I had a similar situation with my daughter. I have twins that are 16 now. When they were in the first grade one of the girls was struggling by the time they were in second grade the doctor told us she had adhd. By the end of third grade their teacher told me that she saw the same signs in her sister. I had her tested and it came back positive for adhd. She also began meds but did not take them long. She did not like them. When she began high school I was seeing a specialist with my son 8 for adhd/hyperactivity and the doctor asked my high schooler how school was going. She was doing homework for more than six hours some nights and her grades were b,c. He gave her meds and now she is in accelerated and AP classes. Getting 90-100 grade average. Now she only struggels in math. My husbands family has a strong line of adhd two of us treat our children with meds and the other are against it with alot of negative views to adhd and meds. Alot of people cut us up for treating our kids with meds. but here is proof it works.
you owe it to your child to try and treat it.
Let me tell you my story. Let me prefix this by saying that I'm not blaming anyone for anything, trying to brag, or anything like that. I'm just trying to help children and parents avoid the mistakes that were made handling my ADHD.
I was a very smart and energetic kid. I learned to walk and talk very early, I learned to read when I was 3 years old. My parents knew that I was very intelligent, and they made sure to enroll me in the best school that they could afford. In school, I was disciplined/punished very often... not because I was a "bad" kid.... I never did anything to hurt anyone or intentionally broke rules. The problem was that I was always the first one finished with my classwork and I would often end up distracting the other students from doing their work. The decision made by my parents and the school was that the teachers would provide me with extra assignments to complete once I had finished my work and everyone else was still working.
When I was 8 years old (1991) my mother decided to take me to a child psychologist for a basic full psychiatric test to I guess try to get an explanation for my behavior. My mom never did tell me the results of all of the tests, but while searching through a file cabinet for some papers a few years ago (I think it was '02) I found an envelope that contained the report from those tests I had taken back then.
I read through it, and the basic gist of it was that I had an exceptionally high IQ (between 200-220) along with a mild case of attention defecit disorder.
What does all of this mean? The doctor told my mother that he did not think that I needed ADHD medication and that I should just be encouraged to personally manage the symptoms as best as I can. I went through elementary school (1st-5th) with the same issues as before, but as I got older I grew more and more concious of my symptoms and I was able to effectively manage them like the doctor recommended.
I started feeling my symptoms getting worse and worse throughout jr high school (6-8), but not enough to really cause my schoolwork to suffer. I did start to see social changes, though, as I was finding it harder to pay attention to people and maintain eye contact.
High school is when it all fell apart. The format of high school compared to secondary school - more lectures, longer assignments, more homework - really took its toll on my ability to concentrate. First semester of HS I believe I got 4 A's and 3 B's.. the first time I had ever gotten a B, much less 3. Throughout high school I felt my confidence slip away further and it eventually lead to a complete attitude change - I hated school and I wanted to quit. Well, I didn't quit. I got through, but not in the fashion that I should have or would have liked to.
I graduated with a 2.93 GPA and was off to college, my mother still refusing to take me to the doctor to try ADHD medication. 2.5 years and about 10 dropped classes later, I was sitting on a 2.5 GPA and about 35 hours of classwork - barely over a years worth of credits in 2.5 years.
I made a decision to transfer to another school and detact myself from my family a little. Once I was there, I felt a little less pressure, but I was still struggling in classes that involve fast paced lecture and/or long, complicated assignments.
Finally, in June 2005, I was able to convince my mother to allow me to go to the doctor to be tested for ADHD. I not only tested positive, but EXTREMELY positive.
Since starting on the medication, this 2.5 student has raised his GPA to 3.1 and made the Dean's list (3.5+ GPA) in Fall 05 and the Chancellors Honor Roll (4.0 GPA) in Spring 06. I've also been able to improve other aspects of my life, like my handwriting.
I sit here today, 3 days after my 23rd birthday, and I currently have 27 more hours to complete for my degree. This kid who was supposed to be a child prodigy and graduate college by the time he's 20 is now struggling to make it by 24.
I fully believe that if I had been prescribed the medicine earlier, as early as 8 years old, that I could have easily been a 4.0 student throughout high school and college. I know that my mother feels a little bit guilty since she has seen the drastic improvements that I have made in the last year, but I don't blame her for it. A large part of her reservation was due to the fact that all of this was happening at about the same time where all the controversy was popping up about the overdiagnosis of ADHD and the potential risks of Ritalin and etc.
The point of all this, though, is this: If you think your child has ADHD, get them tested. If they show the symptoms, but they seem mild, talk to your child about them. I know that I had the symptoms badly, but I was able to hide them so well at a younger age that they didn't appear as significant as they really were. Now that I have been diagnosed and studied a lot of the information available on ADHD, I can tell you that the peripheral symptoms were always there. I have always has a heightened sense of alertness, hyperfocus, social anxiety, etc.
Even moreso, if ADHD runs in your family you should not have any reservations on the issue, because chances are if you show the signs and have the family background, you probably have it and need to get it treated. A couple of months after I was prescribed and saw good results, my sister was also prescribed and saw immediate improvement as well. While her symptoms were not as dramatic as mine, she too followed a similar path that I did... made it through to high school just "dealing with it", then all of a sudden losing it once high school came along. She's now doing much better with schoolwork and her job, and we both wish we had been diagnosed and treated earlier.
ok awesome38914.6503356481Thanks for the backup. I know I am trying to do the best I can. But it can be hard when most people immediately say something like she is just active she doesn't have adhd or my favorite you should discipline her more. Did your parents have adhd or show any signs of it??? My dad definitely has ADHD, as does his sister (and her two children - VERY extreme cases.. they've been on ritalin since they were 5 or 6). My mom does not have it, nor do any of her immediate family members. Me and my sister have it. I've never asked my dad's other two sisters, but they've never said anything about it, and their kids haven't either.OK Awesome - so glad to hear you are on the right path now. We parents do what we think is best, sometimes we are human and make wrong choices. I'm hoping that the choices I've made for my kids are mostly right, but I suppose I've failed at one time or another. But I don't let other people dictate my choices, I do what *I* believe is best.
I've lived a similar story with my daughter, but chose the route of medications. By 3rd grade, she was obviously well above average in intelligence but struggling to maintain decent grades due to her short attention span (couldn't complete an assignment from top to bottom), and a complete misfit due to her erratic behaviors. She was in detention almost every night for missing work which just fueled her anger and odd behaviors. It took a year of counseling and psychiatric evaluations before counselor had me fill out the Conner's test - the psychiatrist said it was "classic ADHD". The regular psychiatrist had been determined to prove that my daughter's behavior was mostly due to the "broken family syndrome". However, the counselor noted that I had two daughters, both with the same environment, discipline, diet, etc., and one was functional and one was not, and had me fill out the form. It just happened that the regular psychiatrist was on maternity leave through this and we got a substitute who was much more open minded about my divorce. Anyway, ONE DAY on Adderall was a complete turn-around. If I ever doubted the existence of ADHD before that, I am now a firm believer. She went from struggling daily for B's and C's, and sobbing at night saying life was too hard and she couldn't do it anymore, to being almost straight A's (OK now it's just an attitude problem common to all teens that she doesn't get all A's) and appearing to enjoy life.
I don't worry what other people think about the meds. I don't care what they think. I know that my daughter is now excelling in school, in AP Math and English class in 8th grade, and she has a large group of NORMAL friends! I'm secure in the fact that this is the right path. If the way to get the best education and give her a foundation for the rest of her life means she has to take a pill each day, so what and why is that anyone else's business?
Generally when I explain this to people, that we did a year of counseling to no avail, that the doctor did a FULL PHYSICAL first to prove there were no other underlying problems contributing or that might be a bad mix with the ADHD meds, that her behavior changed not only noticeably but DRAMATICALLY with the very first dose... I have yet to find anyone to argue with me.
[QUOTE=scotmama]i must admit i am delaying meds for my son as much as i can,was your life so bad without meds?i was only diagnosed last month with impulsive,inattentive ADD AT 34 and have 6 A LEVELS and speak 3 languages,but i don't think i would have managed university.but i never had the hyperactive bit which i think is going to be a big problem for my son at school.[/QUOTE]
my life wasn't bad... i was just underachieving greatly. my biggest problem was focusing on lectures and completing large assignments. pre-meds, I don't think I wrote a "rough draft" of a paper in my life, I just rushed through it, ran it through spellcheck and turned it in... so I got a C or a B when I probably would have gotten an A if I had just taken the time to revise my work.
I would constantly get like A's and high B's on my tests but D's and C's and low B's on the homework and projects. I would wait to the last second to do my work, now I usually tend to do it as early as possible to get it out of the way and not have to worry about the deadline.
That was an excellent post, ok awesome. My experiences are eerily similar to yours.u-
thanks for sharing and validating what I needed to hear. Just recently I shared with some folks that I had my son on a small dosage of ad/hd medicine and they looked at me like I was crazy. They even had the gull to say, "why would you do that?" I never have doubted why I was doing this. But I have to admit in the initial stages I wondered what people would think.