Help!! 9 year old with anger/frustration | ADHD Information

Share

I'm in need of some help!!  A quick background...I have a 9 year old daughter who has always been active, busy, and intense.  She's bright and interesting but has had anger outbursts on and off for years.  In the past few months, she's had outbursts that were big.  We took her to see a psychologist who has been working with her on managing her anger etc.  Long story short, we met with two doctors, took the various tests, researched etc. and she was finally dx's with ADD.  Doctor prescribed Adderall XR 5 mg - after some consideration, we started it a week ago.  We've seen some improvement - we're not peppered with constant questions of what next, etc. etc. etc.  And she seems somewhat more able to control her anger and frustration.  How do we know that it's the proper level of medication? 

Has anyone else had an experience similar to this?  What should we think about in terms of titrating the dose?  It's exhausting and scary, and I can't seem to think straight at all...I think I'm starting to have anxiety issues over this myself.  Please help!!

 

About medication, you've got to trust your gut. It takes about 2 weeks to
see what the full effect will be, but if it's doing nothing or she has a
major negative personality change, call the doctor.

The medication is not going to magically transform her, she's still going
to have her bad habits. She's just going to be less impulsive, but if she
knows something "works" it's going to take some time to get her to do
something else.

I highly recommend the book The Explosive Child. My son did a 180
when I started using the plan outlined in there. He learned to think about
his feelings and think about others feelings and make a decision about
how he wanted to act instead of just freaking out whenever something
didn't match his expectations.

Good luck!

I started reading the book this week!  Thank you for the advice.  When you said the word "expectations", it really struck a cord in me.  That's a issue area for my daughter.   

Thanks again!