how do I tell if my child has ADHD?

here's a couple of good websites for you ...

marcie

http://www.additudemag.com/addabc.asp?DEPT_NO=201&SUB_NO =1

http://www.playattention.com/attention-deficit/articles/cate gory/russell-barkley/

Thank you for your advice. I was just wondering if the recomeneded age to be tested is the same in Canada as the US?  My husband and i have the same view of our daughter.  We have spooken to alot of people and they have agreed with us that she has adhd.  I was also wondering if adhd can run in a family because my step daughter's older brother ( they share the same mother not father) has been diagonsed.  He was tested when he was 5.  We have been noticing some syptoms since september.  We got full cutody of her in september.  Some of the things we have noticed are;  well she is a perfect child untill we say something that she doesn't like. Example: please go and play with your sister or time to turn off the tv.  She will take a huge fit and throw herself on the floor and throw toys or hit.  She will scream and scream.  when doing this she will repeat herself constantly, like "no sister no sister".  When we try to go pick her up to talk to her she screams even more and she will even hit us.  We will give her a time out on her bed for a few minutes (usually till she stops screaming and crying).  But when we go in her room to talk to her she starts again.  She also gets bored very fast.  She goes from toy to toy all the time.  When we try to teach her something new ( a word, phrase, ABC's).  She gets frustrated and will look at the floor or turn anway or starts to scream or just look at you and not respond. She also has trouble pronoucing words.  She is very hard to understand for most people.  When she get frustrated she will pull her hair.  When she gets bored she likes to take her hair ties out or take off her clothes or empty out her dresser.  She has trouble when we go out to the store.  She can not stay sitting down in the cart.  She figgets all the time.  She has trouble with directions.  If she is asked to pick up a toy right beside her she will look and look around.  if you point to it she still doesn't understand. I have a daughter myself who is 4 months younger than her and when comparing the 2 of them that is how we have come to the conclusion that adhd is a possiblity. She likes to hit her sister and will not share things.  If we ask her to share there is a huge fit.  We have to sit with her when she eats because she gets bored and plays with her food or throws it on the floor.  We also have to sit with her if she is colouring because it will be everywhere she has trouble controlling her crayon.  She gets frustrated with herself.  Getting her into the carseat is a fit and she just can't sit still.  She constantly kicks the seat infront of her.  She will just blurt things out at any time.  She loses her toys and her sippy cup all the time and can not find them because she ahs trouble following our directions.  She will only sit still when she is watching Dora the Explorer.  But when that is over it is a huge fit.  There are other syptoms that she has also.  We are waiting to take her to the doc because we are waiting for her medical records to come from her old doc in another city.  But if any one can tell me if these symptoms sound like adha, please let me know.   

Hello, I am a step mother of a 2 year old girl and I think that she has ADHD but i am not sure.  If anyone can help me that would be great.  Please post some of the symtoms that i wouldn't know about.  Thank you. it would be greatly appreciated.

Hi Monica....the only way to get an informed diagnosis is to have the child tested by a pediatric neuroligist and a child phychiatrist because many symptoms can mimic ADHD. Read below:

50 Conditions that Mimic ADHD

anither thing is most Dr.s don't reccommend heving a child even tested untill they are 5 or 6, Just around school age. I am not sure why. But I have seen people in this saying their children have been diagnosed at 3,4 or 5. But from personal experience, I know it is a difficult task. The dr. wants the teacher to reccomend the evaluation and the teacher doesn't want to because it make her look like she didn't want to deal with the child. "pass the buck" if you will.

Some symptoms my son has (mind you he is 6, not 2) no matter how many times we talk about it, he can not stand still, walk calmly beside me in a store, he can not do his home work with out having me or his father standing right over him, the same is true at school. He knows how to add and subtrack, but he gets distracted,he has to a long ride to school on the bus, he gets in trouble sitting for such long periods of time. These things might not seem like much but when they are all at one time non stopp all day, there are hardly no times when he is perfectly still, except for whe he is playing his playstation 2. This is a common trait of ADHDers. when it seems like nothing will stop them from going, they can play video games very well with great concentration. That is why some people think they are capable of controlling themselves the rest of the time, but they can't. I don't know why.

I knew my son had a problem when he was about 6 months to 1 year old. He would get unusually frustrated with toys. He would cry non-stop. I tried to have him evaluated at 3 years old but the dr. said no one would do it, it wasn't till he was 5 in kindergarten that i finally got it done, and sure enough, he's ADHD. I hope that if you are planning on having your daughter evaluated you have better luck than I did with a child that age.

What does her dad think, does he agree that she might be? or does he think you just don't want to handle his daughter?

[quote]Whether it is adhd or not, we can all benefit from hearing how others use strategies daily to help their children.  When my daughter was diagnosed adhd I didn't really agree with the diagnosis but read about behavior modification and decided that no kid would be hurt if their parent tried it.[/quote]

Exactly, I mean what any parent with an ADHD child is going to give in terms of advice for a potentially ADHD toddler is going to be good advice for pretty much any child.

And Iyardi, I know there is a fine line between terrible twos and ADHD  It is just a matter of awareness that's all, no different then how I educate myself on what to look for if my daughter or son get chicken pox, measles, flu whatever, they may never get those things or maybe they will, but at least I will be aware of what to look for right?

Anyways, let's all just move on, this is getting blown out of proportion!

~CC

Whether it is adhd or not, we can all benefit from hearing how others use strategies daily to help their children.  When my daughter was diagnosed adhd I didn't really agree with the diagnosis but read about behavior modification and decided that no kid would be hurt if their parent tried it.  She does really benefit from charts and rewards and the concept of consequences. 

Maybe our two yr olds are all a little adhd.  It is like a wake-up call - hey, this is going to take effort!  If we just let them run wild they will stay that way.  With time it improves, except if it is really adhd it takes longer (if ever for some).  Being a concerned parent is not bad.  If you read about how to use time outs, how to re-direct attention, how to make transitions easier, etc it can only help.  And a lot of this information is covered in books and websites for adhd.  So don't feel like you are going in the wrong direction.

Iyardie, I don't believe Monica is rushing out to get her daughter diagnosed with ADHD, she just came with a question and a legitimate question at that since ADHD doesn't just suddenly "pop up" at the age of 5, 6 or 7 when it is more of an applicable age to do any kind of diagnostic testing. I agree at the age of two, with so many life and develomental changes going on it is wayyyyyyyyy too early to even go there, but I take offence to the way you snapped at her and called her down since I was going to ask the exact same question myself last night until I saw her post.

Being that Monica and I have daughters that seem to be almost identical in behaviour (and some recent major life changes funnily enough), and that there is already a history of ADHD in the family which has been identified in most scientific studies as being a genetic trait, I think that Monica and I are wise to be on the look out for it. If our girls don't have it, then that is truly wonderful, but if they do end up having it after being properly diagnosed a few more years down the road, then at least they will have started off with the best possible beginning for a child with ADHD - and that is parents/mothers who are educated about it and trying to do everything they can to help their child live with this.

I'm not out to label my 2 year old as ADHD at all, but I'll admit, I am curious too as to what input or insight parents can give (who have ADHD children) when looking back at the toddler years now that they know more. If I see some commonalities then I will be more aware of them and possibly able to help her and I think Monica was basically asking for the same reason. I know for me, this is my first 2 year old child, who seems much more extreme in terms of her personality than any other 2 year old I have ever met in my life (and I've met a lot of them) and last time I checked there is no parenting manual that comes for every possible 2 year old temperment, ADHD prone or not. 

Monica is smart taking her daughter to the doctor IMHO, it could just be a simple matter of food allergies or something else and not ADHD related at all. Who knows.

I don't want to start a debate here at all, I was just startled because this is such a friendly and supportive board and the critical response caught me totally off guard.

I'll get off my soap box now and go to bed

I have a 2 year old daughter, that sounds very much like yours and I am watching her closely for ADHD since I am ADHD myself and it runs rampant in my family (I have it, my mom had it, my uncle has it, my aunt has it and I'm sure my grandpa had it as well - so, I truly believe there is a genetic component to this.)

Your daughter sounds very much the same as mine. My daughter is very busy, very easily distracted, frustrated etc etc.

As for sharing, at the age of two, I don't think they can comprehend that whether they have ADHD or not. At this age it is all about them. 2 year olds are very egotistical  I think at this age, 2, it is too early to tell really if they have ADHD because developmentally there is just so much going on, they are constantly in a state of learning about the world around them. You say that you are noticing these symptoms since Sept, when you got custody of her. I would bet there is still a lot going on with her in her little head - she can't begin to understand what happened there. I say this because my husband just left for Calgary last month to go to work and since then our daughter has been acting out a lot more than normal, and I am assuming it is because a major part of her life changed and she can't begin to comprehend it at all. She has been very angry sometimes since he left for work. And with Dora, OMG I hear you there. When Dora is over in our house all h*ll breaks loose!  haha :)

With our daugher we are very firm, we have to be or she would be even wilder than she is. If she hits or acts out or gets really agressive, she immediately gets a stern warning and if she doesn't listen she gets a time out in the "time out room" - it's just our bedroom really, until she calms down and if we go in and she starts screaming again (which she would do) then she stayed in there for another couple of minutes until she stopped. And once she stopped we told her why she was in there, and what she did isn't acceptable in our house and she had to apologize. It sounds so Super Nanny-ish, but really we have been doing this long before the Super Nanny came on TV  and slowly but surely it is working. Mainly because our room I think is so boring to be in for her  I don't believe in spanking, especially if we are trying to teach her not to hit. We also don't put her in her room. We learned that the hard way - everytime we went close to her room even just to put her in bed or play, she figure she was in trouble for something. So the "time out room" is a totally different room that is safe, there is nothing to play with and it is baby/toddler proof.

If she has to stop what she is doing for whatever reason (because we have to go out, go to bed, etc) we make sure she gets "closure" on it. So if it's time to go out and she is playing with a toy, then we tell her a few minutes before, we are going out and it is time to say good bye to the toy now and she will say good bye to the toy and put it down.  If we don't do that and just flat out stop her and say, okay we are going now put the toy down, she totally flips out.  Actually, I follow a lot of the advice from the Dr. Sears book "Gentle Discipline" and it is working wonders. For most of us with ADHD an immediate interuption is really difficult to handle, and I think that is the case with my daughter, so letting her know ahead of time what is going to happen helps her change direction so to speak. I also make sure for her sake and for mine, that we have a pretty solid routine. I need it and so does she.

One thing I have noticed is that I really have to limit her sugar intake from anything. Sugar from fruits and every other kind of food (a banana for example has 28 grams of sugar). I also try as hard as I can to keep her away from any heavily processed food or foods that have a lot of preservatives, additives etc, and keep her protein uptake fairly high. That has made a huge difference, it hasn't totally gotten rid of the outbursts, but certainly made them a lot more manageable. I make sure she gets a huge dose of Flaxseed oil each day (I "hide" it in peanut butter, jam, yogurt etc in little amounts that add up to a lot at the end of the day), she gets her multi vitamins each day, and she also gets out each day to run, run and then run some more so basically she is too exhausted to fight back.  The low sugar/processed foods diet and tons of exercise make a HUGE difference (for both her  and I actually). When she is over at my mother in laws house, my MIL loads her up on sugar filled everything that she thinks is healthy and some of it is (ie banana's, oranges, crappy yogurt that is turquoise blue and full of sugar, Honey Nut cheerios etc, but they have a lot of sugar in them that our little girl can't handle) and I know what she has been eating all afternoon because she is bouncing off the walls, arguing, throwing things when I get there and then my MIL has the audacity to complain about her behaviour . Wow, I do have ADD that was getting really off topic - don't get me started about my MIL!  Anyways, we make sure her sugar is severely limited (which is hard to do when you really think about it) and that she gets as much whole unprocessed and organic foods as possible.

During the day if it is too crappy to go outside, then I just let her hop from one toy to another if she wants, but the condition is she has to clean up the toy she was just playing with and wants to leave. Mainly I want her to slow down and think for a second before just bouncing around. Sometimes she'll clean up the "old" toys to get the new ones and a lot of the time she decides she doesn't want to switch toys after all. I recycle her toys so there are always "new" toys coming out and the older ones going away for awhile. I also make sure I have a lot of crafty things to do with her, even if it is just playing play dough, colouring, making valentines whatever. And yes, we go through A LOT of different crafts in an afternoon because she gets bored real quick and changes her mind on what she wants to do - but again, if we switch crafts she has to clean up first and that has also helped.

Sorry for the novel, but I can totally relate for the most part what you are going through with your 2 year old. And if there is already a family history it is wise to be watching for it, although I don't think it is fair to label them as ADHD when it is way to early to tell. However, if I am told in 3 or 4 years that my daugher is ADHD it certainly won't surprise me. This kid has been bouncing around since the moment of conception I am sure

But if you want to chat more or just need to vent to someone who can relate, feel free to PM me for my email address!