Child With ADHD

ADHD is ongoing, so a good doctor will look at your life story, and hear from your parents, your spouse and your siblings.

Questions to Ask Your Child’s Doctor About ADHD

[Dr. Margaret Weiss] So a child may be perfectly fine in soccer but not okay doing their homework and doing on a page of arithmetic. So the process of assessment pulls all that information together, the clinical information, the rating scales, the different informants, the developmental history, and gives us an indexing of confidence as to whether or not this particular patient meets the diagnostic criteria in the eyes of a good clinician.

Did anybody ever say as a kid growing up gosh you know, go see a doctor for you? you ever go see doctor?

Invisible Disorder

One of the things that makes this disorder unique is it can be completely invisible in the office. If someone comes in with a broken leg you see the fracture you don’t necessarily see ADHD unless you get collateral information. So we use rating scales and we use other informants, family members, teachers, daycare workers, to find out how this person behaves in situations that are attention demanding. But I’m going to tell you what may surprise you which is that the least important part of the evaluation is the child’s behaviour in my office. It’s a one-to-one setting. I’m a novel person in their lives. I’m highly reinforcing. I’m not asking them to persist at a dull boring repetitive task that they didn’t choose.

Were you ever prone to things like sadness times when, we’re talking about before the age of 12, times when necessarily you felt overwhelmed?

and the other thing that was surprising is not very useful, is going one time to observe a kid for 45 minutes in their school. Turns out when you look at research it takes about 50 hours of training raters, and it takes them about six visits to get stable information about a child. It’s interesting.

ADHD in Children

For more information see:

• Two Common Parenting Challenges When Your Child Has ADHD
• Do Children With ADHD Flourish Under Certain Circumstances
• He Can Focus When He Wants To
• Stop Shaming Lazy Parents
• Children and Summer Fun