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ADHD: What it's really like

A look at the symptoms, the medical treatment and what parents are doing to cope at home

By
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Originally published in Today's Parent September 2010

Arriving home from kindergarten one day, Michael* announced, “The teacher said she was going to light firecrackers under my arms to get me moving, because I’m so slow and pokey.”

That was his parents’ first indication something might be wrong at school. At home, Lynn and Andrew Hughes, parents of three boys in Simcoe, Ont., began to notice how their son Michael would drift away from his homework, or reappear empty-handed 20 minutes after being sent upstairs to get something.

The Hughess wouldn’t have a name for the apparently laziness and disorganization troubling their son until he got to grade three, when a paediatrician diagnosed Michael with ADHD, even though he didn’t exhibit the hyperactivity that most people associate with it.

Most of us are familiar with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, a common disorder with symptoms that fall into three categories — hyperactivity, which includes fidgeting or exploring inappropriately; impulsivity; and inattention.

Symptoms are the primary yardstick doctors use to judge whether a child has ADHD. There’s no lab test —one of the things that make ADHD difficult to diagnose. More difficult still is the fact that while most kids with ADHD have symptoms from all three categories, some are mostly hyperactive and impulsive without the inattention, while others, like Michael, have problems only with inattention. (It’s a little confusing, but even without hyperactivity in the picture, it’s still called ADHD. See FAQs about ADHD.)

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