With my daughter it was ADHD until she probably reached her 20's. Now it's more ADD but she takes charge of it and even sees a special counselor. We started her with one many years ago, but she now sees a woman.
ADD or even ADHD is often described this way (which I found helpful to know): Three things can be happening at once: The boss may be on the line, a car or truck passing by and a bird on the fence. People with ADD have no way of filtering out what the necessary one is...their attention is totally scattered. Often they aren't easy to live with....directions must be given one at a time or nothing will happen. I made that mistake with my daughter....and then I learned.
Today there are newsletters, probably sites on the computer even, but at that time we had nothing. After she graduated from college, we had plans to write a book together b/c people don't know about both sides of the story. I would tell mine and she would answer it in the way she understood. But then a boyfriend came along......! It would have been extremely helpful to others at the time.
I have since been "lucky" enough to face something like or similar to ADD myself. I'm glad that I had the chance to learn it firsthand. It was very frustrating, but I learned so much from the experience. Our brains work in so many different ways. She was capable of hyper-focusing which probably saved her. Able to hone in on the slightest thing and have an answer for it....but overall, it was difficult, to say the least. I couldn't trust her to even cross the street until she was 13.
She's 50 now and still sees the counselor, but handles things beautifully. She has learned how to control it instead of the other way around. I leave it up to hear to tell me what she is/isn't going about it. It did help when she recognized it herself and made every effort to change things. To be honest, I don't think she could have without a counselor. That experience changed all of us and made my husband far more involved . She works fulltime, does best on her own and has been very successful....so have hope, but work with your child and have private testing done. The schools still "lose" the results....even today. Yours, Lenora.
