Does your child have ADHD, or is he just “active”? This can be a difficult question to answer if your child is a toddler. As your child ages, however, certain symptoms of ADHD become easier to identify. This could be why some children are not diagnosed as having ADHD until they reach junior high.
Symptoms of ADHD include an inability to sit still for long periods of time, a difficulty with being quiet, a tendency to have problems focusing on a specific task, with following directions, and with listening to a person that is speaking to the child who has this disorder. Other symptoms include a difficultly with being patient (or waiting one’s turn), and an inability to control impulsive behavior (both verbal, physical, and emotional).
If your child is a toddler, then he or she may be displaying all of those symptoms. This does not necessarily mean that your toddler has ADHD, however. Most, if not all, of those symptoms are age appropriate for kids who are in the toddler stage.
On the other hand, your toddler could be among the children who get diagnosed as having ADHD when he or she gets older. Right now, though, it is too early to tell.
There was a study done that involved preschoolers who had ADHD. Researchers used an MRI to scan images of the brains of a group of 26 preschool aged children. Half of the kids had ADHD, and half did not.
The results showed that the preschoolers who had ADHD had “significantly reduced” caudate volumes when compared with the other group. In general, without having a brain scan preformed, it is not always so clear if a preschool truly has ADHD.
Things change, slightly, when your child enters kindergarten. Your child is now spending at least part of his or her day inside a classroom, with a teacher, who is expecting certain kinds of behaviors.
Kids that have a really hard time sitting still, or who are so disruptive that they are frequently removed from the classroom, get noticed rather quickly. Part of what starts the process of getting an official ADHD diagnosis in a public school is a paper trail of inappropriate behaviors that a child has repeatedly done.
What if your child has ADHD, but his or her symptoms are not quite that severe? It may go unnoticed until your child reaches middle school, (or in some cases, high school). At this age, students are expected to be able to keep themselves organized, without the assistance of teachers to guide them. Tweens and teens are expected to juggle several tasks within a typical school day, in many different classrooms.
Kids that constantly forget to turn in homework, or to bring their textbook with them to class, might get noticed by at least one of their multiple teachers. This could be the first time that your child gets evaluated to see if he or she really does have ADHD.
Image by Steve & Jem Copley on Flickr