Thank you!
With my D, we all missed the diagnosis, in large part because she was so smart and never caused problems. For her, just having a diagnosis was life changing. She couldn’t understand why she was incapable of doing things that other kids could easily do. She didn’t want to fail her classes because she forgot homework. In fact, she didn’t want to fall asleep in class, but her ADHD was so intense it stretched into narcolepsy, and when a class was not interesting, she fell asleep. (Try explaining THAT to a teacher!) When we added medication, wow was that a game changer. Turns out being awake and engaged can really help academic performance.
For my youngest S, I had a gut instinct he had the same issues. But everyone kept telling me, that he was so focused at school and doing great. Spoiler alert … he was just really well trained. He never caused any problems. And he is fantastic at making eye contact and nodding while in a very different world in his head. We finally caught it when he took his high school entrance exam and his reading comprehension score was wildly off of where we all thought it would be. He went on the meds and as an experiement we didn’t tell his teachers … well they could tell immediately. His English teacher said that he seems so much happier because he knows what is going on all day in the classroom and he’s rememebring to turn in assignments. Getting yelled at for missing work is exhausting!
For both of these kids, they aren’t bouncing off the walls, although they do enjoy a good fidget activity. My D likes to knit during math classes, for example. And my youngest S is a big cuber. Their issue tends to be hyperfocus. So, the good news for them is, while this is often a problem in school. When they get to the job portion of life, they are going to knock it out of the park (if they find a job in an area of interest). They both like computer science, for example, because that plays to their strengths in puzzle-solving and hyperfocus.
And they face stigma because people think ADHD is made up or they should be able to muscle their way through it. My S#2 is at an age where kids aren’t really talking about it. But my D is college is a proud disability advocate and speaks about her condition freely.