I posted recently about my frustration with my 7-year-old daughter being pushed toward an ADHD diagnosis which I believe would be a misdiagnosis, and asking if there were any advocates out there who seek to help children avoid ADHD misdiagnosis, specifically. So far, no one has been able to answer that question and most of the thread has been general advice. Rather than add this there, I decided to put it out as its own post. The following is my concise and descriptive perspective that I will be submitting to my daughter's ADHD assessor, along with other letters from people who know or have cared for her for significant amounts of time.
Maybe you guys can let me know if you think I'm way off base here, since this is probably the best group to ask. If, however, you do find my perspective compelling, I'm open to any and all suggestions for how to make what I wrote better.
(One thing of note is that I have ASD.)
To whom it may concern
I am P******'s mother and I have spent possibly more active one on one time with her than anyone else in her entire life. Her father works, her step-mother has split the care time with day care and school, whose caregivers and teachers come and go. I have always configured my schedule such that I have almost never worked or been absent during her time with me. It may be a smaller timeshare, but I have always tried to be 100% present. I deeply believe that P****** does NOT have ADHD or ADD and I'd like to share my perspective of her and why I am certain of this.
Her father and I separated when she was 10 months old. Since that time, I have had concerns for how her family dynamic, living in a broken home, would effect her long term. As a toddler and young child following the divorce, she would cry, scream, and throw a fit for hours prior to transitioning between homes. She would often refuse to get out of the car or fight to stay in her carseat. Several times she hid behind legs, keeping someone interposed between her and the person she was supposed to go to. When she was 2 years old she told a CPS worker, when asked what she wanted at that moment, that she wanted her mommy and daddy to live together in the same house again.
I believe this highly contentious divided environment she has grown up in to be a cause for some deep seated and foundational emotional trauma, which is the basis of many of her behavioral 'issues'.
She shows many signs of attention seeking and thrives with one-on-one attention. Since her siblings in both homes were born in 2021, there has been much less opportunity for her to have that one-on-one attention she craves. She is often boastful with things like "I'm really strong, right?" or "I'm really fast, right?". She very frequently asks for adult focus on her "Watch this!", "Watch me!", "Watch what I'm going to do!", etc. She wants attention and if she can't get it by being 'good' or by excelling, getting it through misbehavior seems to be an acceptable substitute.
She wants people to love/like her and is constantly seeking reaffirmation of this. "Do you love me?", "You really love me, right mommy?" "Daddy loves me too, right?"
I believe this is a direct consequence of internalized feelings related to the divorce.
Mostly she is a kind and loving child, often thoughtful and sometimes surprisingly insightful. She has been referred to as 'Delightful' by many people. She is INCREDIBLY bright and has hit nearly all of her developmental milestones far ahead of the average. She often uses this intelligence to try to manipulate situations and people around her to best suit her. Her efforts in these situations are still unsophisticated so it's obvious when she's trying, but what's important is her proclivity for trying to get her way.
She is smart and she knows she's smart. When she decides something is a certain way, she believes fundamentally that she is correct, because SHE thought it through. Usually in situations like this the only way to get her to comply is by convincing her that she didn't take everything into account and that some missing piece changes the equation.
She also has possibly the strongest will that I have ever seen in a child. I have seen her refuse to eat for over a full day because the food offered was not what she preferred. She was banking on being offered something else when she transitioned to her other home. Only when she found that I had given them the same food for her to eat there, did she finally agree to eat it. When given tasks at home or at school which she does not want to do, she will often steadfastly refuse to do them or find every excuse to delay, even if it means forgoing something that she does want. She has a very strong defiant streak. She also scoffs at authority and will only grudgingly submit to it. I once smacked her hand after she touched something I had told her not to. Her immediate response, with an angry disposition was "That didn't even hurt!". At a loss, I asked her "Did you WANT it to?". She struggled with that for several seconds, eventually she submitted admitting that she didn't. I would say that the VAST majority of the behavioral problems she displays are a battle of wills, where she pits her will and defiance against the will of someone in a position of authority. She thinks she knows what's best and will not budge from that position until either forced or convinced.
Now here's why I believe she does not have ADHD or ADD.
These are characterized by someone whose brain chemistry does not allow them to shift focus easily or stay undistracted for the duration of a task, someone who is highly impulsive, someone who can be overstimulated by sensory input and who has a hard time regulating their responses to that overstimulation.
While P****** displays behavior sometimes consistent with this, she also often does not. Her behavior which is consistent with this can be easily explained by other sources, whereas her behavior that is inconsistent with it is hard to explain if ADHD is what the underlying cause is.
She can easily read a book which interests her, then switch seamlessly to helping me cook a meal, then again switch seamlessly to building a tower out of blocks with her brother, etc. She has no problem staying focused on tasks which she enjoys or feels are benign. She can watch a full length movie without fidgeting, even one she does not enjoy, then have a conversation about that movie to show that she paid attention to and understood it. I can explain math, science, history, writing, or language concepts far beyond her grade level to her in depth, with her listening with focused attention, and she will apply what I explained weeks or months later. Her attention only seems deficit when applied to things she is actively disinterested in. She only seems to have any sort of hyperactivity when presented with multiple options which she has an active interest in. I believe that P****** is not challenged enough at school, which causes her mind to wander to topics and thoughts which she does find interesting, and when pushed by authority things devolve into a contest of wills. When properly provided with new information, she has no trouble at all focusing, even if the topic is of no intrinsic interest to her.
Beyond that, she has zero behavioral problems when with my mom and stepfather, or with my dad and stepmother. She is by no means a 'perfect angel' with them, just a typical 7 year old. Her martial arts instructor describes her as one of the best students he's ever had and that she is in a completely different category than the kids with ADHD that he has seen come through his classes.
She does not carry these behavioral problems with her from environment to environment, which she would if it was due to an innate problem with her brain chemistry, rather than based on her own choices and proclivity to clash with select authority. This strongly suggests to me that her behavioral problems are learned or environmental rather than innate.
Something that you should know about P****** is that she is incredibly similar to me, both physically and mentally. We share so much in common with our mindsets, preferences, proclivities, and tendancies that P****** has more than once accused me of being able to read her mind.
When I was a young child my mother went to college for a degree in early childhood development. She was one of only a couple of students who had children so she was invited to bring me to school so that the class could get practice observing children. According to my mother I displayed nearly all of the traits associated with ADHD. The students and teacher told my mother that I should be medicated immediately because it was obvious that I had ADHD. I was a very bright and inquisitive child who was interested in almost everything and asked questions on many topics at a rapid pace. When others saw multitasking, they misread it as hyperactivity. When they saw rapid questions because of unbridled global curiosity, they assumed an inability to focus on a given topic.
They saw behaviors which led them to a conclusion of an attention disorder when in reality attention wasn't an issue for me at all, all of my behaviors stemmed from intelligent curiosity in an energetic child. I have spoken at length with therapists as an adult and it has been concluded that I am not and never have suffered from any sort of attention deficit disorder. If my mother hadn't known me well enough to understand where my behaviors came from, I might very well have spent most of my life on a medication I didn't need, under the umbrella of a diagnosis which did not apply. I am very grateful to my parents for understanding me so well and I strive to understand my daughter as well as my parents understood me. I don't believe any of her behavioral traits come from an attention disorder anymore than mine did at a similar age.
In summation, I think P****** is a highly intelligent willful child who suffers from boredom and a craving for attention due to deep-seated emotional trauma relating to the nature of her parents' divorce. If anything, I think she may suffer from an obstinate defiance of authority, but that has nothing to do with her ability to give attention or to focus. She is very much like me and I recognize all of her behaviors from myself. I never suffered from ADHD though people thought I must have and I don't think she does either.
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