I quoted some of what these PP posters said about their own kids because it is so similar to my ADHD DD18. I am a teacher so my experience with ADHD isn't just limited to my own child, but I will mostly just focus on her in this post.
Where she is now:
DD is now a successful college freshman at a very good state university. She has been taking time released Concerta and fast acting Ritalin since the 7th grade. She just finished her first round of college midterms and got all As and Bs. She has met with the Student Disability Department once and may go through all the steps (additional testing because her testing is over 5 years old. The battery of tests can be expensive - anywhere from $500 to $1500 - but so worth it in the end. You can shop around for the best price.) to get accommodations, but she is not sure she needs them, since she successfully* navigated high school without accommodations. I am pretty sure she wants the option just in case she starts having trouble. She takes 4 classes a semester vs the usual 5, so she has more time to devote to each class. This works for her because she has her AA degree already (*successfully navigated high school - was a 3 sport athlete [needed her meds to focus at games], team captain, NHS, top 20% in her class, completed a dual enrollment program with the local community college to get her AA degree a month before she earned her HS diploma, and had a part time job!). She was a solid A/B student in all honors classes in high school. She wasn't the smartest kid at school by any stretch, and she still forgot something at home (like a piece of her uniform, or her lunch, or her field trip form & money, or her homework) on a weekly basis, but she was very driven and wanted to succeed. She also has tons of friends and is socially well adjusted. So parents - DO NOT GIVE UP or get discouraged, success is possible!!!!
DD will be the first to tell you that she has to work harder than everyone else. She will also tell you she does not make excuses for herself or use her ADHD as a crutch for missing school work, getting bad grades or getting in trouble. I had a student in one of my classes that said he couldn't help his disruptive behavior because he had ADHD. DD went off when she heard that. She said it
is much harder for an ADHD kid to control himself, so he needs to work 3 times harder at doing it, but it can be done (her words not mine). Your mileage may vary.
How we got there:
When DD finished preschool, her teacher told me DD may have an issue with self control in kindergarten. She did ok academically in K-3 for the most part, but she was constantly in trouble. By 4th grade, her academics started suffering. She brought home Fs on math papers. One example - I checked the math, and she had it all correct. So I checked the problem in the math book. She'd taken the top number from #4 and the bottom number from #8 and added them together (perfectly, but the answer was still wrong). This happened with alarming regularity! She also failed a few tests where she had the answers all correct but not in the format the teacher
verbally requested because she didn't hear the verbal directions at all. We had the local public school do a child study on her and got her some accommodations, which helped a lot. (Accommodations included: making lists, using a kitchen timer, quiet testing locations, a red piece of paper with a square cut out so she could only see one problem at a time, written directions for everything, verbal checks for understanding with the teacher). By 6th grade it was not enough. She was failing math with a very good teacher. She couldn't do any of the daily homework, and I'd have to spend 3 days before a test re-teaching her the whole unit. She was not mentally present in her math class at all! She also struggled the most socially in middle school. Her personality has always been the "life of the party" type, made even more prominent by ADHD. MS is hard socially for lots of girls as queen bees start to develop their social dominance, and kids get excluded, feelings get hurt. DD dealt with all that normal stuff, plus kids often got tired of her constant loud babbling and immaturity and could only take so much of her.
At the end of 6th grade, we started the process to get ADHD meds, and she started taking them in 7th grade. Turns out DD is ADHD mostly inattentive, but the
H part presents itself as hyper verbal. Her teachers worked with us to get the dosage right. DD is a very funny, bubbly, happy girl and none of us wanted that part of her personality to go away. We just wanted to tone down the speaking out and the loudness and increase her ability to focus. I am very grateful to her middle school teachers who took the time to help her with this transition. I was able to keep my sweet funny kid while her full academic ability finally started to surface. And the results were impressive - she won the school Algebra I Award at the end of 8th grade! She was even able to read a novel for pleasure for the very first time.
ETA: To answer the OP's (
@Lilacs4Me ) question about behavior - "What's your "bottom line" with your ADHD child? By that I mean - what behaviors do you try to shape and mold the most, and what do you let slide or are willing to repeat over and over?"
We held our DD accountable for everything. She had to follow the same rules for behavior, school work, grades, table manners, literally everything that we had for our older DS who does not have ADHD and was his HS valedictorian. We just gave her a lot more tools, scaffolding and support to help her follow those rules.
I saw this video below on Facebook the other day and it made me bawl. This was my kid! This young woman has a whole video series about living with ADHD (titled
How to ADHD) on Youtube that is very worthwhile (from relationships to friendships to homework and projects to diagnosis as an adult plus many more). Check them out.