I think it's also impossible for us as parents to fully tease out what's up with our kids when they are having challenges like this - we see the child we know at home, we read about intellectually gifted children and their associated quirks, we have knowledge from other parents and from reading and from our general impressions about things like ADHD but we're not trained experts who know who to diagnosis it any more than teachers are, and we find hints of things like CAPD by researching that may fit some of our children's symptoms so we check them out. Following our gut feeling and checking out things that seem to make sense is really important, and you're on the right track with that. The thing is, though, as you said, even if your dd has CAPD it's possible it isn't going to be "the" one thing that explains everything. I apologize for losing track of who's child has had what testing, but this is where I've found that a broad look by a private professional really really helps - either a neuropsych or in your dd's case possibly a developmental pediatrician familiar with ASD and ADHD.
Yes, I agree. DD had a workup for depression and anxiety. We also sort of covered ASD...it was a long session. She was not given any actual tests, though we filled out a lot of questionnaires. She was interviewed privately, as were we. They did give her an anxiety and depression dx. My feeling is that the anxiety one may not really be right but that the depression one is correct.
Interestingly, we have seen a lot less of the really distressing behavior at home recently. I have no idea why this would be, since school doesn't seem to be going too well. She has always been kind of on-again, off-again. We will have weeks at a time of relative peace and then things will go south and we see day after day of major problems. We have been doing a bit more behavior management/token economy stuff, which is always a mixed bag with her because she gets so upset when she "fails," but maybe it's helped.
Something I have not seen mentioned on this board before is an easy little online 'test' you can do to help see if attention/brain flexibility are causing an issue with learning. Google "Stroop Test" and you will see a lot of versions online. The basic idea of the "Stroop Effect" is that our brain has to draw upon different areas to distinguish different information: words in one area, colors in a different area, OR visual locations or shapes in a different area.
Thanks! Times like this I do wish we had results from a longer IQ test. But I have a very strong suspicion that DD would have a strong processing subtest score, which doesn't seem consistent with ADD. I've mentioned here before that we have played around with online "brain games" that test digit span--she tests very, VERY high in that.
