I was hoping to bounce some ideas off of you. Some recent behaviour issues have had be coming back to a consideration of the possibility that my son has ADHD. His teacher thinks he is fine, and my husband thinks I am overanalysing everything. So I feel a bit like the line from Zoolander "I feel like I am taking crazy pills" where no one else sees something that is starting to look obvious to me. Here are a few of my concerns, keep in mind that my son is still only 5.5, and maybe he will grow out of some of this. Also please share what concerns made you seek assessment for your child.
On his IQ test he had a verbal score in the 150s and a processing speed of 118. There is a big discrepancy between a reading comprehension test administered privately which had him hitting the ceiling of the test with comprehension of at least 3rd grade and the school administered test that puts him mid 1st grade. I tend to agree with the teacher's assessment, but his reading accuracy is at a 4th grade level, and I think there is a big gap in his oral verbal ability and reasoning, his reading accuracy, and how he seems to do with reading comprehension, which to me indicates that there might be some sort of problem slowing down his reading comprehension.
And thinking about it now, he has trouble with memory recall. I have had times when I ask him things, and he says he doesn't know, but when I give him a slight trigger for the memory, the information is there, he just seems to have trouble grabbing the correct information without a bit of a prod.
DS has never been able to sit still. He constantly gets up from the dinner table. He had trouble sitting on the mat for news time at daycare last year. Even when I am reading him a story at night he tends to be fidgeting away.
He really struggles to keep his hands off things. He is into drawers he knows he is not allowed to be, he grabs things off the kitchen counters. When we are doing something together on my computer and I ask him not to touch the keys he keeps hitting them anyway.
He talks constantly and has a hard time not answering questions which are directed at his sister.
Getting dressed in the morning has been a battle for years now. I remember one day when he got wet at the park and I asked him to change when we got home he got upset and said, I am so bored of having to get dressed all the time. He swings his clothes around his head, or walks off to start doing something else.
He is very disorganised and often comes home missing some of his things.
He can rarely self entertain.
he rushes through worksheets and often fails to read instruction properly.
He rarely finishes things he starts, be it a game or activity he has picked or something I had asked him to do.
he tries to avoid anything that involves any amount of effort.
Even if he is working on something that he really enjoys, he gets distracted very easily by what is going on around him.
In extracurricular activities he seems to have trouble focusing too. In swimming class he gets in trouble and has to sit on the side of the pool because he will be jumping off the podium or moving all around when it is not his turn. When he was in dance class, all the kids would be lined up and he would be at the lockers at the back of the classroom getting his hands on to anything he could find. He liked the class, but if he wasn't actually the one doing the dancing at any given time he was all over the place.
Sometimes its really hard to get him to pay attention to me when I am trying to talk to him.
In your opinion, is some sort of assessment warranted to look for possible ADHD or maybe some other learning challenges that his strengths might be masking?
