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My eldest son was diagnosed with ADHD a few years ago when he was struggling in school. Though he has never been diagnosed, we suspect he has other learning disabilities (we are trying to get him to get some free testing done that his college is offering him, but he probably never will).
Recently this got brought back up, and we started thinking about the fact that ADHD tends to run in families. We always suspected that DD14 had ADHD before school started because of her inability to follow through with tasks (doing chores, etc), but didn't think much about getting her tested for it because once school started she seemed to do very well.
Looking back, I still have to wonder if we should have followed that hunch. If she did actually have it, it would be the Inattentive type for sure, as she's always been *very* calm and actually hard to get hyper and excited about "crazy" things (loud noises, dancing, etc). (I remember her telling me how annoyed she gets when other people try to force her to dance and scream and other things which her ADHD and even normal-ish friends would be happy to do)
Having said that, I've begun to force her to repeat back my instructions to her because if I don't, she's not going to remember them.
She has about 20 books in her room, all on around page 10.
She will be playing with a yo-yo when I come back to check on how her "room cleaning" is going.
She does huge projects the night before, no matter how much she tries to do it before-hand.
"Huh?" is her most used word.
Her room is a mess.
And the list goes on and on...

The reason I don't know if she would be considered ADD is that she has some Anti-ADD seeming things about her.
The main thing being that she *can* focus if she's interested in something. She can tell me all about a teachers' lecture, or a video they watched at school. It's just that if she's *not* interested in something, she doesn't usually focus well.

Anyway, enough with that, I guess it all boils down to "Are people with ADD/ADHD (inattentive) unable to focus at all? Or is it just a matter of if they care about what's going on..."

I think that's the definition of ADD, actually. ADD is thought to be a weakenss in doing the reward center of the brain the makes us happy for a boring job well done.

Having said that - it doesn't automatically mean she has ADD, there are lots of other ways to discribe this set of traits.

Some people have to be 'emotionally aligned' with a project to do well on it. Some see the big picture and hate the details. Briggs-Myers talks about people who prefer to collect more information rather than come to a decision.

If you do an evaluation, make sure it's someone who is well versed in the presentation of ADD in highly gifted girls.

Of all the points you listed, the one that concerns me is the 'last-minute finish to projects when she tries to do otherwise.' I would certainly keep working on that one, because there is a point where the projects get so huge that last minute will limit the quality of what she can accomplish.

Recently a family member was diagnosed with ADD, and I was curious what life was like on the stimulant medication. I asked if he thought that I had ADD too, and if he thought the medication would make my life better. He said: "Oh yeah, you have it, but you don't need medication - you make it work for you!" That had the ring of truth to it. Now when I hear your yo-yo story, I think "That's normal isn't it? Oh wait, maybe that's normal for me!"

The interesting thing is to figure out what conclusions your DD has made about herself based on her behavior. Does she feel 'dumber' than the other smart kids in a way that makes her work harder, or makes her give up?

I have 'a zillion' little tricks to keep me on track - my latest is a Sufi style of mediation called Heart Rhythm Meditation. I've always been 'a natural' at drifting off with upward Meditation, but I've never perused it because it seemed redundant. Finally I've found a style of meditation that keeps me grounded and able to regulate the OverExcitabilities and do the things I want to do in the world. They call this 'downward meditation' - how cool is that?


Your family is lucky that your daughter seems to consider most
school work to be interesting. What has helped me so much is that I am able to 'strongly encourage' myself to be interested in most of the things that I need to do. That seems a skill worth recognizing in your DD to the extent that she already has it, and developing through praise evermore of.

Also - it seems prudent to have her hearing tested, as well as her 'central auditory processing' checked - if 'Huh?' is her favorite word. If that's fine, you may want to figure out 'alternate cues' for commonly used instructions. I sing quite a bit to cue other people. Humming to let people know I'm in their space, 'Good morning to you,' 'clean up song,' 'working on the railroad' to boost the energy.

Words from other languages make good cues for common routines.

The trick to this not seeming patronizing is to clearly be using it on yourself to manage your own energy first.

I've heard of families where the mom uses handsignals. I'm thinking that if your DD is willing, making an agreement to both wave your arms back and forth as if you are doing the wave before you give instructions - in the manner of clearing an etch-a-sketch before changing the subject and starting a new topic.

As a child one of my biggest complaints was that adults were always 'creeping up behind me and wanting me to do jobs for them' right in the middle of a terrific daydream. Now I realize that I was always in the middle of a terrific daydream - they didn't have a chance.

Does your daughter have any sense of time? I am always 'in the present' with no innate feeling of time passing, especially if I'm in the zone - when things get tough, I set my wrist watch for 5 minutes all day long, so that if I drift off, I get a chance to see if it's a choice every 5 minutes.

I'd love to talk some more about this topic.

Grinity

I have a good friend with severe ADD, and I think of it as her being "stimulus driven." Her attention gets grabbed away from the current task by anything and everything that happens by. But by the same token, a really absorbing task can keep her focused, even when her brain ought to be telling her that it's time to get ready to go. It's as if she's at the mercy of whatever is in front of her.


Wow, this really describes my friend! She will look at the clock and see that it's 10:15, and she'll spend the next 45 minutes thinking that it's still 10:15.

Recently (less than a year ago, and this is a woman in her 40's) she told me excitedly that she had figured out how to get somewhere on time. You figure out how long it takes to get there, and then you count backwards from the time you need to be there. I thought she was being funny and ironic at her own expense, but it turned out she was being quite sincere, this was a new and effortful insight for her.

Let me emphasize that this is not a stupid person. She is articulate and insightful and not particularly bad at math. But when it comes to time (and spatial relations too, I think) her brain is just wired differently.

Well, when I mentioned it, she said she couldn't tell if she had it or not. Which probably isn't a sign that it's affecting school too much... The only place it would be affecting school would be in reading I think, because she gets very frustrated that she doesn't seem to have as high of scores on tests about the books (asking factual information) than classmates, even though she knows she's scored higher on reading level tests (when she is hyper-focused, the teacher told her she got the highest score in the school, so that means she *should* be a better reader than everyone, right?) than them. The reason could very well be that she just doesn't read as thoroughly as she needs to to start with, though. I think that she *did* have convergence insufficiencies that make it hard for her to read, especially at night (well, actually, she told me she did.), but some tips the eye doctor gave her helped her overcome it, except for at night, it kind of comes back sometimes. Usually she'll just close one eye, which is uncomfortable, but works.
Also, memory is a problem. She has great long term memory, for facts (incredible at trivia), phone numbers and library barcode numbers, etc, but she's not any good at the whole "see a sheet of paper for 5 minutes and remember everything" or "I'm going to tell you a sequence of numbers" pattern. She was once taking a test for a friend's science fair experiment to see how music effects memory. (She was placed in the music group) The friend told her that she had the worst score of the whole experiment. (now that was actually only of the 15 people in her Honors Science class who had taken it, but still...)
When my son got diagnosed, the "diagnosis" was really, really simple. "Do you feel like your mind is unable to get settled down?", A few other questions, and then "Ok, you have Classic ADHD, which medicine do you want?" And it was obvious he had it. He, at that time, could never stop talking, sought nonstop attention, and had severe anxiety.
I feel like for the inattentive part, it's not as cut and dry.
Responses
Grinity- Lol! I love the humming idea! If only it would work, DD would probably just get annoyed, thinking I was being childish with her or something...
Her time is about average, I'd say. Except she did tell me about an odd incident where she was reading for what felt like 20 minutes, but then looked up to find that only a minute had passed. (She tends to skip around a lot when she reads, but 14 pages in a minute is kind of a lot...). Right after that, 30 minutes went by with her thinking it was less. So sometimes she gets kind of mixed up with time, but not usually. I think everyone does that sometimes.

ADHD inattentive type is sometimes hard to detect. Both my children have it, and it wasn't until my daughter was a Freshman that it even hit our radar. Since inattentive types rarely have behavioral issues (other than maybe forgetting, getting lost in thoughts, taking an inordinate amount of time to get things done or spacing out), the signs are easy to miss. With my daughter especially, she has good organizational strategies and can be very self - sufficient. But, when she started complaining about an inability to stay focused during class, while reading and even during some sports activities we took notice.

Here are some good books that provide excellent strategies to manage ADHD and executive functioning problems:

Understanding Girls with ADHD, by Kathleen G. Nadeau, Ph.D.,
ADD Women and Girls: Late Diagnosis, Little Treatment http://www.additudemag.com/adhd/article/1626.html

Late Lost and Unprepared: Cooper-Kahn http://latelostandunprepared.com/

No Mind Left Behind: Adam Cox http://www.dradamcox.com/nomindleftbehind/index.html

My son takes stimulant medication for his ADHD. The combination of ADHD and severe dyslexia is too much to handle alone. The medication makes a huge difference in the way he can focus and attend. We are not treating my daughter - although I often wonder if we should. We have hired an academic support tutor that has helped her with study skill strategies and she is on a 504 that gives her extra time, class notes and outlines for class lectures. This has made a huge difference.

Inattention is a misnomer - ADHD inattentive is actually a deficit in tuning out unimportant information. People with this type of ADHD are often able to hyper focus if the task is very interesting. This may be what you are seeing. APD (auditory processing disorder) can often look like ADHD. And, it is important to realize that the two conditions are often comormid.

Good luck!!

Hi there! (Waves enthusiastically).

I am a mother with ADHD to a daughter with ADHD, so I have two perspectives on this subject.

I think the heritability is very eye-opening to a lot of families. My daughter was first identified as having ADHD and then, as a result of a very good friend of mine (who also has ADHD) asking me who I thought she got it from, I was identified. I had just lost track of my keys for the umpteenth time in a matter of hours at her home. Needless to say she *knew* it was me. Having the diagnosis was a godsend, literally. It made my whole life make sense, and that is not an understatement. Having that knowledge has made me more forgiving of my fallibility. Being treated with stimulants has made me feel capable and successful. I did okay before, I mean I graduated with honors from college, but it was always a struggle. And socially, well, that was definitely a challenge. "Open Mouth, Insert Foot" could be my motto.

The reason I am sharing this is because having your daughter evaluated, regardless of whether you treat her or not with medication, could be very helpful in her understanding of herself and in helping you know how best to work with her. I was "under the radar" growing up because I was a people-pleaser and I did average work at school. This was even as my sister had been diagnosed with ADHD (then known as just hyperactivity) in the 1970s. Little did we know I was capable of doing honors-level work as we discovered in college. Which, by the way, is typical for ADHDers - we can have very uneven experiences in school. I also may even be gifted, which I never, ever would have thought as a child or teenager, but my true abilities were (probably) masked by my ADHD, which was more inattentive at that time. I think the suggestion to be evaluated by someone who knows how ADHD is presented in gifted girls is important. We haven't had that benefit for our dd, who is now 10 btw, and it has led to some questions regarding diagnosis and cause of some of her behaviors. It is is challenging.

Grinity, I love all that you had to say! You are soooo helpful. I am absolutely going to use some of those suggestions at my home. With me and my girl, it can get pretty interesting. We get things done and we play together, but it can be a whole lot of doing one thing and then .. "Squirrel!" and we're off to another.... my poor husband.

It's a very ADHD morning for me and have to get to work, so I must go now. I hope we've been helpful.

Best,

Sky

Hilarious! This is exactly how my DS12 has been his whole life. He's not hyperactive at all but he's always been super aware of every little change to his environment and, when he was little, just had to go check it out (and touch it, but that's another matter!). We started him on meds in the winter and have seen a bit of improvement (he can now speak a complete sentence without getting distracted by other thoughts in the middle, and he can now concentrate for longer periods when doing homework or practicing his instrument) but as our doc said, you usually see less dramatic changes with inattentive type ADHD than with hyperactive type. Anyway, just love the "Squirrel!" anology from UP!

Too funny on the "Squirrel!" My DS9 would not just get distracted by the squirrel but chase him and throw in a few cartwheels and a song while he was at it - clearly adHd! We started medication and it was like turning a switch - no more handstands on the couch, no more singing the same song in goofy voices while doing handstands on the couch. I am very curious to see how school will be with the meds......

Thanks for the topic!

(Oh shiny object�)

Thanks everyone for sharing. This has been a very enlightening thread. I've always disliked ADHD or ADD diagnosis as it seems so vague and very inaccurate and is it even a real problem. (Not meaning to be offensive) Probably because less is heard about the "inattentiveness" portion (?) and related to what happens with girls and gifted girls. And mich's comment about Auditory processing -- very interesting.

It's fun reading all of these responses! Some of them fit her so well....
Another biggie is "Do you want to..........................." stares off into space.
Or "Do you want to go get....um....um.....pizza! for lunch?", etc. She has that thing about trailing off in the middle of her sentences, or not thinking at all when she is talking, like one of you mentioned.
About whether a parent has it, I don't think I have any attention problems, and my husband... unless there is a special category for the engineer who about half of the time calls our son by our daughters name, daughter by our dogs name, etc, without even realizing, takes 10 minutes to respond when you ask them something, almost as if they spent the whole time processing the question, probably not. But I have to wonder about him sometimes.. even if not ADHD/ADD, *something* is a little off about him. (Keep in mind that he's *way* smarter than me, I'm pretty sure he falls well into the gifted range)

We just got her schedule today, she is in 3 honors and 2 Ap's as a freshman, in addition to Band, which will involve practicing, marching at games, and early morning practices. Speech, her other course, will be a good way to address her difficulty with speaking to crowds. I guess this will be the real test of ADD....
By the way, I discussed it with her and she said she was going to *really* try hard this year, and I can see that she really is motivated, especially with her difficult courses (AKA more interesting). I've heard Biology Honors is killer, even for gifted kids, (ends up being mostly gifted kids in the class because the others drop out), hopefully since Science is one of the more interesting subjects for her, she'll really get a lot out of that. Also, she is *absolutely ecstatic* about AP Geography and AP World History.
So like I said, if her grades aren't great at the beginning,even with her seeming more motivated, it might be time to see about medication.