ADHD Progress

Well in my last post regarding my daughter’s ADHD struggles, she was going to be entering a tutoring session provided by the school. So far, it is working. Her Social Studies grades are rising and her reading comprehension is improving as well. Her math is getting better, but she is still have some minor struggles. It hasn’t improved at the same rate as the other two subjects.

She has a better concept on the formulas and processes. The multiplication tables are her nemisis.With studying them regularly she does well when we test her at home. When she is doing homework she tends to forget them. I think it is more of a long term memory thing. She can’t recall them after a certain time period.

This is true for her in other areas as well and is why we have gone to making her lists. The lists remind her of what she needs to do and it’s broken down into sublists as well. It reduces giving her a broad subject to cover. “Clean your room” is just to much for her little mind to cover; there are too many steps to miss. As she completes each step she just crosses it out or puts a check mark next to it. If we don’t do it this way we have to give this huge speech over and over about how to do it and verbally repeat each step. Then she is bound to come back and ask you several times just what it was she had to make sure she accomplished in that task.

The new doasge of her medicine also helps. She originally started on Concerta 18 mg. It worked wonders for awhile. There were no notable side effects for her. She did lose a little bit of weight, but was also growing through a growth spurt. So she shot up in height, but not in the weight department. She was eating like a horse so the doctor was not concerned of the lack of appetite than can sometimes be a side effect.  The doctor was concerned about her going to bed so late and felt that possibly the medicine wasn’t wearing off fast enough for her to sleep at night. We changed over to Metadate 20mg and she did great again. She was still up late at night and her height/weight continued to react the same way.

We eventaully noticed that the medicine just did not seem to be remaining in her system into the afternoon hours to aid in her concentration for homework. We struggled with this for months. Finally after speaking to her teacher and finding out that her teacher noticed the same lack on concentration in the classroom, we asked the doctor to switch medicines again. The doctor told us that eventually the children out grow the dosages and sometimes have to have them adjusted to one that is more suitable to the child. Now she is back on Concerta and has been upped to a 36mg dosage. The results have been great. Her teacher has noted the improvements in the classroom too.

Since the change, tutoring began as well. The combination of a higher dosage as well as the further in depth review and one on one work she gets in tutoring is helping her acedemically. That has been our concern as parents from the start of this diagnosis/treament process that began three years ago. We will deal with her “wild” behavior at home and the “broken record” talks we have with her to get things done such as chores, but good acedemics are a big key in our home. Would I love for her to have straight A’s and breeze through her studies? Yeah, what parent wouldn’t?! I realize that this may never happen for her. We have talked with our daughter about how she has to do the extra work in order to stay on top of her school subjects. She knows that she is different from other kids that way, but it isn’t an excuse for learning or in some cases: not learning.

This past summer, my husband gave the task of learning her multiplication facts before school began this past fall. She studied them like she was supposed to in the beginning, then we had to remind her constantly to review them. Finally it all slipped. We stopped telling her and she stopped doing it. When the classwork got to those same multiplication facts this year, she struggled. During one of her nights of homework trouble, her dad looked at her and asked if she now realized why he tried so hard to get her to know them before the school year began.  She rambled on how the other kids didn’t know them yet either. After going round and round in that converstaion we finally got her to see that the point he was making was simply this: the other kids are learning them now and doing well at remembering them and getting good grades because of it. She wasn’t because she was having trouble remembering them and needed the extra time to memorize the facts. It was at that point she realized we had pushed her to help her not to be awful parents that made her do “school work” during what was supposed to be a relaxing summer vacation.

 It has taken a lot of work on not only her part, but our entire family’s to help her stay on track and develop a system that works. The biggest thing we are/ have learned is you, the parent, can not deviate from the system. If you do, she will also. The entire program you have set up then has to be started from the beginning. It takes discipline on everyone’s part to make it successful. Find what works for you, we did. We are constantly looking for better ways to help her and new ideas that are either better or would fit in to the system we have already developed.