ADHD?

[Usernameschmoozername]

Am I justified in thinking that my DD might have ADHD or am I clutching at straws and excusing bad behaviour?
DD has just turned 12 and is what I have often thought of as ‘not an easy child’. Her dad decided to leave when she was 5 - he struggled with parenting and, after 12 years together and 6 years of marriage we split up, He initially lived within 45 minutes or so and saw her every second weekend (though it took him 18 months to go from Sat am/lunchtime pick up to taking her on Fri evening). He would also take her out for tea on a Tues /Wed if he wasn’t away for work. About 3 years ago he moved 100s of mikes away, working for the same company - not sure how voluntary it was, or if it was a case of no move=no job. He comes up every second weekend and takes her to his elderly mother’s house about 45 mins away. He usually phones once during the intervening 12 days, for maybe 3 minutes, and it took him until the 4th to bother to wish her a happy new year. He doesn’t seem to have much grasp of her day to day life, and I have repeatedly tried to encourage him to make more effort to maintain a more regular dialogue with her and to play a bigger role in her life, but he doesn’t seem interested. He has a live in gf who has been up here with him several times, but DD has only met her once for one weeekend. I met her briefly and she seemed fine, and I would be okay with DD spending time with her, but he seems to keep his two ‘worlds’ very separate. Sometimes DD goes with her dad with no trouble on a Fri evening, but at other times it’s a source of stress and upset. I remember physically carrying her out to his car once while she kicked and screamed. She’s generally fine when she’s with him, with the occasional phone all/text chat with me, i’ve always insisted she go with him as that’s what we legally agreed and I want her to have a relationship with her dad, but she’s now getting to the age where she can have a say (I’m not sure what the legal position is on that in Scotland). She’s very much a homebody and it seems to be more the leaving me/home/her stuff/ cats/friends than going with him that is the issue. She’s also going to stay with her elderly, partially deaf grandma with no kids round about to play with, so not a big draw really.

Anyway, DD has never been a good sleeper - a fb memory thing popped up a few weeks ago from when she was 2, going on 3, saying that she’d gone to sleep in her own bed, but woken up at 11, wanting to be with me. I was trying to be firm with her, but eventually gave up and took her in with me at 5am. She still struggles to get to sleep - she’s usually okay once she’s asleep - and I quite often have to read her to sleep (we’re on the last Princess Diaries book!). If she goes to sleep in her own bed I quite often find her in mine in the morning, but she’s good at getting in quietly so I don’t really mind. She is going through a phase of falling asleep in my bed, which isn’t ideal, but not the end of the world. It can be 11ish when she finally drops off, then it’s a struggle to wake her up for school the next morning at 7.

She has always been volatile, and still continues to have meltdowns, 0-60 in seconds, usually at home. These can involve her physically attacking me. It’s quite weird when it happens, her face totally changes and sometimes she has claimed to have no memory of it afterwards. I showed her a video I’d taken on my phone one evening when she asked why I wasn’t letting her watch tv the next morning and she denied it was her! Homework is often a flashpoint and I dread the words ‘I have maths homework’, although a teenage neighbour / maths genius came over and gave her a maths tutoring session recently which seemed to help. As soon as she finds something difficult and I try to explain it (I usually have to look it up online first!) she tells me I’m an idiot who can’t explain it properly, or she’s an idiot for not being able to understand. She very much has a ‘fixed’ rather than ‘growth mindset’. Developing her confidence with reading was a long, painful
process in primary and at one point the teacher suggested we stop doing reading homework as it was proving so stressful and affecting our relationship at home. She has recently decided that she actually quite likes reading, a source of joy for me as I love reading, and this has been quite calming for her. She is very down on herself academically and constantly compares herself to others - she’s passing tests, but not by much, and her friends seem to be getting high marks so she tells me she’s stupid and an idiot. This is despite her doing revision at home, but she seems to freak out in test conditions. I’ve been trying to reassure her that this kind of testing is a new thing for her in high school and takes a bit of getting used to, and as long as she tries hard I don’t care what grade she gets. I’d love her, for her own self-esteem, to find something she’s quantifiably good at so she doesn’t just see herself as ‘an idiot, stupid, never going to achieve anything’ as she has described herself. Socially, she’s made a lot of new friends, who all seem very nice, and she was at her first ever sleepover without me at someone else’s house in the holidays - I made the rookie mistake of telling people she didn’t sleep so, although we’ve had lots of girls to stay here, she’s never been invited to stay at anyone else’s. The other two girls went to sleep at 2ish but she said she lay awake until 5, not for any particular reason or pining for me, she just couldn’t sleep.

Sorry for the epic post - I’m going to post this before I lose it!

I'm not a MH professional, just an ordinary Mum, but it doesn't sound like adhd to me. Maybe some sort of other behavioural issue or anxiety/stress coupled with limited sleep.
At her age i would have thought school would have commented by now if they suspected something like adhd.
Sending positive vibes.

Doesn’t really sound like ADHD here . I’m a mummy with 2 ADHD children one similar age to yours . In my DD (13) the symptoms showed up later in life mor eprominently but we’re always there . The symptoms she had when she was little was constantly swapping activity’s , and some meltdowns . (That’s all we really noticed and remember ) At age 12 (end of year 7) symptoms became more visible despite always being there for example she did all homework on the bus because her mindset was if it’s not due today then it’s not due. She also became quiet loud , shouted out a lot , excessively chatty , emotional and when I came across these symptoms being associated with ADHD in year 7 I continued to ask how concentration was ect . She told me it was bad and she never heard instructions and got carried away with her thoughts . We also bought her a bic shiny 4 colour pen which was a bad move as she got distracted by it being shiny . We also noticed she was fidgety ( throwing pen up , chewing it , biting nails , spinning her book , constantly Turning around ) . We had her privately tested and they ocncluded that despite symptoms being small when she was little that she did have it due to the fact they worsened and were still quite visible in primary . Mine is quite good at sleeping . She takes around 20 mins to sleep and is very restless and ends up with no covers in the morning but stays asleep till 11am from 2am. I don’t think yours is ADHD but my age worth checking for any of these symptoms

What’s she like at school ? Does she get in a lot of trouble ?

Oh dear, that’s huge! Bet no one reads to the end!

DD was sobbing the night before going back to school, saying she hates school, she’s an idiot, everyone is more clever than her - I did point out to her that she was in the 84th percentile for English in p6, so is better at it than 83% of people her age in the whole country, but other people in her class did better, so that’s what she focussed on, (There are a lot of smart cookies round here!) I had a lengthy phone conversation with her Guidance teacher the next day and told her about what she’s like at home, She said DD always seems happy in school when she sees her and has a nice group of friends (which I’m very happy about) and she would have a chat with teachers and DD and suggest sessions with the school counsellor to her. She was talking in terms of them working together to come up with a ‘toolkit’ of strategies for when she’s feeling overwhelmed, which sounds ideal. DD wasn’t overly pleased when I told her about the chat, but I explained I was worried about her, and she agreed that the counselling sounds useful, but a bit embarrassing to leave class for. DD then said she’d found an online quiz for ADHD in girls and had found that she had practically every symptom, so we had a look at some, and blimey! I’ve been doing some research and I’m planning to speak to her Guidance teacher again. Here’s a list of things which rang bells for me:

• Sleeplessness.
• Tantrums, sometimes violent, but often quite verbally abusive (you’re an idiot etc)
• Loss of control - she lashed out and hit another pupil in primary.
• Some friendship issues which involved me being called into school
• Strong mood swings (she’s very good verbally so can tell me she’s feeling angry or sad and doesn’t know why)
• Depressive tendencies - she went through a phase of saying she wanted to die / would rather be dead and has had CAMHS involvement (seemed to mainly focus on sleep) and some private counselling
• Very disorganised - can’t find school books / homework / details of due dates
• Has to be told many times to do things ie pick up dirty clothes from her bedroom floor, though that’s probably quite common
• Rarely sits still - she will now sit and play games on her phone etc, but for years has danced about, done gymnastics in the living room, done ‘active thinking’ (difficult to explain)
• Talks constantly

Says she finds it hard to focus in class - from what she says she is pretty chatty there too, but she says even when she’s listening she can’t follow I.e. the maths teacher’s explanations, but she has always been very good verbally and can chat away to adults and presents as ‘bright’

• Just scraping through tests, despite revising
• There seemed to be a common theme in her report that she needed to apply a bit more effort / detail to her work, but she says she’s putting in as much as she can
• refusal to go to school at times, though she always has in the end. At times it’s been a physical battle to get her dressed
• Fussy with food (fairly common though)
• Gets hangry, very hangry
• complains about sore tummy / feeling sick quite often
• She seems to hold it together behaviour / temper wise in school and then, when she’s tired / frustrated / hungry lets rip at home. She claims she can’t control it when it happens - she seems pretty genuine in this, but maybe I’m being naive.

I punish her by sending her to her room (where there’s no tv) and taking her phone off her and when she’s calm we talk through her behaviour / feelings. She’s usually very apologetic afterwards. I try to stay as calm as possible because shouting at her tends to escalate things and just makes her shout back, but I do lose it at times. She’s with her dad now and has just WhatsApped me about maths homework as she didn’t understand the wording of a question. This involved a fair amount of verbal abuse! She says her dad gets too angry when she asks him for help and he tries to explain things - I did suggest that if she actually just listened instead of arguing it would be useful.

I love her dearly, and she’s a clever, funny, kind, quirky, cuddly, crazy wee thing, but her behaviour can be exhausting and it is impacting on me and my own mental health. A close friend saw her over the holidays for the first time in a year after she’d had 4 hours sleep at her sleepover and was complaining of being ‘starving’ at a party (she and 12 yr old friend who she hasn’t seen in a year were upstairs, mummies and booze were downstairs). She’s a grazer and would rather have 5 small meals than 3 big ones, so despite having fish and chips for an early-ish tea she wanted something else. I’d forgotten to pick up chocolate brioches, her go to snack, and there was nothing she would eat on offer (party food, but they’d just moved in 3 weeks before and it was over Xmas, so not much else was available). After a few glasses of wine I was focussed on getting her something she would eat, as I know that hunger is a flashpoint for her, the two of them eventually went off with a box of chicks and she was fine. I didn’t shout at her, as it would only have made things worse, but took her aside and sat with her on the stairs and talked things through. When I came to pick her up the next day - I’d stayed with my friend, the hostess was her sister and DD had stayed there with other 12 year old - she hadn’t eaten anything as there was nothing she would touch. We ended up going to Nando’s on the way home, on the grounds that this was 4pm and she’d not had anything, it was there, and fast (another 30/40 mins until she got home and I got her something to eat) and I knew she was guaranteed to eat it. My friend had made some comments about her behaviour that morning and when I said we had gone to Nandos sent me a face palm emoji and said I was rewarding her for bad behaviour. I said it was more for practicality’s sake, we’d discussed her behaviour in the car (I don’t even remember her being that bad, tbh, though there was wine involved) and she was having her phone taken off her for the rest of the day and going to bed early. A couple of days later I got a message from her which upset me a fair bit, saying she and her friends were shocked by DD’s behaviour and the fact that I ‘did nothing to reprimand / discipline her’. I was more focused on trying to find her something to eat than on escalating things by shouting at her, and I took her calmly to one side to speak to her. She said she worries for DD’s future if I don’t reconsider my approach to parenting and that tiredness and hunger don’t excuse that kind of behaviour in a 12 year old and she is choosing to behave that way. She says she is ‘happy to meet with me’ in the future, but not with the kids. I was quite taken aback, as this is someone I considered one of my closest friends, especially as she works with troubled kids. Her own children (her DS is 6 months older than DD) have always seemed pretty calm, placid and compliant (her son was taking himself off to do his homework on his own whereas for us it was a battleground.) She also once told me that it wasn’t ’normal’ for a 7/8 year old to not want to go with their dad for the weekend. Her daughter was apparently always fine going with her dad, but then she’d never known anything else and had younger siblings to play with when she was there. I’m sure there are thousands of kids who are reluctant to go with their absent parent for the weekend. I feel she has no concept of what it’s like having a kid who’s ‘hard work’ and has glossed over all the issues I’ve had with her over the years, including CAMHS and counselling involvement, and seems to think ‘She’s 12 (just!) she should be fine by now’. I hardly slept the night I got the message as I kept going over it in my head, and was upset at work the next day after discussing the matter with a colleague in charge of the Pupil Support Base at work (I’m a teacher too). I showed colleagues / friends in my dept the text and they all thought it was harsh - they probably have more of a day to idea of what DD is like, as, for example, I would be coming into work after being kicked in the face by DD trying to get her to go to school when she was going through a particularly bad phase. i haven’t replied to the message as I didn’t want to say anything when I was hurt / angry. The message itself was pretty cold - nothing positive / affectionate / supportive and came across as being very drafted and redrafted.

Well done if you’ve made it to the end of this - can you tell I’ve been brooding over it for a few days?! Ultimately, I suppose my question is: do you think my daughter is just a brat (being enabled by an incompetent mother) or is it worth investigating the possibility of something along the lines of ADHD? -Nothing leading in that wording, is there?- And do I reply to the message?

Johnny - hopefully the second part of my epic tome gives you more relevant info.

Sounds more like ASD than ADHD to me. Girls present very differently to boys with ASD so it might be worth searching for info on Aspie girls and ASD in girls for more information and to see if it could perhaps be this.

box of chocs, not chicks!

I forgot - she’s had a stammer and different facial twitches that have come and gone.

Hard to know but I’m leaning toward the fact that if present in everywhere she goes she may have ADHD or asd. Sounds like my daughter to b honest especially with the boredom eating which is what my dd does . I’d go private as I’m pretty sure there is something here. It is expensive though. I’m sure you’ve gone through the shouting st her for being naughty stage and it handy worked . My dd just shouts back and throws things hen i shout so I calm,y her and hug her till she calms down

Shouting achieves nothing with her, and just gets me more upset, as well as her.

It's quite scary not to know what you are dealing with. My ds has what I think the traits of ASD and ADHD, but earlier referral end up as inconclusive.
I think you really need proper referral from GP to specialist, and need to be persistent.
They say it's sometimes difficult to diagnose girls with ASD, and a lot of girls get that later compared to the boys.

Exactly , I’d get her checked out x

I spoke to the GP on Friday who said to speak to her Guidance Teacher again, and I’ve downloaded stuff to send her about the ADHD symptoms to look out for in girls in particular. As a teacher myself, I didn’t know much about the difference between how boys and girls present, so I think it might be useful if she could pass a checklist on to class teachers who could keep an eye on her for a week or so.

Sounds like one or t’other or both ASD / ADHD to me. Be prepared to do your own research and show professionals in CAMHS or teachers. Girls present differently with both ASD and ADHD

The thing I struggled with during diagnosis was recalling facts and symptoms from childhood as it’s word as she was shy and yet diagnosed with hyperactivity . It’s easier if you’re looking for symptoms to see them .

www.verywellmind.com/adhd-in-girls-symptoms-of-adhd-in-girls-20547
This might be helpful

Thanks for the link - that's really useful.
Just had maths related meltdowns. She still doesn't know her times tables well and struggles to remember the order of the months. In other ways, she has an amazing memory.

She got the train on her own today for the first time as her dad's car is in the garage - put on at one end by him and met on the platform 20 mins later by me. Think she was quite pleased with herself. She went out and took photos on her phone in twilight when she got back and spent ages editing them and prattling on about them - hyper focus. She's so lovely in so many ways, I just wish life was a bit more straightforward for her.

'Shy' is definitely not a word I would apply to her!

I wouldn’t with mine either , that was only in her early years (3-6) now oh god 🤣 honestly the complete opposite

Mine doesn’t bother with homework as she never can bring herself to do it or gets too frustrated . If it’s not due today’s its not due I guess is her mindset

School allow this as a reasonable adjustment

I think it will make a difference if you let the school know of your dc's problems, what makes the life easy for her, what they can do to improve her performance.
My ds used to have something in his hand to fiddle all the time. He was told off, and the item was taken away. On the other hand, child diagnosed was allowed to have fiddle toy. I didn't find it out until later when I spoke with one of the parent. But If I had a knowledge that it was part of my ds's comforting reaction to concentrate, I am sure the school would have allowed it for him.

Irvine - I’m in the process of involving school. I’m not sure DD knows herself what helps! I’ve emailed her Guidance teacher some info re ADHD in girls and asked her to pass on a checklist to class teachers. Hopefully they can keep an eye on her for the next week or so and see if they notice anything. I think her first parents’ evening is coming up soon so I can hopefully discuss it with her then.

As a teacher myself, I didn’t realise until I started doing more reading into it that boys and girls present differently, so I would have had more typical boy behaviour in mind if I was asked about a pupil. I’m hoping a checklist to tick will be a fairly user-friendly way of asking teachers to monitor her without adding significantly to their workload.

I bought her a new tin of Rescue Remedy pastilles to take to school with her to take if she’s feeling stressed - forgot to put that in the email. Genuine effect, or placebo, I don’t know, but it might help!

I hope it works out for you! Good luck.

She has come home from school today thrilled with herself because she ‘gets algebra’ and it’s ‘dead easy’ and ‘really fun’!! Holy shmoley! This is a first!