My ADHD Journey

My son, who turned 6 years old in August, started kindergarten this year. We were a little worried, because his preschool teacher had told us she thought he would have trouble listening and paying attention. But, he seems like a normal boy to us when he's at home. A little overly sensitive, and more needing of discipline than our other two kids, but nothing that we think is disruptive to our home.

The first two weeks of kindergarten were fine. Then the "red cards" started coming home. Our public school system uses a card system for discipline:
Green card - great day!
Yellow card - got in trouble once (warning)
Blue card - note home/ miss recess
Red card - trip to principal's office.

Thankfully, since he is in kindergarten, he wasn't sent to the principal's office. But we did receive notes home, calls home, and he missed various recesses.

He was very devastated. Every day when he came home the first thing he would tell me was what color card he ended up with that day. If it wasn't a green card, he would come dragging up the driveway from the bus, his whole body dejected. The fact that getting in trouble so upset him made me think that something else was going on here besides rebellion.

My personal diagnosis was that he has some type of auditory learning disability. When he was two, we had him tested for hearing because he didn't seem to be able to hear us. The next year we tested him for speech because the family doctor thought he was behind. Both tests turned out fine. I did some research on the internet on his "symptoms" and came up with the Auditory Processing Learning Disability. So we took him to our family doctor, and received a referral to a neurological psychaitrist (Dr. Z).

Dr. Z gave him an IQ test, various visual/ audial tests, and an achievement test. He said he tested normal on all of those. But he said that during the testing, which occurred over two different sessions, our son was fidgeting, not paying attention, and having trouble listening. His diagnosis: moderate ADHD.