Is Your Child Suffering from ADHD?

ADHD or Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder is receiving a lot of attention from worried parents and teachers nowadays. With parents struggling to balance the work-family dilemma in nuclear families, children suffering from this disorder are difficult to manage. This article is a simplified overview of what constitutes the disorder and the best treatment for ADHD.

As the name implies, ADHD constitutes of two primary symptoms – attention deficit and hyperactivity. Added to these is the symptom of impulsivity. A child may show features of only inattention or predominantly hyperactivity or both. This means, the typical complaints from school would be that the child refuses to sit still in class, disturbs other students, often gets into fights with others and rarely finishes his/her schoolwork. If we observe their class notes or examination papers, a typical pattern is seen. They start off alright and the first few sentences are properly written. Thereafter the problem begins. As their attention dwindles, the remainder of that paper is either filled with incomplete sentences or disjointed words or altogether left blank. They often skip pages in their notebooks and are unable to read through an entire page without getting distracted. Another very common complaint is that they often misplace things. This is simply because they are too distracted to keep things in their proper place. Regarding the hyperactivity, parents are at their wits end as the school repeatedly informs them that the child was unruly or disobedient in class, disrupting the class discipline. And in most schools, strict disciplinarian actions are taken after repeated similar behaviors on the child’s part. Another frustrating thing the parents have to deal with is the child’s impulsivity. They rarely look before they leap. Always acting on an impulse, they are highly susceptible to accidents.

So, how do we deal with such a problem? In most cases, parents and teachers have tried all sorts of punishments to make the unruly child toe the line. Once they have exhausted themselves of all punitive solutions, the child is taken to a psychiatrist. So, even before the diagnosis is made, the child has been scarred. The important thing about any psychiatric disorder is the need to empathize with the sufferer. What we need to understand and always keep in mind is that the child is not doing any of these on purpose. There is a complex network of nerves and neurochemicals in the human brain that is responsible for attention, restraint in behavior and the resulting activity levels. In these children, these networks are malfunctioning. With all the networks going haywire, it is a picture of elemental chaos inside their brain. The unruly behavior we see is a reflection of what is going on inside their head.

Therapy typically has two parts – medicines and behavioral management. Both are indispensable. While medications control these haywire networks at a biochemical level, behavioral therapy retrains the mind to function in an ordered fashion. Mind it, behavioral management is not based on punishment, but rewards.  Parents and teachers are taught to reward the child for performing desired behaviors and withhold the rewards if the child is unruly. And it is important to be consistent with this pattern till we achieve the target behavior patterns. As with all disorders, the sooner we start with the treatment, the better.

Overall, the best treatment for ADHD demands patience, hard work and consistency on part of the caregivers, but it is the only way out.