ADD or boredom? Dopers with ADD experience, help!

In My Humble Opinion
1

I called my son’s teacher today to check up on him because I noticed he’d been coming home with some work he should have finished in class but hadn’t. He’s 5 years old, the youngest in his kindergarten class. So I wanted to find out what her take on it was. He’s had a few behavior issues, so I worried that this was related, but his teacher assured me that he’s doing great and has few issues with behavior.

But she also expressed concern he wasn’t doing his morning work and recommended that I might want to talk to my pediatrician about the possibility of an attention deficit disorder. Now, I’m not going to go all, “my special snowflake is perfect!”(he does have issues focusing sometimes, though he has improved markedly); however, she did tell me that academically he’s doing very, very well. She said she thinks he’s performing right where he ought to be with respect to ability to grasp subject matter, math, etc. But that I might get him checked out anyway. Which left me confused.

Her primary reason for this, she said, was the work he’s been bringing home (and not doing in class). He and his peers have been receiving the exact same morning assignment for two weeks now (for what it’s worth, the assignment was writing their numbers 1-70 within a set time frame to help them master the ability to write the numbers quickly). When I asked him why he wasn’t doing it during the allotted time, his response was, “Well, I did it all once. I’m not sure why I have to do it again. It’s boring and I’d rather think about something else.” He has done all of the assignment at the same time on a couple of different occasions, so I’m not so sure the issue is really that he can’t focus enough to do it, but that he’s bored with it. I did explain to him that, bored or not, he has to do what his teacher tells him when she tells him to do it even if he doesn’t want to.

So I called my pediatrician and they’re sending me some evaluation forms, but I’m a little concerned about this whole process. I guess it couldn’t harm anything to have him evaluated, but at the same time, unless there’s something the teacher’s not telling me, it sounds kind of like he’s bored. I think my primary concern is that my kid could be evaluated for something he may or may not have that may or may not be a function of his age and very repetitive, boring exercises in school. I don’t want to get to a point where he’s essentially being diagnosed with a disorder for being bored. But at the same time, I don’t want to withhold evaluation and possible treatment (preferably therapy, not meds) if he does have a problem.

What are other people’s experiences with this? Parents? People dealing with an attention disorder? Anybody? This is completely unfamiliar territory for me.

2

I assume that if he is going to get an evaluation, they’ll be looking for more than just ADD. Maybe your son is unusually bright and being ‘diagnosed’ as Gifted (or whatever they call it these days) will let him access services that will assist him in being less bored in school. And even if he is diagnosed with ADD, no one can make you medicate him, thank goodness.

‘Diagnosed with a disorder for being bored’… made me laugh, cause that’s really ADD in a nutshell. Cognitively average people are able to produce quality work while sitting in a classroom/office and being bored out of their skulls (and classrooms and offices are usually very, very boring places), but ADD people have a hard time even thinking about boring pointless stuff, much less bring themselves to do boring pointless busywork. Which as an ADD person makes complete sense to me (there are so many interesting things to think and learn about, I can’t stand wasting the chance to stimulate my brain), but has caused many problems in my life, especially in school. ‘Gifted’ and ADD is a tough combination.

3

Doper with ADHD checking in. If he’s only 5 and academically doing “very, very well” - yeah. Bored. To be the baby of the class and already excelling is a pretty good sign that the kid is bright. If he was, say, trying to write from 1-70 and never succeeding because he was looking out the window, spinning his pencil, getting up and wandering around the classroom, etc. he MIGHT have ADD. (Or, alternately, he might just be a boy doing boy thing.) Considering he’s done the assignment a couple of times already, he’s proven he can do it. He’s just sick of doing it at this point. He’s probably a smart kid and unfortunately smart kids - particularly in public schools - tend to have to sit around and wait for their not-as-smart peers to catch up.

Another thing you might want to ask his teacher – when he’s not being bored in class, is he more interested in playing than learning? PandaKid was barely 5 when she started school and all year the only complaint her teacher had was that she simply wanted to play sometimes instead of work. It wasn’t until the tail end of the school year that I found out she was the baby of the class – there were kids in her kindergarten class that were already turning 7.

The pediatrician is probably sending you the Vanderbilt form for you and his teacher to fill out. I think those things are useless, they’re purely subjective., but IME they’re pretty much what pediatricians use to justify writing out a script for Ritalin. (If not the Vanderbilt then probably the Conners, equally useless.) IMHO (IANAPsych professional but at work I read metric fucktons of psych evals done on kids whose parents think they have ADD), the only reliable diagnosis of ADHD is going to come from a thorough psychological evaluation. Some psychologists do use self-reporting forms such as the Vandy or Conners as well but you also have the psychologist observing the kid during the exam which can tell volumes, not to mention what shows up on the testing itself. If little Johnny’s mom insists the kid is constantly bouncing off the walls and has the attention span of a gnat and he sits down during the psych eval and shows good concentration and effort during testing, even on items that are hard for him, chances are there’s nothing really wrong with him and little Johnny’s mom simply can’t control her kid when he’s at home. (I see that at work approximately 7,238,685,239,523,914 times a week.)

I would rip on his teacher for even mentioning he should be checked out, because while I appreciate how hard it is for teachers these days, I do think a lot of them just flat don’t want to deal with anything out of the ordinary — however, in a lot of states they’re legally required to say something if they think something’s wrong with a kid. I wish my teachers had said something, that’s for sure.

Get him evaluated - if I’m not mistaken, the school has to pay for it :slight_smile: Don’t let them bullshit you about getting a copy of the eval – if you have to have 'em send it to his pediatrician and you can get your hands on the report that way. (Some school districts are real dicks about this.)

4

I have a 7-year-old daughter who has been diagnosed with ADD, and I have to say I would hesitate to have a young 5-year-old evaluated on the basis of them not completing a task like the one you describe. I’m surprised there aren’t more kids in the class having trouble with it…it’s hard to engage kindergarteners (especially boys) with boring desk work. I’d wait until at least 1st or 2nd grade, when it’s more developmentally appropriate for them to be able to do that kind of work.

5

Bored. No doubt about it. He told you that’s what it is. Is it ADD? No one really knows, but there are a lot of overlapping symptoms between boredom and ADD. One way to find out is to see if he has problems handling more challenging school work. IMHO, a poor way to find out is to give your son ADD drugs. Also, remember that specialists tend to find problems in their specialty, so take the evaluation results with a grain of salt. You know your son far better than some specialists who spend a few minutes with him.

6

Doing the exact same assignment three times when you already did fine the first two times? That doesn’t sound like teaching, it sounds like punishment. I’d be more concerned with her teaching methods than with your son’s boredom. What skill does “quickly writing natural numbers” reinforce?

Of course your son *could *have ADD. And getting a diagnostic test done is not going to harm him. Like rhubarbarin pointed out, if he gets diagnosed as gifted, that’d be a benefit for his future education. At my school, exceptional students were tested for giftedness in second grade and entered the G/T program in third. You’d be getting a head start by testing him now. But if he’s performing well in all other aspects–like the teacher is claiming–I don’t think you should worry at this stage.

7

Repetitive tasks are good for mastering certain skills. Usually, when they become boring, it’s because you’ve mastered them. So, check with your son. Can he write 1-70 in quick order, legibly? Does he meet the teacher’s standards for hand writing and number sense? If so, there’s no reason for him to continue repeating the activity, and he knows it. He’s bored, and I can’t blame him.

Ask his teacher about differentiated instruction. What has she planned for the students who master skills like this faster than the other kids? Making them do the same work over and over again is boring, and there’s no question that a bored kid is going to act out. She should have other tasks prepped for him if he’s mastered this skill.

8

Another ADD doper here

I’d agree with the other people saying, that there isn’t really anything that you’ve said here that points to ADD.

But

I’d be hesitant to dismiss the possibility entirely, on what you’ve said either.

Your teacher might have some experience with this that she is articulating poorly, and at that age an inability to focus isn’t going to be affecting academic progress in the same way as it might later.

ADD kids are often very bright, and underperforming can often still mean doing well above average. (I performed well until late secondary school, when homework suddenly became important, and then things nosedived). It did cause me serious problems on the social side, much earlier, but I get the impression that tends to manifest in rather unpredictable ways.

I’d suggest getting an assessment, making sure it’s done properly, and seeing if they make a better case. If your kid does have ADD, then trust me, a diagnosis is not something you want to protect him from.

Basically, if I had to lay money down right now, I’d bet on “no he’s bored”, but don’t rule it out.

As an aside, I have no idea what the official line is, but if you do get a diagnosis, and you have to decide about medication, I’d suggest that at his current age, you worry more about whether it is affecting his relationship with his peers more than whether it’s affecting his grade card.

9

I don’t dispute anything you’ve said, but if one isn’t careful, one might assume you’re saying that people without ADD don’t get bored, or that they don’t mind being bored. As a non-ADD (but pretty intelligent) person, I can assure you that’s not the case. I hate being bored; I hate getting stuck somewhere with nothing to read; I get mentally restless having to sit through something long and boring, like an uninteresting church service or graduation ceremony or bad movie. While I can do pointless busywork, I don’t like to and would avoid it if possible. So I would probably balk at having to write to write down a long list of numbers yet again, too.

I have no opinion one way or the other about the chances of your son having ADD. It’s tricky because with ADD, as with other conditions, many of the “symptoms” could just be a normal part of being a human being (or a kid, or a person with above-average intelligence, or a person with a particular sort of personality, or…).

10

This is the single biggest issue, in dealing with, diagnosing, and in colouring public attitude to ADD, and ADHD (based on my own experience, I tend to suspect the two are identical problems, in different environments)

You quickly learn not to talk about it, because it’s damn near impossible to do so without sounding like you are whining about things people deal with all the time, and I can understand this.

Prevaricating all day over 15 minute task = normal

Failing to complete 15 minute task, you really should be doing, for entire week = probably still normal

Sitting at desk shaking and crying and seriously thinking about suicide, because you can’t complete a 15 minute task, despite the fact that you have spent an entire week mostly sitting at a desk and failing to complete that task = ADHD

And if that sounds unbelievable to you, that’s probably because it sounds unbelievable to me, it’s a very unintuitive disease. And yes that was a real low point, and I really don’t want to scare the OP, but it is a serious, real, thing that can destroy your life if it doesn’t get diagnosed

It is an issue of magnitude, but make no mistake, magnitude can be a bitch.

11

I don’t want to add to all of the TLDR responses that have already been posted. But, my daughter is 5 and is in full-day kindergarten, and just before Christmas we went through this process. We are fortunate in that her pediatrician used to be developmental specialist before returning to general practice. He had us do the Conners evaluations, and we got two done by teachers at school. All four showed almost the exact same problem areas and to the same degree. You could have almost overlapped the graphs. The Doctor’s response was that clearly our daughter had an ADHD issue. This is the earliest age at which he would diagnose a child with ADHD and would normally ask that we work with the teacher with some techniques to improve behavior. But we had already tried those, having a teacher for a parent does help sometimes.

Daughter has been on medication since mid-December, and I think we now have the dosage right. Here is the thing to think about, her life has gotten better. School is more interesting. She is learning and catching up to the level she can be at. Her time with friends is better. But she is not perfect, old habits die hard and as parents we are working through that. Meds. do not make it perfect. She is still stubborn about meals, and is still not a morning person. But in ways that I can’t fully describe, she is more her than she has ever been.

My advice, valuable I know, is do the evaluations but also communicate frequently and openly with your child’s teachers and school administrators. If you don’t think ADD is the problem, or the evaluations don’t bear out that diagnosis, keep working together to find better solutions. Teachers, and school staff, generally want to help you kid succeed. Some are bad at their jobs or just not nice people. If you have a good relationship with the school, don’t be a crazy person, they will work with you and get you and your child moved if they can. ADD and ADHD are misunderstood, sometimes they are the problem and can be treated. Sometimes the problem is elsewhere. I have a second grader who is being hampered by the lack of an advanced math program, he reads at a level they don’t actually apply ratings to, and we are going to have real boredom issues in school soon. Had to trick him into an after school Chinese class to keep him challenged.

12

Forms like the Conners your doctor may be sending you are helpful screening devices designed to roughly separate kids who display ADHD behavioral characteristics from those that do not. It does not substitute for a formal psychological evaluation, but plenty of doctors will make a diagnosis and prescribe meds based on the findings of these forms.

The fact that your child’s teacher thinks he may have ADHD will likely bias her responses to the rating scales somewhat. It’s always important to have the parents fill out their respective version of the scale as well. School history is also important, but not very useful here.

What bothers me is the teacher describing your child as being very academically capable, yet seeing some type of performance disability in him anyway. Does she just want him to be more conforming, or does she really see a work completion problem? Children who are being successful in school shouldn’t be tagged with the ADHD label in my opinion, unless the work completion issue begins to be problematic in other types of written work, such as essays and reports. I have a problem diagnosing and medicating a kid who knows the material, but doesn’t always do his homework. There are behavioral interventions for that.

13

All of this reflects my experience.

And…I don’t think “boring” is the issue. My daughter (and I) do not necessarily have trouble with boring tasks, but rather with more complex tasks that need forethought, planning, and/or the ability to organize thoughts in our brains first. For instance, my daughter has good reading comprehension, and if you ask her to tell you about as story she has read verbally, she can do so. If you ask her to sit down and write it out, she will say she “can’t,” and get very upset. If you help her break down the task into smaller pieces (“tell me about the first thing that happens” “ok, write down that one sentence”), she can do it, but being asked to write a long paragraph with all of her thoughts about it is extremely difficult for her, and not at all because it is “boring.”

14

It really depends what you mean by “academically capable”. While, I’d suggest that I did indeed significantly underperform academically, I still got through secondary school with above average grades, and I managed to get my PhD before being diagnosed (looking back, I have no clue how).

ADD isn’t all negative, and it’s almost certainly as much the source of my advantages as it is my disadvantages, but the disadvantages have severely screwed my life up.

It’s not about grades, it’s about stress, and frustration, and inability to relate to ones peers. If a kid is in school, and is getting on well with his peers, and happy, then yeah, I don’t see a need for medication.

Adults with ADD tend to evangelise about medication, because suddenly discovering that"pulling your life together" can come in a bottle is the kind of experience that makes people enthusiastic about things.

If a kid with ADHD is happy and functional without medication, then that’s great, but for pitys sake, don’t judge things solely on grade cards, and be aware of just how quickly things can fall to shit for them when the exams come around.

15

I’d agree with this. Boring isn’t a problem, especially if the task is sufficently straightforward that I can be thinking about something else at the same time.

The problem comes with mentally demanding tasks that I’m not “ready” to do. attention deficit isn’t really a good description, it’s more of an issue with attention control.

As I said before, it’s very difficult to describe, but its almost a disconnect between conscious and unconcious desire to do something. So while most people experience problems with being unable to do things that they don’t really want to do, with ADD you can very much want to do something and still be unable to do it because your brain is undermining you on a subconcious level.

16

This is absolutely the crux of the matter. If he truly has mastered the skill, then yeah he’s most likely justifiably bored. But any competent teacher would expect that and have other activities planned for the kids who have already mastered the skill to keep them from acting out. Your son has not been progressed to another activity, so either his teacher is incompetent, or his “I already did it once” wasn’t up to snuff.

The second option sounds like you may have the second coming of my ADD brother, in which case I will help hold him down while you shove the pills in his mouth. If I had a nickel for every school or household assignment that generated an argument about how it was stupid and boring and pointless and he wasn’t going to do it, I could take you out for a really nice dinner. If I had a dime for every argument about how he already did something and wasn’t goin to redo it no matter how bad a job somebody thought he had done, we could have a nice bottle of bubbly. It’s not an experience I would wish on anyone, even just as a bystander.

If your son has indeed mastered the assignment and he cooperates with the teacher going forward, there’s no real reason at this point to have him tested. If he hasn’t mastered the task yet, or he has but refuses to repeat it, I would get him tested.

17

Thank you so much for the responses! There’s a lot to think about here. I’ll post more later (I’m in a plane on the tarmac at the moment).

18

OK, I am (as far as I know) not ADD or ADHD or anything like that.

I did, however, have a wee bit of trouble in school with repetitive tasks, doing things that I already knew, and thinking that I shouldn’t have to do them over again ‘just because’, or because other kids needed to. (Ha, what, I needed to?! Surely you jest! :p)

I almost failed math one year, despite loving and having no trouble with math, because I wouldn’t repeat work that I’d done the previous year.

He’s a smart kid and he’s bored. Go ahead and do the evals, it shouldn’t hurt, but talk to the teacher again about what’s going on in class.

Why is the teacher requiring him to keep repeating this exercise? Is his previous work not up to snuff? In which case, she should be working with him on what he needs to improve. Or is it just because ‘everybody does it X times’? Which IMHO is crapola. But you can tell him that crapola is part of life, suck it up and do it.

What solved my problem was my mom going to bat for me. They let me start taking the pre-unit and post-unit tests - and if I passed both tests with A’s, I didn’t have to do that unit and could go on to the next. After screwing around and getting like 2 units done in an entire quarter, I wiped out a year’s worth in the next quarter.

It may have been a bit of “special snowflake” treatment, but it helped a quite a few other bright kids when they made it a general policy.

19

Count me among those who point out you can be both bright and ADHD. I’m positive I’m not the only ADHD doper who was in the gifted program as a kid too. Someone probably even said that in this thread, but to be honest I lost interest in other people’s responses less than half way through :stuck_out_tongue: These days the common ADHD symptom “impatiently interrupts conversations” manifests on the internet as “couldn’t wait long enough to read everything in a message board thread before posting my own two cents.”