ADD Inattentive Type ONLY

I don't have experience with this, but remember to add the "joy" of puberty into the behavioral mix as well. Good luck!

Hyperactivity is irrelevant, ADHD isn't about not sitting still, it is about how your brain functions. Anyone, regardless of energy level, can sit in one place if told you must sit in one place. You just do things like tapping your foot or fidgeting with your fingers.

What makes ADHD what it is is how your brain works and your brain works the same whether you are hyper or not.

At any given time I am thinking way too fast, that is ADHD and only medication corrects that.

Did it occur to your doctors to increase the dosage? My 11 year old has been on 40mg since she was 7. She is an itty bitty thing. I can assure you whether I take 5mg or 60mg, I will not be hungry at lunch time. Actually it seems like a lower does makes me less hungry, go figure.

I don't understand specifically what you are looking for. My two oldest are of average weight, one is 6'1 male, 24 years old, the other 5'8 female, 22 years old, both were on stimulant meds since kindergarten. It does not effect their growth! Clearly it doesn't, they are tall people!! Sure they didn't eat lunch but for breakfast and dinner they ate like truck drivers!!

I guess I get the feeling you have got a lot of misinformation and bad advice from your doctors. Any doctor my kids have ever seen say big breakfast, big dinner, just accept lunch isn't going to be their thing. I wonder why you were not told that.

So far as diet goes there is a reason I flip a nut when people suggest that, no diet on earth can correct a chemical imbalance of the brain!! To me it feels like the if you tried hard enough comments. No sorry, I have a disorder, it is said to be a disability, it is not driven by what I eat or my level of self discipline!

I am very healthy, I am so structured people refer to me as Monk, but I still have ADHD and without my meds work is 20 levels of hell.

I am not sure what you want us to tell you, hopefully it is in my rambling somewhere. I do not take my meds on weekends, only when I am at work. If you want proof they work look at my posts on meds and something like this. Completely different! The meds work, they are a good thing. If adderall worked for you get him back on them, increase the dose because I can't imagine 10mg did squat for an 11 year old boy when my 11 year old girl needs 40mg to function. Start feeding him a good breakfast, I mean cram some serious nutrients in there, then give him his meds. Pack him a snack for lunch so he doesn't feel like a freak sitting there with nothing in front of him at lunch, them make him a good dinner!

The thing that is so frustrating about ADHD is it is real but no one can see it. That forces you to question whether it is there or not, is this behavior that or not. I know very well because my 13 year old has autism spectrum! I know what is ADHD or not because I have it but autism! lord that was a new learning curve.
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Sorry but Cheerful M is wrong, if you remove dyes from a diet you NEVER had ADHD you had a reaction to the dyes! If foods caused it then you had a food allergy that mirrored ADHD symptoms!!

I eat healthy as do my kids. We have no junk food in this house, no dyes, nothing! We still have ADHD because we have ADHD not something that mirrors it! Foods and dyes do not cause a chemical imbalance in your brain!

I am sorry if I seem very frustrated by comments like that but if you have lived 44 years with ADHD they are just downright stupid comments! This is not directed at Cheerful M's comment specifically but I have found the people who claim you can't cure homosexuality (which I agree with) are the same people who claim they can cure ADHD. Why is that? Wouldn't people find the comment well I removed soda from my son's diet and he isn't gay anymore, offensive? How about if they followed it up with if you just take soda away all gays would be cured? Well it is the same thing.

Saying a diet will cure me is offensive!

My Best friends sister has a son with ADHD. Her ex husband was convinced that it was diet(gave me a list of NONO foods), and permissive behaviour. Even with the spartan tasteless diet and strict discipline, the misadventures continued(I often babysat her young son). I convinced her to go have her son evaluated. They referred her to a specialist, who diagnosed him with ADHD. They put him on the lowest dose of Risperidol, and the difference is night and day.

When his father refused to give him the medicine(stating that it wasn't needed), he had his eyes opened. The behaviour he attributed to diet and lack of discipline was clearly shown to be a true issue that couldn't be punished or dieted away. For the first time ever, that Man apologised to his Ex.

I have a strong allergy to certain groups of antibiotics. Cows given RBGH/RBST develop Mastitis, which is treated with antibiotics. Cows are put back on the milk line as soon as they can give milk, and not when they're clear of the medicine. If I get this milk, I have allergic responses and migraines, hives and lactose intolerance symptoms. I was diagnosed with several dairy related allergies and lactose intolerance. They treated me with all the normal things you take for lactose intolerance and the like, acidophilus tablets, probiotic yogurt, etc.

It was NOT Lactose intolerance though. It is an allergen response to additives in the milk. It took me years and thousands of dollars wasted before a talented Allergy specialist found the culprit. He gave me an allergen response test for the antibiotics they treat mastitis in cows with, which instantly showed up. What I do now is read the labels and find milk and dairy with RBGH/RBST free. I drink Milk and eat cheese and yogurt(I especially advocate yogurt when sick to help keep your bodies natural bacteria present during treatment).

Allergies and ADHD are NOT one and the same. If diet works for you, I recommend taking your child to an allergist to do an allergen response test.

It's like back in the day when they tried to link vaccines to Autism. It's been proven a myth, and the doctor had his license revoked for causing the mass panic that had left many kids vulnerable to illnesses like Pertussis and Rubella. People are still convinced that vaccines are evil, and will harm their child. I implore you; do your research at the Universities and Libraries, not the internet though, but research it for your own peace of mind and the truth.

BTW, ask your doctor to slightly raise the dose of his current medicine, to see if maybe his growing body needs to have it adjusted for his age/weight. I know my brother, who has a seizure disorder, had to have his adjusted a few times when he got older and gained a bit of weight/height.

Sorry for the rant-o-rama Mamas!

Hope this helps even a little bit.

My son has inattentive type. He is 12 years old, 4'9" and 77 pounds.

He takes Adderall XR (15mg) only on school days, and the occasional time when he is in a crowd and his concentration is required. For the most part, he is unmedicated on weekends and summers.

He is 12 years old, 4'9" and 77 pounds.

He had been taking 10mg awhile back, but a bigger body means more medication needed. Did your son's doctor(s) tell you to stop his medication? It sounds like he simply needed an adjustment.

My son has a 'meds check' visit every 6 months to track his growth and make sure things are going well. If your son's doctor hasn't been doing this, they are unqualified to treat ADHD.

He has also been in OT and social skills therapy since he was 7. This means learning coping skills for life with and without the medication. Coping does not mean curing, it just means handling situations a little better than if you had no skills at all. This is a brain issue; there is no cure. Diet may help with general health, but it will not cure ADHD. Therapy will help, but it will not cure ADHD.

I agree with what Jo W. has written, she always has great info regarding ADHD because she lives with it.

My daughter was diagnosed with ADD 4years ago. It took a long time to figure out what exactly was going on with her. We ended up taking her to the Mayo Clinic to have her evaluated by many different doctors. We found out she had ADD which was a very different diagnosis then we had gotten locally.

One of your concerns is growth while on medication so I wanted to let you know about my daughter. She is turning 13 in a couple weeks and she is 5'10" so the medications have certainly not affected the way she is growing. Yes, she has always been tall for her age but she has been growing a ton these last couple years while on the medication. The medication does affect her appetite midday and she is thin at 125lbs but she has a normal appetite for breakfast, after school and for dinner. I attribute her thin stature to her being tall and growing so quickly that her weight has a hard time keeping up instead of attributing her weight to her medication. She is also very active in sports so that attributes to her weight as well.

It did take a while to find the right medication to help my daughter and the right dose. We discuss the dosage with our doctor regularly at her appointments although we have not changed the dose in maybe a year and a half. Discuss a change of meds with your doctor, maybe your son was not on the right medication for him to be at his best.

Red dye #40 is a big one that influences attention and often behaviors. If you look for it you'll find it in almost everything!

I do believe that if this is not controllable by other means then medication is the kindest thing one can do. If you have ever been under general anesthesia and went through that experience of waking up while still under the edges of it, you know, in recovery. Where everything was sort of a Fugue, or dissembled when you tried to make sense of it later, that's what it's like to have no ability to make your brain pay attention.

This is not something that can be ordered to stop, it is a brain issue where the brain is not working correctly. Sometimes medication is the only way to correct something. Like a diabetic or someone that has a seizure disorder. They cannot make themselves not have that illness, only medication makes it livable.

So if nothing else totally stops the issue then you find a med that does work, it is a needed thing and not a choice.

When I was 10 (I’m 31 now) I was diagnosed (by a slew of psychologists, not a family doctor) with ADD. Back then you could just call it ADD, now I think they call it ADHD without hyperactivity. My parents were very wary of such diagnoses, and they were adamant that I receive no medication (Ritalin was recommended). I received help at school with math, since that was/is my worst subject. I also got counseling for a little while, (from a child Psychologist and then a school counselor) I was diagnosed with depression as well. I don’t think that the counseling was effective at all, I also saw a counselor as a teenager for a short time but in every case I was very carefully polite and basically lied about how I was feeling, what I felt like I needed, etc. because I wanted to prove I was not crazy. I never told a counselor anything other than fluff or fiction. My academic problem continued and even got worse. I was pretty much incapable of organization so even in subjects where I was actually pretty smart I ended up with poor grades. One teacher thought I must be cheating when my test scores always came in high (A’s and high B’s) because my daily work and homework were always poor and usually incomplete. I dropped out of school after 9th grade and “homeschooled” which in my case was a euphemism for helping around the house, getting a job, and reading whatever I liked in my spare time. I studied a book about the GED test and when I was 18 I took a GED prep class for a couple of weeks and I was able to pass the GED, it was not hard except for the math section, I have always done well on tests. As an adult I decided to go back to school and I have done very well, I think that in some ways I have “outgrown” ADD, although I have really bad days where I feel like I am wading through Jell-O just to remember basic things or focus on reading a textbook. I have earned an Associate’s degree and I am working on a Baccalaureates’ degree in English Literature. Without the help of my husband, I doubt that I could have done it; he is my best friend and by far my best tutor! I also sought help from study groups for math and Biology. I still wonder sometimes if I could benefit from Ritalin or Adderall. I have terrible memory sometimes and I forget to do important things or I procrastinate because I have a hard time estimating how much time a particular task will take. But now I am too afraid to even see a doctor about ADD; I am afraid he will say the same thing that all my teachers used to say, that the only thing wrong with me is that I am lazy and don’t work hard enough. I also worry about the cost of medication, even though I have insurance. I am not planning to have more children so theoretically I don’t need to worry about how the meds would affect a fetus, but there is always the possibility I could get pregnant unintentionally and then I fear that the meds would harm my baby and I could never forgive myself. So the question of whether or not to medicate is still complicated.

My son has ADD, My son also has celiac disease, he cannot eat anything that contains gluten - We noticed a huge improvement in his ADD symptoms after he went on the gluten free diet. Even the teachers mentioned that they noticed a big difference.

I am not saying that gluten free cured his ADD, I am saying it improved his symptoms.

My 13 year old was diagnosed with ADHD Inattentive. She started 15 mg of Adderall. Honestly, I did not see a big difference initially. She may have been able to focus a little better in class. Her grades came up. Her confidence came up. Behavior not perfect, but definitely better. She still has a lot of bad organizational habits. BUT we went from 11 missing assignments last year 4th quarter to ZERO missing assignments 1st quarter this year! And all teacher comments have improved significantly. She started Adderall in August so I could monitor side effects before school started. The first week her appetite dropped a lot. And she had some trouble sleeping. BUT she seemed to adjust and the side effects lessened. Just this month we upped her to 20 mg, and I'm giving it to her a little later in the morning, as I was concerned it wasn't a large enough dose to help her in the afternoon classes. On the first day of the new dose she told me after school she noticed that reading was much easier at school. She was actually able to finish the assigned reading in class and REMEMBER what she read afterwards while working on the study questions. This is a major breakhthrough for her, and I'm convinced the Adderall is key to helping her focus. She still gets bored easily, has little patience for waiting, and is sometimes quick to anger, but that was the same before the meds, I don't see any difference in her personality on Adderall. Also, we're focusing on rewarding her for effort and good grades, and not threatening consequences for bad grades. She's a much happier kid now this year. I've learned to accept there are things that will always be hard for her, it is OK. I work on my control issues too. I don't check her grades online every single day and ask her constantly about this quiz or that project. This past month she switched her diet to vegan, and we've eaten much less processed foods. Her mood has been better. I think that helps as well, but I'm constantly making sure she has enough protein and gets a good breakfast and enough sleep.

Jo W. I love your post!! :)

I would look into dietary changes.

I have ADD symptoms ONLY if I eat one of the foods I'm intolerant to. My mind races, I can't concentrate, I can't sit still. I feel like I'm going to jump out of my skin!

Once those offending foods were removed from my diet, I am FINE. So don't underestimate dietary changes. I actually cried after the offending foods were removed. I was thinking "Wow, this is what it feels like to be normal."

I removed artificial dyes from my daughter's diet and her symptoms disappeared too. She went from jumping up every few minutes and not being able to sit still to being "normal" (if there is such a thing!) We pulled her from public school after first grade because of possible ADHD. Turns out it was only food issues. We are loving homeschooling so we will continue, but anyone who tells you it takes medication to fix it doesn't know the whole story. For my daughter, it was a reaction to red #40.

Good luck!

My daughter is border line ADD and no meds ever. I put her in a montissorri where she wont get in trouble for fidgeting and worked on her learning to control certain behavoirs and actively knowing what she can eat or not eat. Focusing is more of a challenge these days. Kids learn as they get older to shake there foot or mush a stress ball in there hands to keep them busy. And in a montissorri you child can have a mush ball in her hands to keep going to so she can focus and not fidget so bad as to distract anyone. Saying that I have to Point out
that its 6 grade and many kids not just those with ADD or ADHD find it overwhelming. Many are not on task and have a hard time getting allt he work done and done right. Its a huge change and most highschools will not look at 6 grade mostly because of this. Your child has to deal with the add on top of it. He is old enough to start learning his cues to help lesson the symptoms. I'm not a doc but have you tried weining him off them. I'm sure by now he has gotten a high tolerance to meds if he has been on them for a long time.