How to talk to teen about possible adhd?

[Anonymous]

Hello. I’ve begun to strongly suspect that my teen my have adhd. I’ve observed enough symptoms and spouse agrees that the right thing to do is at least talk to our family doctor and take it from there. My question is, what do I say to my teen? She will be attending the appointment, obviously I want to discus. It with her in advance but I don’t want to concern her, confuse her, etc.

Do I just say that I think we should see dr x about the a, b, c that she has been experiencing?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Hello. I’ve begun to strongly suspect that my teen my have adhd. I’ve observed enough symptoms and spouse agrees that the right thing to do is at least talk to our family doctor and take it from there. My question is, what do I say to my teen? She will be attending the appointment, obviously I want to discus. It with her in advance but I don’t want to concern her, confuse her, etc.

Do I just say that I think we should see dr x about the a, b, c that she has been experiencing?

She's a teen and she can understand what's going on. Tell her she can on Yotube to check on some of the videos about ADHD. how does she fell about it? She since a teen I would be straight up with her.

[Anonymous]

Thank you, I appreciate your idea. I think you’re probably right. I just worry about putting the idea in her head if it turns out that I’m wrong. . . .

[Anonymous]

What I said to my 11 year old is, We have noticed you have had some trouble focusing, have you? We know you try hard, we know you are very bright, and we are wondering if there is something that is making it hard for you to focus. We'd like to talk to some experts who specialize in this and other kinds of challenges. We'd like to do some tests to help us understand your strengths and weaknesses . Depending on what we find out, we may see that there are ways to make studying/focusing at school a bit easier for you.

He immediately acknowledged the focus issue and was on board right away.

We personally skipped the ped/family doctor step. Any responsible doctor should refer you, not diagnose or dismiss concerns. And you don't need a referral. A ped can diagnose, of course, but it is not the most thorough way to go about this. My point is, there are a number of issues that can cause ADHD like symptoms and the best way to know what you are looking at is to do psycho-educational or neuropsych testing. Diagnosing is not an exact science but those would be the gold standards. Otherwise you run the risk of missing the real issue, over-diagnosing, under-diagnosing.

[Anonymous]

Don't mention ADHD, just talk about the symptoms you see and ask her if she agrees with those being issues. Say it is worth talking to the doctor to have those assesses to see that they think.

She is going to know that she struggles to make and keep friends, that she has thinking processes / perspective taking that is not on par with her peers, that she is often missing what is going on around her.

As other posters said - it could be a range of things - don't armchair diagnose her.

[Anonymous]

Wonderful ideas here. Thank you so much.

I don’t know why I didn’t think about it that wY myself!