As Children’s ADHD Diagnoses Rise, Parents Discover They Have It, Too

When her son Jake was diagnosed with ADHD at age 11, it didn’t occur to Cary Colleran that she may have the condition as well. It didn’t occur to her that the appointments she forgot, the permission slips left on the kitchen table, the misremembered dates of field trips might be anything other than a symptom of her personality. She’s disorganized. That’s all.

It still didn’t occur to her when Jake began taking medication to manage his ADHD — and she noticed that he wasn’t getting stuck in the ways he used to. It didn’t click when Colleran remembered how stuck and incapable she felt when she was young. She was simply relieved her son was succeeding in ways she hadn’t.

It only occurred to her eight years after Jake was diagnosed.

Colleran, then 45, was on the phone with her son’s doctor. Jake wasn’t doing well in college; he stopped taking his medication, forgot to attend mandatory events and sat in the wrong class for six weeks. Colleran began to joke that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. The doctor didn’t miss a beat: “He was like, ‘Well, you know, sometimes when the parent has ADHD, the kid does, too,’ ” Colleran said. “That’s when the aha moment hit.”

With an increase in children being diagnosed with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder in recent years, parents who grew up in a time when receiving such a diagnosis was rare are starting to understand that perhaps they, too, have it. That years of struggling to focus on schoolwork, being told they weren’t living up to their potential, getting bored at jobs or losing track of things might be more than a personality trait.

They were feeling inadequate because, despite their best efforts, they didn’t get the results they wanted.

For many parents, their own ADHD diagnosis journey begins when they bring their children to the pediatrician, because things aren’t adding up. They think: My child is smart, but he can’t complete his work. She keeps getting in trouble for daydreaming instead of working. He speaks out in the middle of class and says he doesn’t know why. She studies for hours and hours and still fails.

Jeremy Didier, a 51-year-old ADHD counselor, said her symptoms presented as spontaneity. It wasn’t until her third child, Isaac, seemed different, that things began making sense. “I was reading the symptoms, and I was like, ‘Oh, wow, okay, that’s me,’ ” Didier said. “Talking to my husband, he was like, ‘Oh, yeah, that’s you.’ I went into our doctor and he was like, ‘Oh, yeah. That’s you.’ ”

“She’s always been very spontaneous,” said Bryan Didier, Jeremy’s husband and one of just two members of the Didier clan without ADHD. “Her having ADHD is probably something I always kind of knew. She’s been in sales and before that broadcast journalism. I think she found ways to survive and thrive and used her competitive advantage from ADHD.”

Getting an ADHD diagnosis meant Jeremy finally had an answer. “I look forward to the day when it’s standard practice that when the kid is diagnosed with ADHD, the whole family is just evaluated,” she said.

“I’m embarrassed and ashamed to admit that I didn’t believe that ADHD was real until I had a child with ADHD, and then it was so obvious,” she said. “I just couldn’t deny it. … I was able to do my own research and say, ‘Oh my gosh, not only is this real, I might have it, too.’ ”

Excerpted from “As Children’s ADHD Diagnoses Rise, Parents Discover They Have It, Too” in The Washington Post. Read the full article online for additional details.

Source: Washington Post | As Children’s ADHD Diagnoses Rise, Parents Discover They Have It, Too, https://www.washingtonpost.com/parenting/2022/08/01/adhd-parent-and-child | © 2022 The Washington Post

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