When my daughter was being evaluated to determine if she had ADD, the psychiatrist asked me if I had ever noticed, when I was talking with my daughter, maybe even asking her a question, that she appeared to have not heard me, despite the fact that she was looking right at me and could obviously hear my words.  As it turns out, what I thought was her being willful and rude was actually another symptom of her Inattentive Type ADD.

After her diagnosis, I found myself spending a lot of time where I find myself right now:  on the computer.  By reading information from a number of websites, I found that those who have Inattentive Type ADD are often never diagnosed!  The reason makes a lot of sense.  Kids with ADD who have the Hyperactive Type are easy to find in a classroom; they may have trouble sitting still or not talking when the teacher is in the middle of a lesson. 

In contrast to these children who become energized by stimulating situations, kids with a diagnosis of Inattentive Type ADD become overwhelmed by them.  To make this even more of a challenge, they also share the other ADD problems of having difficulty tracking details, keeping focused on conversations or trains of thought, and staying organized.  Some articles referred to the term "passive daydreamers."  They appear to be listening, to be looking right at you, but their mind has wandered off.  How could I expect my child to do well in school if this is what her brain was "doing to her?!!" 

I spoke with my daughter's guidance counselor about her diagnosis, and asked her to relay to my daughter's teachers the need for some additional support from them.  As her grades declined from A's to B's, I could accept that middle school was more challenging than elementary school - that's obvious.  I am realistic in my expectations; she doesn't need to have straight A's.  But when I check her grades online and see that she gets 105% on her test and 0%'s for homework, and is therefore getting a C on her report card, something is amiss!  Never was I so dismayed and concerned about her teachers' lack of understanding as the day a teacher told me "We have students getting D's and F's; we can't spend time on the ones getting C's."

Realistically, I am not yet sure how this "high school thing" will go.  I emailed her new guidance counselor the week before school began, but I have not yet gotten a response.  Meet-The-Teacher Night is coming up soon.  The current plan invovles my daughter writing her homework down in her assignment book which I check each night.  Of course, when I checked it today, there was nothing written for last Thursday.  The result of this error was Speech Number Eleven:  "Why You Must Fill Out Your Homework Assignment Notebook Every Day."  And while that particular speech lasts about three minutes in "real time," the Mary Poppins version is "Well begun is half done." 

It is difficult to strike the balance.   I struggle with knowing which is worse, allowing my daughter to fail or negatively impacting our relationship (and my SANITY!) because what we spend most of our time "saying" to each other is what sounds  like "nagging."  It is very hard to know when that Inattentive Type diagnosis ends and that fourteen year old begins.  I guess it is also going to require teaching some teachers, too.  I really think they need to be on my "team," as we tackle this together!