Fwiw not that anecdote is particularly helpful, but I had such severe ADHD as a kid that my parents couldnt even take me to public places, I had to be on adderall through high school or my grades would immediately plummet, etc. And everything is now more than fine.In post 10, Kublai Khan wrote:My oldest kid got diagnosed with ADD today. I love my wife, but she shared this news with me by trying to repeat as much as she could remember from the psychologist. Including stuff like statistically he's going to have a shorter lifespan, be more likely to land in jail, get addicted to drugs, less likely to finish college or possibly high school, etc.. I think she meant it as just background information, but i'm fucking reeling. We had discussed the possibility (hence why we got him evaluated), but I was kinda in denial of the possibility. I teach kids with behaviors way more extreme and my kid didn't seem to be anything like that.
I guess we'll start medication and go from there. It's just the first real roadblock in his life. It just really hurts knowing that he's going to struggle not just with one thing but many potential things and I feel helpless. He just seems so vulnerable and all I can do is hope that maybe the right medication will help. I hate trusting a doctor I haven't even met yet with the wellbeing and future of my kid. I hate trusting the field of psychology because it's always seemed to me to be one of the most inexact of sciences. Because it depends on personal physiology and brain chemistry and we don't seem to have that super understood yet. Just ends up being a lot of guesswork. I know I'm being unfair but this is just becoming stream of consciousness at this point.
Anyways. That's my venting for this evening.
The majority of people with ADD don't even progress to having ADD in adulthood. Yeah it's definitely a hurdle but it doesn't at all even mean your child will have a flip of a coin chance of it lasting his lifetime / having long term impact. And at least I learned in school that ADD and jailtime/amoral behavior are completely absolutely different (conduct disorder is associated with increased jailtime with ADD not being at all).
I'm sorry you got a floodgate of scary info from your wife but A) it really isn't as bad as that all makes it seem and B) you're not helpless, you being a good parent will get your kid where they need to go, coming from a guy who had ADD and good parents who gave me the tools I needed to get through it