Over the years we have wondered whether or not medication was the right choice for JP.  As we started on the diagnosis at quite young age, we were hesitant to jump into medication.  Although I have seen many students on medication over the years and know first hand what a significant difference it can make for a child at school, as a parent this was a lot tougher decision than I thought it would be.

First of all we decided that we wanted to try behavioural strategies and parenting sessions first to see if that would make a difference (more info on that in an upcoming ‘Musings’ posts).  We also worked with the school to develop a behaviour plan to see if that would help and were hopeful it would.  The strategies would work for a short time, but nothing was sustainable and we didn’t see any changes over time.  Around this time we were going through the diagnosis process with Woman’s and Children’s Hospital and they encouraged us to have a psycho-educational assessment to determine if there was something else going on (more on that in another post).

The main question we had was how do you know when medication is the right choice for a 5 year old?  For us it all came down to safety.  We had safety concerns at both school and home (including leaving home without permission and going to the park; riding his bike blocks away from home; running across the street; Spider-Man like climbing up trees, buildings, rails and anything climbable; jumping from table to table and standing on chair backs at school; walking away from school to go home mid-day and the list goes on).  The safety concerns were not improving and it was apparent JP needed more help to make safer choices or we were going to have an even bigger issue on our hands.

On the recommendation of our psychiatrist, we went to a parent information session at Woman’s and Children’s Hospital (ADHD Education Day for Parents by the Provincial ADHD Clinic Recording of Parent Education Day).  It was an extremely informative day for us and helped us have a deeper understanding of ADHD, what it is, what it isn’t and why medication might be a good option for children and adults with ADHD.  To this point I knew that medication helped children, but we weren’t quite ready to start with JP.  I didn’t really understand how it worked and was always a bit confused about why a stimulant medication would be given to a child who was already overstimulated!  The doctors discussed many things that day, but for me, having some clarity about what ADHD actually does in the brain and why the medication helps, if it is the right diagnosis, was the key take-away and helped us make a decision on where to go next.

The clearest explanation I heard that day was that children with ADHD live in the ‘Do’ part of the brain (the front part of the brain) and the neurotransmitters that connect the ‘Do’ part of the brain with the ‘Know’ part of the brain (the back of the brain) are too slow.  Therefore no matter how many times we teach kids skills and strategies or safety rules, they can’t access what they ‘know’ before they ‘do’.  The stimulant medication speeds up the neurotransmitters so the message between the ‘Know’ and the ‘Do’ is more timely.  This made complete sense to me.  I always wondered why JP and other students in my school could tell you every strategy and reason why he should or should not do something, but could not access that information in the moment.  For us, this was the deciding factor.  He needed to be safe, he had the strategies and the skills because we worked so hard to teach them, but he couldn’t access them on time, so he needed medication to help.  Once we made that decision, the medication trials began!