Spencer & ADHD

Spencer was diagnosed with ADHD on Monday.  I wasn't surprised, and I'm not hung up on the label.  It will help him to get the services he needs and help us learn how to parent him better.  I'm reading up on it now and just came across this on Dr. Sears' website.  It's as though I could have written it about Spencer.

Johnny, 8 years old, seemed to hear the first instruction given by the teacher but often missed the next two. He had an excellent memory for things that interested him, like baseball players' names, or the exact words of a television commercial, but seemed completely unable to learn his multiplication tables. Sometimes he had trouble getting started on his schoolwork. Once started, he would abandon it long before it was completed to sharpen a pencil, start on something else, or just sit and play. This seeming inability to attend to an assigned task for any reasonable length of time was quite confusing to his parents, as they had observed time and again how Johnny could play for hours with his building set or video games. Yet it was a struggle to get him out the door for school each morning because he was easily sidetracked. His mother would find him still in his pajamas and sprawled on his bed with a hand-held video game 15 minutes after he had been sent upstairs to brush his teeth and get dressed.
His report card said, "More effort needed." His parents felt he was fooling around at school and tried taking privileges away to punish him. Johnny had been examined by the family doctor and tested by a special education teacher and neither one found a problem with his attention span in these one-on-one situations. His parents felt Johnny was the brightest of their four children by far, but he was failing the third grade! "He's just so creative." they said. From nowhere he comes out with these fantastic ideas! When he gets into inventing something, his energy seems endless, but he won't stick to any of his school assignments unless we really sit on him. When he's working on something that is not his own creation, he is a real scatterbrain. He irritates his teacher because he says the first thing that comes into his mind. He jumps from one idea to the next. He just doesn't think things through."