It’s 8.35am. You’ve asked your child to put their shoes on six times (possibly seven), the homework book that’s due in school today has vanished, and your child is lying upside down on the sofa as you’re trying to get him out of the front door.
You get to the school gate late, sweaty and shouty, and on the walk home you find yourself wondering if this is just what kids are like, or whether it’s ADHD.
What ADHD can look like
The name ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) is misleading. Not a single letter of it is quite right. The attention isn’t always in deficit; sometimes it’s abundant (hyperfocus is, after all, a central feature). Basically, it’s all or nothing. And the hyperactivity is as much in the head as in the body.
Every ADHDer has a racing brain, thoughts ping-ponging from one to the next, whether or not they’re bouncing off the sofa. In girls especially, any physical hyperactivity can be quieter and easy to miss: doodling, twiddling their hair.
Signs to look out for include a child who is a chatterbox and can’t wait their turn to speak, who never remembers to bring their homework book in on a Tuesday, and for whom tidying their room is like starting World War Three. They may have no focus at all for the things that bore them, but endless focus for the things they love.
When they were little, they may have been a regular in the school accident book. They often have big emotional reactions, make friends easily but struggle to keep them, and take criticism really hard.
Or your child may be the dreamy one, who zones out and seems to be somewhere else entirely even when they’re sitting right next to you. This is inattentive ADHD, and it’s the type most likely to be missed, especially in girls.
Your child won’t tick every box. Everyone is distractible and disorganised sometimes. What matters is the extent of it, and how much it affects their life compared with other children their age.
If this sounds familiar, here is a plan of what to do.
Don’t wait
If your child had a sore knee that wouldn’t go away, you wouldn’t spend years wondering whether to get it looked at, and wait until they were hobbling before you saw a doctor. It’s the same with ADHD. Deciding whether your child has it is the doctor’s job, not yours, and the answer may be no.
Your job is to get someone qualified to decide either way, and the sooner the better, because the queue is long and children who wait too long can see a dip in their self-esteem and school can be harder than it needs to be. In June 2026, there were around 737,000 young people in England on a waiting list for an ADHD assessment.
On the NHS, children’s ADHD assessments are usually overseen by Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (Camhs). The referral can come from your GP or from your child’s school, usually via the school’s special educational needs coordinator (SENCo).
Whoever you ask, go armed with examples: how long your child can focus on something that bores them compared with something they love, what happens before and after a movement break, and what follows when they’re asked to pack their bag. Ask if a Camhs caseworker can support your family and talk to the school about support while you wait. And don’t be fobbed off by a local policy of “not before eight”. NICE says children can be assessed from four.
You can also ask your GP about Right to Choose, which lets you use a private provider with the NHS paying, though some areas have capped or paused it to save money. Paying privately is quickest, but with ADHD there’s a catch. A private assessment usually means paying for any medication privately too, unless your GP agrees to take over the prescribing under what’s called a shared care agreement. Not all GPs will, so check before you book. If yours won’t, you can move to one that will.
How to talk to the school
Start by comparing notes with the class teacher. Don’t be thrown if they say everything’s fine, because lots of ADHD children hold it together all day and then fall apart the minute they get home. Understanding of inattentive ADHD is also very poor and is commonly missed by teachers.
If your child is struggling or unhappy at school, ask whether they can be put on the SEN Support register (and if they are struggling a lot, discuss whether they need an EHCP). Sen Support is the first level of support; EHCPs the second. Either way, the school should plan extra help for your child, and you should meet at least three times a year to see how it’s going and set targets.
Small changes can make a big difference. ADHD children need to move to focus, so ask about movement breaks every 15 or 20 minutes (even a two-minute dance break for the whole class helps). Ask for fidgets, which should more accurately be called focus aids. Work should be broken into chunks, with instructions given one at a time, and even better shown visually too.
A standing desk and a visual timer can all help. And a teacher who says “you zoned out, that’s fine, we all do” instead of telling them off is worth their weight in gold. If your child is an ADHDer and keeps getting detentions for forgetting their PE kit, point out that forgetfulness is part of their brain type. Under the Equality Act, they shouldn’t be punished for it.
After meetings, email to confirm what support has been agreed with school. Then try not to email every day. As a wise friend once told me, if every email is urgent, none of them will be.
What to do while you wait for a diagnosis
Become a detective. What helps your child focus? An audiobook, music, doing homework standing up, a fidget, you being in the room or five minutes of work followed by 10 star jumps? (You’ll become one of Amazon’s most active customers before you find the right fidget.)
Having someone else is in the room, just keeping them company rather than joining in, while doing their work is known as body doubling, and lots of ADHDers swear by it to get stuff done. Notice when their energy peaks and crashes, and what tips them from bouncy into overwhelmed. Write it all down. Helpful for the person assessing your child, and it shows you what to do more of.
Be aware that ADHD children can seem confident when really they’re struggling. My younger son came across as the most confident child in North London, a chatty, joke-cracking charmer. Really, he was masking and had anxiety at school. When a caseworker first suggested this, I resisted the idea for a year or two. She was right.
Learn about rejection sensitivity, the intense pain lots of ADHDers feel at criticism or disapproval, real or imagined. Something as small as a tone of voice or a sigh can set it off. Explain it to your child – tell them it’s intensely horrible, but it will pass. They’ve managed to overcome it before, and they will do it again. And when your child is in the grips of it, help them distract themselves: watch their favourite TV program with them.
Think about energy as well as behaviour. An ADHD brain is exhausting to run, and ADHD is often about energy highs and lows, not a Duracell bunny who never stops. Let your child decompress after school, don’t fill the diary, and if sleep is a battle, ask your GP about melatonin. And be their cheerleader. It’s you, your child and the school vs the problem, not you and the school versus your child.
One last (but crucial) thing
Nigel Farage et al are wrong. ADHD is not overdiagnosed, and it isn’t down to screens (though ADHD brains with their unreliable dopamine are even more intensely drawn to them) sugar or bad parenting. NICE puts the proportion of children with ADHD at about five per cent, yet only around two per cent of under-18s in England have a diagnosis. If anything, we have an underdiagnosis crisis.
I let that noise get into my head, and it delayed things for my sons, which I regret. Finding out whether your child has ADHD gives them the information they need to understand themselves, rather than spending years believing they’re lazy, naughty or too much.
Jessie Hewitson is the director of ThriveND, a company that supports parents of neurodivergent young people. She is also the author of ADHD, How to Raise a Happy ADHD Child and Autism, How to Raise a Happy Autistic Child.
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