ADHD, more common in boys?

Parents Forum
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I work in a small general ed public school with small classes. After working in a special education field for many years (still working) I can also spot children with various diagnoses very easily.

I am in every classroom all week long, as is our school psychologist, behaviorist, occupational therapist, and special education teachers. We see everything that goes on, and we collaborate weekly (daily when needed). Our OT does weekly lessons in every class. This time is built into our schedules. If we need more time, we get more time.

We have flexible seating for all students, and provide movement breaks, etc as needed.

When there is a child with a problem, it doesn’t have to be brought to our attention. We know about it at the same time as the teacher. Our district acts on these issues immediately, referring (and paying for) all necessary evaluations- neuropsych etc. We do, however, give kids a chance to settle in before referring (we keep a close eye on them). There are kids who simply need time to adjust.

We always work collaboratively with physicians, outside evaluators etc. It is not uncommon for these individuals to come to our school for a few days to observe. We always follow all accommodations as do the teachers.

Boys make up most of my caseload. This has been true for my entire career (many different settings). In my observation, girls are less likely to have the H.

This post saddens me, as it brings to light the inequities we have regarding education.

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So Adhd is usually not a singular issue. Many will have some LD with it. Slow processing is one. We went private and were fortunate to have neuropsych educational tests provided. The schools over all don’t have the resources. I call this test the $5,000 evaluation. This was over 10 years ago. I realize many can’t pay for it. The person was booked out at least 6 months back then.

My point is there are usually other things associated with it and other medical conditions that the teacher or medical professional like a pediatrician will point to but it’s not Adhd. Through developmental optometry my kids stopped skipping lines reading. My daughter’s issue with transferring things from the board to paper improved. In 2 weeks her handwriting went from extremely messy to just about perfect. With biofeedback she became organized and the whole Executive functioning issue went away. She was never 100% diagnosed with Adhd but it runs rampant in my family. I know the struggles since I lived it.

Also many high intelligent kids have slow processing and yes brain immaturity and it takes several years for this to catch up. Some are socially ackward and associated with Adhd and wrongly diagnosed.

It’s funny but I can spot someone with Adhd easily… Lol. Maybe it takes one to know one so I can see a well educated teacher etc being able to see this as well and refer for a more professional evaluation. But also if a teacher suspects this or something else what is wrong with giving even pseudo accommodations to help the child. It always bugged me that you need an outside source to tell you if someone needs to sit closer, or needs some extra time to answer a question and not be penalized for not being active in class by raising your hand. We try to fit all these kids in the same box and there are many types of learners. Schools have to do a better job of trying to have kids that learn differently, adjust to that. I realize with decreased resources this is very difficult.

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The K-8 public school in our district is known for mainstreaming kids, and families move there for that. It’s a small-ish community school, and this feels consistent with who we are as a community.

With that said, the school’s testing almost always comes up with something they can deal with in the school, rather than referring out to someone who will need to be paid. It’s not unheard of for the Dx to be wrong so that the services can be provided locally. This can be really maddening, and I feel for these families because it is so frustrating for them to be advocating for their kids against a seemingly intractable system.

At the same time, when you look at the school budget, it is dismaying to see what a disproportionate part of the dollars go to these programs that frustrate those being served by them rather than to the general education budget. ANd it’s frustrating to hear that there is no money for music/STEM, etc.

Nobody’s the winner until we have good solutions for all kids. We really need everyone to develop their full potential. This is also how a compliant kid with ADHD (no H apparent) just flies under the radar.

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In our school district, a gargantuan part of the budget goes to special ed services. People move to our district for that reason. All the testing my son had, even when at the private school, was paid for by the district.

My friend is a HS principal in a nearby district. He says the numbers of students needing special ed services has increased by something like 30% in the last five years or so.

It’s very clear that there should not be a “one size fits all” approach to teaching. Obviously everyone has different learning styles. It is impossible for every student to be taught individually and this is a very challenging time to be an educator. Educators are undervalued, underpaid and overworked.

I think a reason why boys are so overrepresented, as noted by @twogirls , is partly due to basic societal expectations. Girls are expected to be quiet and compliant, and boys are not. Therefore, they are noticed more often when things are going wrong for them. I don’t think there is a big mystery about it.

I know several girls with ADD, or ADHD. In my work, it seems there are more girls than there used to be.

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I hear ya. For my daughter to keep her IEP we had to get her evaluated from our local public school evaluator. Ugh! She grossly misdiagnosed her even with us giving her “years” of LD teacher report, neuropsych tests etc. She wanted her to go to a “special” school since we had money. She basically told us that. We had her fired since we felt she was referring to this known school and getting a kick back. They replaced her with a lovely person that actually helped my child. That is the very short story but yes, the whole process needs to be improved. I don’t want to go down this rabbit hole but do we really need multiple testings for extra time. To be fair give it to everyone. If you don’t need it then your done and go to the gym and run around or something. But many kids truly need it for various reason but the poor kids are made to be some loser freak for asking for it. The stigma and self worth these kids go through… I won’t start with the parents… :roll_eyes::joy:

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A quick google search shows that there is data showing girls outperform boys in Japan.

In Japan, there are ample evidences that girls are outperforming boys in education at both secondary and higher secondary level . Morita et al. (2016) asserted that academic performance and achievement in education is constantly high among female students in Japan

Did not do exhaustive research, but may not be true that girls do not outperform boys in other countries.

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Oh I never claimed that girls did not generally outperform boys in school. Just that there does not appear to be a gender gap in college attendance in some countries, the way we have here. Somehow an equal number of boys are kept engaged in the academic system and on track in certain other countries.

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When a smaller percentage of teenagers end up in university it is MUCH easier to create gender parity.

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About 1/3 attend university in Germany, and no, they do not provide a gender hook for males, so it is likely there are other issues at work.

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Yes, the other issue being weeding out at an early age.

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That really has changed. There are multiple opportunities to shift back and forth betwen tracks now, my German friends advise.

Of course, high school is actually rigorous there, unlike most of the US, so only those ready for that then are on that track. But it is possible to access higher ed later if one’s interests or focus change to a more academic nature after age 18

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I never considered private school as our public school options were excellent. I am fortunate to live in a city with well-resourced public scools where, frankly, a lot of parents and kids are on the spectrum. Teachers and administrators really work hard to accomodate different learning styles and abilities. For example, our elementary school employs a behavioral analyst, social worker, math and literacy specialists, and a teacher’s assistant in every classroom to work with students in small groups. It’s not uncommon for families to transfer from private to public schools to take advantage of the excellent resources.

I sympathize with those of you who have limited educational options. A supportive school with good teachers can make all the difference. It certainly did for our family.

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I have a kid with ADHD. His first private school was terrible, and it was before he was diagnosed, but there was literally no attempt to do anything for kids that were not 100% compliant 100% of the time. He then spent a year in our very good public, where we did have to have a meeting with the teacher and assistant principal because of his behavior, but that they were willing to assign him to get to run errands to the office or other tasks just to let him burn off a little energy. He was diagnosed in the second semester and his math grade shot up, on an extremely low dose of medication.

I should say that all of our kids have/are going to single sex schools for high school, but what really made the difference to my ADHD kid was an all boys elementary/middle school. It has extensive grounds with chickens and other animals that the kids care for. It has PE every day and extended recess. It has an all male teaching faculty. There is no single school building, but every grade is in a separate house. It is focused on developing the character of the children and so prioritized freedom, because without the freedom to choose whether to do good or not, the ability to choose good is not developed. The boys were encouraged to climb trees, and there were no electronics permitted on campus (and they were strongly discouraged at home). All teaching was with paper books and written on paper and many classes were taught outdoors.

We were incredibly fortunate that we discovered this school, and that we could get in. There were a lot of kids with ADHD here and many of them just flourished there after being branded bad kids at other schools.

Ultimately our public school would have been fine, and private schools varied greatly in how well they worked for us. But it is a unfortunately a luxury to be able to have some of these options.

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Perhaps Germany isn’t quite as balanced as is being portrayed.

  • In almost all OECD countries, women make up the majority of those graduating from general upper secondary education. In Germany, the share is 54% (OECD average 55%). In contrast, men are overrepresented among graduates of vocational upper secondary programmes in most OECD countries, as is the case in Germany where they make up 62% of all vocational upper secondary graduates, above the OECD average (55%).
  • At tertiary level, gender ratios are nearly balanced in Germany with women making up 51% of first- time graduates compared to 55% on average across the OECD. However, with a share of 38% women are underrepresented among graduates of vocational upper-secondary programmes. Gender gaps are much larger within individual fields of study. For example, only 11% of graduates from upper secondary vocational programmes in engineering, manufacturing and construction are women, but 83% in the field of health and welfare.

https://gpseducation.oecd.org/Content/EAGCountryNotes/EAG2022_Germany.pdf

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There are also what are called “twice-exceptional” which means that the kid is both ADHD and academically gifted. The giftedness often hides the learning disability, and the result is a kid who is underperforming, relative to the different tests of their academic abilities. Since many have inattentive type ADHD, they are able to sit and focus (more correctly hyperfocus) when something interests them, so rather than suspecting ADHD, their inability to perform as well as expected is attributed to laziness, lack of “will power”, or similar moral shortcoming.

There are other things that can mask inattentive-type ADHD, such as other mental health issues.

My daughter was only diagnosed with ADHD in college, this having been masked by her academic talents, and her anxiety. Luckily, the accommodations that she had for her anxiety in middle and high school did help her somewhat. However, getting accommodations specifically for her ADHD helped even more, and she did far better in college than in high school, despite it being far more challenging.

Considering the fact that the stereotype for women was being “flighty”, even hyperactive-type ADHD would have been ignored.

My mother almost certainly has ADHD, and both my my nieces have ADHD as well. SO all the women in my family have it, as do most of the women in my wife’s family (and most of the men as well) One of the reasons that my mother didn’t think to test me as a kid was because she had all of the symptoms that I have, and she never had any reason to consider that they were not “normal”.

The men in my and my wife’s immediate family generally have hyperactive-type (except for me), while the women have inattentive-type ADHD. Had my daughter and her cousins been growing up in an earlier time, they likely wouldn’t have been diagnosed.

They almost certainly are are (that was the case for me), but historically, a lot more attention was paid to the academic success of boys than of girls. So symptoms of inattentive type ADHD were much less likely to be noticed in girls. My mother, who is well read, and also read up on ADHD (because my younger brother has hyperactive type ADHD), never even considered her obvious symptoms to be anything out of the ordinary, because it wasn’t important that she didn’t finish college, or was not doing as well as she should have been doing, based on other indicators of academic talent.

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Excellent post. Many Adhd kids actually score very high on whatever evaluation scores and always hear they aren’t living up to their potential. It can be frustrating when the ability is there or they actually do score high but it takes everything out of them to get there.

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We do know that learning disabilities that give extra time accommodations for tests are more commonly diagnosed in kids in high SES families.

So where there is an advantage for either diagnosis or lack of diagnosis, expect high SES families to deploy money to get the advantageous result.

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Yes. No question that if you have the money to get the diagnosis and your kid has the issue you will get extra time. But you need proof also. All the family’s we knew including ours kids had issues and been to multiple tutors, evaluations, experts. It wasn’t about gaming the system. These kids had issues affecting then educationally /socially.

I am sure there are families that somehow get away with gaming the system. But for 504 /IEP we had years of documentation to back up our claims. But getting that educational psych eval (the $5,000 test I called it) was key. Many don’t have that money

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Exactly! It took two neuropsych evaluations (because the neurologist we finally saw didn’t trust the 1st one’s results since he didn’t know the evaluator), seeing many doctors, having an MRI to rule out brain tumors, going down the chronic lyme rabbit hole, etc which took a good 9 months, countless hours and unbelievable stress and worry.

Our situation was complicated by my son’s symptoms of anxiety (migraines, gastrointestinal issues), which we didn’t know was anxiety at the time. (Anxiety often/usually occurs with adhd).

No attempt to “game the system” here, but it definitely took a very privileged, educated, and affluent family to get to the right diagnosis.

A poor family couldn’t afford the testing, let alone know to chase down every lead till they got to the right doctor. They probably would have just gone with the teachers’ assessment of laziness, and been done with it.

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Agree that having the financial resources to get a good quality evaluation is very beneficial (insurance often doesn’t cover, or very minimally reimburses for an evaluation), but an implication that a diagnosis can be “bought” if the data doesn’t support is a bit offputting. Testing takes many, many hours to administer, score, interpret, write up, etc. after the initial diagnostic interview and record review. Several of the companies that develop/sell the tests charge a lot to use scoring software (some tests are scored manually, others are not) and the test equipment and materials necessary can be costly. Providers may also employ assistants to do some of the test administration. It’s a complex, time consuming and expensive process.

(Didn’t mean to tag you, @cinnamon1212 - just meant to reply to the thread).

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