Some days it can feel like your child with ADHD has a vendetta against you. You tell them to go out…they go in. You say stop…they go. You tell them to start their homework, and they look at you and turn on the television. When our kids show defiance and go against our warnings or directions, it can feel downright infuriating. And it can make you question whether you are even a good parent.

First, let’s normalize this: you are not alone! Defiance is one of the most common challenges faced by parents and teachers of children with ADHD. As a psychologist, whenever a parent tells me that their child is defiant, I always try to dig a little deeper to find out why?

The truth is that defiance is often a symptom of a larger problem for the child or with their environment.

Today, I am sharing four possible reasons for defiance in children with ADHD.

1) Executive functioning differences

I remember testing a young girl and asking her to complete some math facts quickly for 1 minute. Af...

How’s school going for your child? In Arizona, we just finished up the school year – which is a welcome break for all of us parents who have been homeschooling our kids for the past two months! How did distance learning go in your family? Each of us at The Childhood Collective have had different experiences.

Mallory’s oldest is in preschool, so they didn’t have any specific homework. She has been doing all kinds of creative activities to keep her little ones busy and engaged. Lori and I (Katie) each have daughters in kindergarten, so we got to dive head first into distance learning! My daughter loves reading and is now reading everything in the house… which wasn’t awesome when I left myself a note to remember my tooth fairy responsibilities (oops, had to think fast to get out of that one!). Of course, each day when it was time for my daughter to do math, she would immediately need a snack, find a random bug bite that needed attention, or have an emergency trip to the bathroom. Full di...

Your child is having difficulty focusing and seems constantly distracted by the smallest things. Homework and morning routines take hours to complete. Your child is rarely able to stay seated at dinner or at a desk, interrupts constantly, blurts out funny comments at the most inconvenient times, and climbs literally everything in sight. After years of concerns from yourself and teachers, you finally make the decision to seek out an evaluation and treatment for attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). However, after a quick google search in your area for specialists who diagnose and treat ADHD, it becomes clear that there are too many options. Hello, overwhelm and confusion! In this blog post, I am going to provide you with a little information on ADHD, why a comprehensive evaluation is important, and advantages/drawbacks of various specialists who diagnose and treat ADHD.

What is ADHD?

Before I get into answering the question of which specialist to choose, let’s first disc...