Notes from the ADHD field

My ADHD diagnosis was the most useful label I ever received.

I was staring down the barrel of middle age, and suddenly my entire life was put into a fresh perspective. The challenge with deadlines, perpetual overwhelm, the dance between what I now know to be hyperfocus and paralysis. It reframed decades of internalised narratives.

As a child, I had grown accustomed to different labels: lazy, unmotivated, not applying herself. Over time, those words stop feeling like someone else’s feedback or opinion and start feeling like fact. You don’t question them anymore, they become identity.

My mother valued education deeply, so much of our conflict revolved around school. I needed to “try harder” to “reach [my] potential”. I learned how to excel at mediocre - just average in most academic areas, quietly strong in creative ones. But creativity wasn’t considered a viable future. Art wouldn’t pay the bills.

So I found my way into education mostly by accident. Teaching became something purposeful (and a good use of that Literature degree). It also felt personal. I knew firsthand how frustrating it was to struggle through a system that wasn’t designed for the creative individuals who needed the most assistance and support. 

As an educator, I developed language for what I had felt as a child and even caught myself becoming the very teacher I loathed. As a parent of a child with ADHD, it became something else entirely. It became personal.

What Parents Actually Hear

I humbly consider myself a decent parent. I advocate for ‘tough love’ and teaching consequences. I try my best to ensure he doesn’t eat a sugar-rich or beige-only diet. My son doesn’t have free-range nor unlimited device time. He has known books since birth and we read together most nights. Our home is messy and chaotic, but full of love and laughter.

My primary-school-aged son is too young to hate school and yet, we are on that edge. The feedback from school has been consistently negative and full of the very labels I am still peeling off my psyche in my 40s. On paper, he is not “enough.” He is lower than he “should” be. He isn’t making adequate progress, or, as fast as “other students would” if they had the same intervention and assistance.

One principal even questioned whether I was doing enough at home. He was diagnosed to access support, but the most assertively offered solution has been medication.

What schools don’t measure or therefore report are the things that cannot be standardised: empathy, humour, curiosity, kindness, the ability to think about things in different ways and ask unexpected questions. The very soft skills that will set our children apart from our future AI overlords.

My son loves to read and has a strong vocabulary. But because his handwriting resembles chicken scratches and the only word he correctly spelled in the most recent test was “stupid”, he performs poorly in literacy and that ‘s’ word is getting louder. The reading skill is there but the assessments do not reflect it.

He has started calling himself “stupid”, believing that spelling it correctly must make it so. That is the label I am fighting against the hardest.

Parents don’t experience schools through Strategic Plans or inclusive policy statements. We experience them through the language written about our children and what they pick up between the lines or on the playground.

Inclusive in Theory

As a cog in the educational machine, I am aware of the frameworks. I have read the research. I too can recite the buzzwords of inclusion and neurodiversity.

We speak of Universal Design for Learning; reference evidence-based practice; commit to inclusive education in our strategic plans and staff briefings.

Yet the dominant measures of success remain narrow, standardised, and speed-based.

We still operate within a model of education designed for compliance, uniformity, and efficiency, the framework from the Industrial Revolution built for the 19th Century. Meanwhile, neuroscience, cognitive psychology, and decades of research into neurodivergence have fundamentally shifted what we understand about how humans learn. The rhetoric has evolved, but the environment has yet to catch up.

When Labels Harm and When They Help

The ADHD label liberated me. It shifted my narrative from moral failing to neurological difference. It allowed me to seek strategies and try to heal my shame. It aligned my lived experience with research and gave me context.

Labels are not inherently harmful, but untethered from environmental change are.

When a diagnosis simply becomes a justification for more remediation, more behaviour tracking, more concern about falling behind, medication etc; without adapting the environment, the label becomes another deficit marker.

But labels could be utilised for advantage. A diagnosis could be used to trigger the very things we preach: flexible assessment pathways, strength-based planning, environmental adaptations, collaborative problem-solving, explicit teaching of executive functioning skills, or reduced emphasis on speed and volume. Shouldn’t labels be design tools rather than descriptors of limitation?

A Challenge for Educators

My ADHD diagnosis gave me understanding, language, and permission to learn to work with my brain rather than against it.

This is not an argument against medication, nor is it an argument against accountability or high expectations. It is an argument for coherence between what we know, say and do.

Because If we genuinely believe in neurodiversity, then our environments must reflect, honour and account for it.

If we cite research, then our assessment practices must align with it.

If we use the language of inclusion, then we should practice what we preach and children should not be internalising deficit as identity.

When schools repeatedly communicate “not enough”, children listen. And parents carry the weight of undoing that message at home.

Labels should not shrink the young people we set out to empower and serve. They should help us build better environments for them.