My 10 year old was diagnosed (via a thorough neuropsych evaluation, not by annoyed teachers) and my wife and I have been very leery of medication. It's not tha

My 10 year old was diagnosed (via a thorough neuropsych evaluation, not by annoyed teachers) and my wife and I have been very leery of medication. It's not that we doubt the efficacy, but we do have concerns about its effects on growing brains and, most importantly, want our guy to be able to manage things himself. Step one has been to help him become more self aware of what's going on. We use lots of checklists and consistent routines to ease the load on his executive functioning. We also work to break bigger projects into lots of small chunks. Working on a thing for 2 hours is hard, but working on a thing for 15 minutes is pretty easy. We'll also set a timer during homework and have mandatory "run around and do something" breaks after 30 minutes of homework. At school, he'll even ask to take a test in a separate area of the room, or ask to go walk up and down the stairs a few times when he's getting restless. In our case, things are working w/out drugs. He's learning school materials, and the positive feelings he's getting from not being in trouble more at school and getting his homework done have made a nice feedback loop for continuing to stay with the program. That said, I'm sure there are cases where progress is impossible and medication is the only option to get results.