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I was in exact same situtaion, My 8 year old has been on medication for over a year now. I did not see any light at the end of this tunnel and I felt so overwhelmed with it.However, supplementing with omega 3 & multivitamins has seemed to help him. There's mixed reviews and opinions about the effectiveness of omega 3 fish oils helping to improve a child's attention and concentration, and everybody is different, so I don't know how much will that help you kid, but it's a good idea to look into it, go through some research studies and so on, here is another mom's review, who found it worked for her kid, and she went on to try it for herself as she herself was suffering from ADHD-
Our son was pretty hyperactive and had a hard time focusing in school, staying still when he was young. We had him evaluated by a very well respected developmental pediatrician and put him on ADHD meds when he was eight (tried some different meds/dosages as some did not work at all - opposite effect or too high a dosage (more hyperactive or comatose), so we definitely tried meds / dosage changes at home first before doing anything at school). Gosh these meds sure felt scary to me, and this is our darling child we are giving these too. We tried a lot of other things too vitamins, more structure, physical activity before doing meds and while doing meds. You feel so much pressure to help your kid succeed and do the best they can at school and fit in there. I don't think the meds really helped all that much, but some teachers reported they did and we kept him on them. What was really challenging is that the meds were a huge appetizer suppressant, so feeding my son felt like the story of my life. We also with the testing and observations we saw that he had learning disabilities (bright kid, but struggled in some academic areas.), so he got an IEP. We in third grade sent him to a private school for bright kids with learning disabilities that included an hour of one on one tutoring each day and class sizes of 10 or less. We also did after school math tutoring twice a week. We sent him there for 3rd thru 8th grade, and then he want to our public high school with an IEP.
Certainly if you aren't following the subject and are missing things you can become disinterested, distracted, and fidgety, just like if you know all the stuff and find it boring that you can become disinterested, distracted, and fidgety.
When he was college age (attending community college) we took advantage of a grant for some other comprehensive testing and there he came out as border line, not really having ADHD. With that and him wanting to try going off of ADHD meds, we supported him going off of them. Certain academic areas continued to be a big struggle for him, with other areas he was interested in being fine for him. I really think for him it was pretty much the same with or without the meds, and without them he felt better and didn't struggle with not being able to eat. With math requirements (area of learning disability) he never did get a degree (get thru required math course work), but did finish course work in his area of interest.
As an adult (what a wonderful young man -- makes friends easily, super responsible, so personable - a total joy to me and my husband) he has a job that keeps him pretty busy and engaged that he loves. He works as a tour guide and does some supervision of other tour guides.
I years later talked to the teacher who had talked about improvement in performance who based on her reports got us to put him on meds in the first place, and she told me she always does ratings to get the kids on meds as being on them helps out so many and parent are so reluctant to try them. // A behavioral health rating scale is super subjective, and I really think we had our son on meds for about nine years that maybe did not even help him. Seems like a crime. // And the teacher who really was falsifying the rating scales (really just randomly filling them out) was someone who I really respected. I was a volunteer for 10 hours a month in her classroom and thought she was an amazing teacher (probably one of the best teachers I have ever observed for keeping kids engaged).
Behavioral health and meds feel like a big scary world to me. And we as parents are just muddling through trying to do the best for our kids, reading all we can, talking to professionals, trying tons of different things, and making best guesses that can turn out to be wrong. Just commenting on our own experience with my son's ADHD diagnosis in case it's helpful to any other parents out there.
I was looking for a miracle that would help my son be truly successful in school. That miracle wasn't there or if it was, we didn't find it. Baby steps, experiences, maturity - growing up is all that was really there. DS is a really well organized adult and it was not like that in his school years (despite so much work on learning strategies). And OMG being in the work world instead of the academic world is so wonderful for DS.
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