Serving the Home Education community.

Special Needs

(Editor's Note: This article has been edited for length with the permission of the author. The unedited full version of this article is available here.)

Should you medicate your ADHD child? In my opinion, it comes down to four factors:

  1. Is ADHD something that’s “wrong” with the child?
  2. Could something else be causing the ADHD symptoms?
  3. Does the child have significant comorbidities?
  4. Are the ADHD symptoms significant enough that they’re impacting the child’s quality of life?

Originally published in the Summer 2010 issue of the Home Matters magazine.

When you chose to home educate, you did so (typically) at least partly so that you could give each of your children the best education for their individual needs and gifts. Then when we discover that one of those children has some sort of special need, a learning disability, a learning challenge, a handicap or a different way of looking at the world (all of which can be present in the same child, depending on who is observing him), we become concerned about our ability to provide what that child needs.