If your child was recently diagnosed with ADHD, you’ve probably already noticed something strange: everyone online seems to have a confident, simple answer for how to handle it. Ten tips. Five hacks. One superpower narrative. But if you’re a parent navigating ADHD for the first time, you already sense that your kid’s experience doesn’t fit neatly into a carousel post. On a recent episode of Kids These Days, I talked with Dr. Norrine Russell, founder of Russell Coaching and author of Asking the Right Questions About ADHD, about why that instinct is exactly right — and what to do instead.
ADHD Rarely Shows Up Alone
One of the most important things Dr. Russell shared is also one of the least talked about: only about a third of kids diagnosed with ADHD have ADHD by itself. The rest are also navigating anxiety, depression, a learning difference, or autism — and a meaningful portion of those kids are managing more than one additional diagnosis at the same time. That matters because so much of the parenting advice circulating online assumes a single, generic version of ADHD. In reality, the ADHD showing up in your house might be tangled up with something else entirely — which is exactly why a single Instagram tip rarely works for every kid.
Why Getting a Diagnosis Feels So Confusing
Parents often expect a clear path to diagnosis, the way you’d see an orthopedist for a broken bone. ADHD doesn’t work that way. Pediatricians, neurologists, psychiatrists, and psychologists can all diagnose ADHD, but each one screens for different things — a neurologist might rule out seizure activity, while a psychiatrist looks for more severe psychiatric concerns. Given how few psychiatric and psychological specialists are available nationally, most kids end up diagnosed by a pediatrician using a brief checklist, which simply isn’t designed to catch every overlapping condition. Dr. Russell suggests that a full psychoeducational evaluation, even though it’s not always the first stop, tends to give families the clearest and most complete picture of what’s really going on — covering both the mental health and educational pieces at once.
Start With Strengths, Not Just the Struggles
Before diving into a stack of recommendations from an evaluation, Dr. Russell recommends pausing to ask a different question first: what is this child already good at? She describes this as attaching a “strengths cover sheet” to any evaluation. For one of her own children, that strength was a deep desire to please and follow through; for the other, fierce independence and creativity. Rather than treating those traits as separate from the ADHD conversation, she weaves them directly into how she helps each child build executive functioning skills — because kids are far more motivated to grow when they feel seen for what they’re already good at, not just corrected for what’s hard.
The Trouble With Calling ADHD a “Superpower”
It’s become common to tell kids that their ADHD is a hidden superpower. Dr. Russell pushes back on this gently but firmly. ADHD itself isn’t the superpower — a child’s creativity, humor, or persistence might be, but those traits exist independently of the diagnosis. Framing ADHD itself as a strength can confuse kids who are genuinely struggling with a messy backpack, a missed assignment, or trouble following directions at practice. It can also make it harder for kids to ask for help, because admitting difficulty feels like contradicting the “superpower” label they’ve been handed. A more honest framing — ADHD is hard, and you also have real strengths — gives kids permission to hold both truths at once.
Parenting a Complex Kid Is Intense, and That’s Normal
Much of our conversation centered on something rarely said out loud: parenting a child with ADHD, autism, or anxiety is genuinely intense and dysregulating, especially in the early years when parents are first sensing that something doesn’t match the typical developmental path. Dr. Russell described the experience of having an early concern dismissed — being told her son was “just a boy” — and how invalidating that was. She encourages parents to trust their instincts even when reassurance from others doesn’t match their lived experience, and to find community with other parents walking a similar, less conventional path.
Tools That Actually Help
Alongside the bigger mindset shifts, Dr. Russell shared a few concrete strategies that work well for many families: relying on visual schedules instead of constant verbal reminders, using a large family whiteboard to track daily priorities, and a simple practice of moving a coin across the counter every time you pause to connect with or compliment your child — a small visual reminder that connection comes before correction.
Resources & Links:
If there’s one phrase to hold onto from this conversation, it’s Dr. Russell’s repeated reminder: stay the course, trust the process. Not every day will go smoothly. The visual schedule won’t always work. That doesn’t mean you’re failing — it means you’re doing the long, unglamorous work of raising a complex kid, one day at a time.
If you’re navigating an ADHD diagnosis, a confusing eval, or just the exhaustion of parenting a kid who needs more support than the average parenting book accounts for, you don’t have to figure it out alone. Our team at Integrated Behavioral Health is here to help your family find a path that actually fits.
- Dr. Russell’s book: Asking the Right Questions About ADHD
- Dr. Russell’s podcast: Breaking Out of the Box: ADHD, Autism, and Anxiety
- Russell Coaching
- Integrated Behavioral Health: integratedbhs.com