Can Girls Even Have ADHD? (Or Is That Just a "Boy Thing"?)

Even when my daughter was diagnosed, I hadn't considered ADHD. She was just busy, as a child. And remember, she was my miracle baby, so I didn't feel I had the right to question it. I simply accepted it. This was God's plan.

As a child, I was busy too. A tomboy. I'm a teacher, I studied this, but busy boys and busy girls look different, even though I was always out there playing soccer with the boys, running around with them. I never wanted to play with dolls. Dolls were boring. Running at the park, climbing trees, that was the exciting part.

My daughter's "busy" looked like curiosity, and finding solutions. I remember a day when she was about three. I was in a meeting in the room next to hers, three steps away. She was playing, the door was ajar, and every so often I'd pop my head in or just listen, certain she was fine.

Until she stepped out of her room, into the meeting, completely naked.

I scanned her room and found she'd filled one of her large storage containers with water. She wanted to swim, so she'd made her own pool.

So no, ADHD does not always present the same in girls and in boys.

Does ADHD Look Different in Girls Than in Boys?

I was always called a daydreamer. My daughter is one too. I can be the life of the party one moment, then completely alone with my thoughts for hours, even days, and still be entirely happy. Or I can be beside myself because I spilled my tea, feeling like the whole world has turned against me.

Before I have to go anywhere and talk to people, I run through the conversation, and every possible outcome, twenty thousand different ways, until I'm anxious, or I've simply decided I don't care, and go anyway. Even when it goes well, I come home and replay it moment by moment, from every angle. I have these out-of-body moments, watching my own movements and my own face, trying to work out if I offended someone or gave the wrong impression.

My daughter is deeply empathic, and I'm proud of her for it. But I'm also afraid of how much she feels. When Donald J Trump was running for president the second time, social media was saturated with it, for and against. It became the constant topic among her friend group, Grade 7, twelve years old, and we don't live anywhere near the US. But she got pulled in so deeply that her personality started to shift. Almost overnight, as the election intensified, it felt like she was sliding into a real depression.

What I noticed was that this topic had become her world, her identity. She'd taken on the fear and pain of people she'd never met, people afraid of what a second term might mean for them. It had become personal to her. That's when I stepped in: I asked her to stay off social media on the topic, and to step back from the conversations altogether.

We have a good relationship, so she understood, not instantly, and not every time, but she understood, that when I do something like this, it's because I love her empathy, even when it comes at her own expense. Her mood changed. She came back to herself.

So can girls have ADHD? Yes. But how it shows up doesn't always match the boy-ADHD picture we've all been taught to look for. Sometimes it overlaps. Often, to the untrained eye, it looks nothing alike.

And no, ADHD was never just a boy thing. We simply weren't looking in the right places.

— Tania, Tansley Express