My 10yo Daughter didn’t want to take Her ADHD Medication

My 10yo daughter didn’t want to take her ADHD medication the other day, and when I asked her why, it seemed very clear that having to take a pill to help her focus was making her feel like she was different from other people.

Naturally, I explained how she focuses so much better with the medication, and how homeschool is so much easier, and how she gets done with her schoolwork in nearly half the time, but none of those reasons changed how she was feeling about herself.

I thought about telling her she had to take it. Perhaps giving her a punishment for not taking it, but that didn’t seem right.

Instead I took her upstairs to my medicine cabinet and I laid them all out. I told her why I take them: this one’s for depression, and this one I take when I have a panic attack, and this one... I told her about the time I went off medication completely because I didn’t want to be someone who had to take pills to feel better, and how things got really bad for me, and how that made things bad for her mother and our family, and I realized that not taking medication not only impacts me, but also the people around me, so I went back to the doctor.

“I’ve never shown all this to anyone, not even your mother,” I said. “But I’m showing it to you because I want you to know that you’re not alone, and there are a lot of people just like us.”

She didn’t respond. She just left the room, and I was left to wonder if anything I said made her feel better, or if I just made her think her father was crazy. I’d never been this vulnerable with one of my children about my mental illness, so I didn’t know what to expect.

The next morning at breakfast she got up, and without being prompted, took her pill. And once she was done, she looked over at me with a half smile, and it felt like we were sharing more than just a meal.

You’d love my new mental health memoir Anxiously Ever After.