You’ve spent fifteen years conducting evaluations, writing reports, and making recommendations for students with ADHD. You thought you knew it all – the executive functioning challenges, the struggle with sustained attention, the frustration of forgotten assignments. Then your son is diagnosed with ADHD, and suddenly, you’re sitting on the other side of the table.

Nothing humbles you quite like watching your own child struggle with the very challenges you help other children navigate every day.

As school psychologists, we know the statistics, the interventions, and the best practices. We can recite them in our sleep. But when you’re trying to get your own child out the door in the morning, watching them forget their lunch for the third time this week despite the checklist you made together, all that professional knowledge feels different.

You know firsthand that there’s a vast difference between understanding ADHD professionally and living with it 24/7. When you recommend a behavior chart to parents now, you think about how your son refused to use his for two weeks straight. When you suggest breaking down assignments into smaller chunks, you remember the meltdown your son had over a science project, even after you had carefully divided it into manageable steps.

Here’s what this dual perspective can teach us:

First, our clinical knowledge is invaluable, but so is empathy. You now understand the exhaustion in parents’ eyes when they say they’ve tried everything. You know the worry that keeps them up at night, wondering if their child will ever learn to self-regulate and manage their symptoms independently.

Second, this dual perspective can teach us that our recommendations need to account for real-world implementation. Sure, that 12-step behavior intervention plan looks great on paper, but how does it hold up at 7 AM when everyone’s running late and emotions are high? It teaches us to streamline our recommendations, focusing on what’s most impactful and actually doable.

Third, having the unique point of view from both sides of the table, this duality teaches us that progress isn’t linear. As professionals, we know this intellectually, but as a parent, you feel it differently. The strategies that worked brilliantly last week might fail spectacularly this week. And that’s okay.

Raising a child with ADHD will teach you more than any textbook or training ever could. Children with ADHD can be creative and resilient.  They show us the importance of celebrating small victories – like remembering to turn in homework without a reminder, or successfully using a planner for a whole week! 

To my fellow school psychologists: if you’re working with students with ADHD, remember that behind every evaluation, behind every IEP meeting, there’s a family trying their best to navigate daily challenges. Our professional expertise is crucial, but so is our understanding that families are doing complex, emotional work every single day.

And for those of you who straddle both worlds – being both the professional and the parent – know that your dual perspective is a gift to our field. Your personal experiences make you a more empathetic and more effective practitioner. Every day, you bring both your professional knowledge and your parental experience to work, hoping to better serve the families who trust you with their children’s educational journeys. Because sometimes, the best school psychologists are the ones who’ve sat on both sides of the table.