The first time I thought something might be wrong with my son, he was two years old.
He had been holding my hand. I put a piece of rubbish in a bin — maybe three seconds, maybe five — and he was gone. I found him running in circles around the elevator shaft. Not hiding. Not scared. Not looking for me. Running in circles, arms out, completely joyful.
I stood there, heart still pounding from thirty seconds of absolute terror, watching my child spin. And I had no framework for what I was seeing.
I do now. That framework is what this post — and the full video — is about.
The signals underneath the behaviour
My son is sixteen now. He is one of the most interesting, complicated, genuinely surprising people I have ever known. But the journey to understanding his brain started in a shopping mall and ran through waiting rooms, school meetings, more waiting rooms, and the kind of midnight googling that never leads anywhere useful.
His first assessment was at age two. The result was Sensory Processing Disorder — vestibular type. Which is a clinical way of saying: his brain was not reading the signals from his body the way most brains do. He needed movement to feel regulated. He needed spinning to feel still.
That sentence took me years to fully understand, so let me say it again, because it’s the key to everything that follows: the behaviour you’re watching is usually the solution your child’s brain has found, not the problem. The spinning, the fidgeting, the constant motion — that’s a nervous system doing its best to regulate itself with the tools it has.
What ADHD actually is (and isn’t)
Here’s the thing about ADHD. It is not a shortage of attention. Kids with ADHD can hyperfocus for three hours on something that lights their brain up — and then spend three hours not starting a one-page assignment. I’ve watched it happen at my own kitchen table.
That’s not laziness. It is not bad character. It is not a choice.
ADHD is a difference in how the brain’s motivation and executive systems are wired — the circuitry that decides what’s worth attention right now, that starts tasks, holds steps in mind, and puts the brakes on impulses. In an ADHD brain, interest, novelty, and urgency drive that circuitry far more than importance does. Which is why the assignment that “really matters” loses to the thing that’s actually interesting — every time, until we change the conditions rather than lecture the child.
Once you see it that way, the daily battles reframe themselves. The question stops being “why won’t he?” and becomes “what does his brain need to make this possible?” The first question — what is wrong — is a dead end. The second one — what does he need? That’s where the work actually lives.
What helped us
The full video walks through the strategies that actually moved the needle in our house — movement built into the day on purpose rather than confiscated as a reward, breaking the wall between “should” and “can,” and how we stopped treating regulation as something my son had to earn.
If your child has their own version of the elevator shaft — the behaviour that terrifies you and delights them in the same instant — start there. Ask what it’s doing for them. That question changed how I parent, and honestly, it changed how I practice medicine.
He’s sixteen. He’s fine. We are fine. It was a ride to get here, but we got here.
▶ Watch: What’s Actually Happening in Your ADHD Child’s Brain
Everything here is for informational purposes only and isn’t a substitute for care from your own physician. You already knew that.