Why Parents of Kids With ADHD Are So Worried Right Now

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For a couple of years, the driving forces of grade school—learning and friendships— were out of reach for Grace’s young daughter. The girl, who has attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder and dyslexia, would walk around the classroom, touching and distracting classmates. When she inevitably got in trouble, the child felt embarrassed and anxious, but it was impossible to control the impulsive behaviors. “She could not function in school, at all,” says Grace, who lives in central Oklahoma and whose last name is being withheld, like those of other parents in this article, to protect her daughter’s privacy.

That began to change four years ago when the then-6-year-old started on stimulant medications to control her ADHD symptoms. After trying a few, the family found the right fit, and for the first time, learning and friendships felt like a real possibility for the girl.

Now it feels like the hard-won progress—for the girl and for our national understanding of the roughly 1 in 5 American children with neurodivergence—is at grave risk.

Underlying the Trump administration’s Make America Healthy Again campaign, and most particularly a February executive order calling out ADHD medications and other commonly prescribed drugs for children as potential “threats,” is the anti-science implication that neurodivergence is a fiction, curable, as suggested in the executive order, with a well-balanced diet and regular exercise. Parts of the order read a lot like recent declarations from Robert F. Kennedy Jr., offering another piece of evidence—as if his persistent illusions of a link between vaccines and autism weren’t enough—that the secretary of health and human services believes that scientists and doctors are hurting rather than helping neurodivergent children. President Donald Trump recently announced that RFK Jr. will oversee special education for schools, meaning the secretary will now wield enormous influence in how children with disabilities are perceived and treated at the federal level.

It’s only in recent decades that it’s been widely understood how rooted the most common neurodivergent conditions like ADHD, autism, and dyslexia are in differences in brain structure or function, or both—and how treatable ADHD, in particular, can be with medications that alter that functioning. “The science of ADHD has shown that it’s a brain-based disorder. It’s not poor discipline; it’s not bad kids,” says Max Wiznitzer, professor of pediatrics and neurology at Case Western Reserve University and co-chair of the professional advisory board of the advocacy organization Children and Adults With Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder. Specifically, for those with ADHD there’s an imbalance in the brain networks associated with attention and impulse control.

To Grace and other parents, the executive order felt like a gut punch, with its implication that bad lifestyle choices can cause ADHD. “It makes me kind of rage honestly,” she says. “If it was that simple to fix without meds, we would have done it. Suggesting that ADHD is a parenting failure rather than a neurological difference is all kinds of messed up.”

Neurodivergent children are by no means the only group of students with disabilities threatened by the Trump administration’s many wild, devastating actions. Efforts to destroy the Department of Education could decimate services and advocacy for students with disabilities ranging from deafness and blindness to learning and intellectual disabilities to all manner of neurodivergence, hurting students of color and marginalized children the most. Severe cuts to Medicaid will make it nearly impossible for lower-income families to access vital services and supports, starting at birth when extremely premature babies are automatically eligible for critical therapies.

Yet it is notably with neurodivergent children, and those with mood disorders like depression, that the country’s leaders appear to be attacking the very essence and scientific understanding of disability. Repeatedly, RFK Jr. suggested before his appointment that children taking illegal narcotics, as well as ones prescribed ADHD stimulants or selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, could be well-served on “healing camps” or “wellness farms” where they would essentially be reparented—cut off from the corrupting influences of modern life and, it seems, modern medicine. Last year, according to a recent article in the Cut, Kennedy claimed on a podcast that these farms could be particularly useful for Black children, saying, “Every Black kid is now just standard put on Adderall, on SSRIs, benzos.”

The executive order singled out ADHD stimulant medications such as Ritalin and Adderall, which aim to increase brain activity in areas related to attention and impulsivity. (Many children also take nonstimulants, which expand the levels of norepinephrine, a neurotransmitter that promotes focus and impulse control.)

According to the executive order, the steady rise in diagnosis and use of prescription medications for ADHD among children, along with generally high rates of chronic illness and mental health issues, “poses a dire threat to the American people and our way of life.”

Yet never once does the order use the words brain or neurodivergent, instead lumping disabilities like ADHD and autism in with diseases like asthma, Type 2 diabetes, and fatty liver, arguing that they can be addressed with “fresh thinking on nutrition, physical activity, healthy lifestyles,” and more steps in that same vein.

In other words, the administration, or at least the writers of the executive order, do not appear to understand the distinction between a brain variation (that you are born with) and a disease (which you can, indeed, sometimes develop through an unhealthy lifestyle). Wiznitzer notes that all competent pediatricians “encourage good diet. All of us encourage sleep and a healthy lifestyle. But even if you do that with the ADHD population, there is still going to be ADHD.”

“The core symptoms,” he added, “respond best to medication,” with behavior therapy and classroom strategies also helping. But children with strong hyperactivity in particular, he said, most often need some medication to function effectively in school and in life.

Some studies have shown that ADHD medications can even alter some of the brain differences in children with the disorder, although Wiznitzer noted that “medicine is just one portion” of treatment and that expanded access to behavioral therapies and classroom support could help reduce some reliance on pharmaceuticals.

Yet availability of those therapies and supports—like occupational therapy and staff in schools trained in working with children with disabilities, including neurodivergence—could also become even more restricted. Public school districts across the country already were facing severe budget cuts with the disappearance of pandemic relief funds. And now the slash-and-burn upheaval at the Department of Education poses more budgetary uncertainty. While cuts could ultimately affect all students with disabilities, those with more mild to moderate disabilities, including many with ADHD, could feel the impact more quickly as schools strive to protect services for those with the most severe needs.

Children with ADHD are also a (seemingly) unintended target in an ongoing lawsuit by the attorney generals in 17 red states to declare unconstitutional the seminal Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, a Civil Rights law that prohibits discrimination against people with disabilities by recipients of federal funding. (The stated reason for this challenge was the 2024 inclusion under the Biden administration of gender dysphoria as a protected disability. But experts say a conservative push against federalism in favor of greater states’ rights is also likely at play.)

Most children with disabilities get special education services in school through an IEP, or an individualized education program. But more than a million children who aren’t eligible for an IEP, including countless students with ADHD, get accommodations in school through a 504 plan. In South Carolina, a state that is part of the lawsuit, the attorney general received about 1,000 emails from parents concerned about the possible end of 504 plans, says Mitchell Yell, a professor in special education at the University of South Carolina. “If [the lawsuit] is not thrown out, that would mean a lot of hardship,” he says.

Officials in many of the states have told parents that they are not targeting school 504 plans, but “if Section 504 were declared unconstitutional, it would be catastrophic for people with all types of disabilities,” says Alison Barkoff, a professor at George Washington University, in an email. In regards to potential impact on school 504 plans, she says, “I don’t think they realize they stepped on the mama tiger third rail.”

It took over a century for scientists and doctors to develop a strong understanding of the brain science behind neurodivergence—an understanding that’s still being refined. At the start of the 20^th century, behaviors that we would now describe as characterizing ADHD, for instance, were referred to as a “defect of moral control,” according to a 2010 review article on the history of the disorder. Although the subject of morality doesn’t come up in the executive order, there’s an implicit morality policing of parents in the suggestion that the real cure to conditions like anxiety and ADHD lies in healthier meals, less screen time, more outdoor activity—ideas perfectly summed up in the vision of those “wellness camps” RFK Jr. has evoked. “It seems to imply that there is something corrupt about these people,” says Wiznitzer.

In the middle of the century, scientists made the connection between ADHD and the brain, writing that hyperactive behavior in children was caused by “damage” to the organ. That link to the brain was developed and refined over the next few decades. And ADHD, so named, first appeared in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in 1987 (for a few years before that, it was ADD with or without hyperactivity; and before that, it was hyperkinetic syndrome of childhood). It wasn’t until the 1990s, though, that doctors came to understand that ADHD is not something that most people necessarily outgrow, says Wiznitzer.

The use of stimulants to treat ADHD—discovered by accident—long predates our contemporary understanding of the condition. But in more recent years, there’s been tremendous progress in refining and diversifying the types of medications available, particularly among the nonstimulant drugs.

Shanna, a New Jersey mother of a 10-year-old who has ADHD and autism, says that at first she was deeply hesitant about putting her then 6-year-old on medication for ADHD. “I really thought we could control this with behavioral therapy,” Shanna recalls. “I don’t think any parent wants to give their kid medication they will be on for the rest of their life.”

But the child wasn’t progressing academically, even with behavior therapy. At one point, a therapist stood near the child in the classroom and tapped her on the shoulder when she wasn’t paying attention. “What she learned is that she didn’t have to pay attention unless they touched her on the shoulder,” Shanna says. The pediatrician reminded the parents, “She has a chemical imbalance in her brain; she’s not going to outgrow this.” That clinched it.

The parents first tried a stimulant medication, which proved disastrous: It didn’t help the inattention and the child lost 10 percent of her body weight. But the family regrouped and tried a nonstimulant that was more effective. Shanna credits the medication with finally giving her daughter the attention span to learn to read. “The differences were so startling,” she says. “It was shocking how well it worked.”

Parents and pediatricians say no one treatment is a cure-all. Shanna’s daughter continues to receive a variety of in-home therapies for autism and for ADHD. She’s on the same nonstimulant drug she started four years ago. In school, she has several accommodations: Teachers always say the girl’s name first when asking her a question, and she has preferential seating at the front of the classroom.

The family watches the girl’s sleep, activity, and diet closely (they stopped giving her much chocolate years ago, for example, because it made her too excited). But Shanna calls the idea that this monitoring alone—as implied by the executive order—would solve her daughter’s ADHD symptoms “ridiculous.”

For most kids with neurodivergence, including Shanna’s daughter, a combination of strategies and therapies is crucial to helping them live their best lives. And the prospect of taking a key treatment away from millions of kids, Wiznitzer says, is “like kicking the chair out from under the child.”