Understanding ADHD (Understanding Atypical Development)

This essential guide provides accessible, concise, evidence-based guidelines on Atttention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), offering a deeper scientific understanding of the condition and its consequences. It offers ideas and insights for managing the condition in daily family life and promoting the most effective self-regulation strategies for children and adolescents, allowing parents to better understand the origins of their child’s behaviour and avoid potential negative consequences.

In this straightforward text, Capodieci and Re set out the basic theories on ADHD and cover key topics including parent-child relationships, helping children understand their condition, friendships with peers, comorbidities, classroom strategies, and how families and professionals can best work together. Taking into account the most recent updates to the DSM-5 definition of ADHD, the authors emphasise the importance of a multifocal approach to the treatment of ADHD, involving the child’s teachers, parents and peers, to better develop family and peer relationships. They offer strategies for the classroom, for good sleep and for healthy eating and physical activity, and support for any other learning, language, movement and emotional problems an ADHD child might have.

Understanding ADHD will be essential reading for parents of children with ADHD, as well as health, education and social care professionals involved in the field.

Agnese Capodieci is a psychotherapist and researcher at Department of General Psychology, University of Padova, Padova, Italy.

Anna Maria Re is Associate Professor of Developmental and Educational Psychology, Department of Psychology, University of Turin, Italy.