I don't understand the confusion between AS and ADD

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for my kids, the 6 and 12 yo's were initially diagnosed ADHD and later that changed to pdd-nos and aspergers. now my 5yo, i'm told is adhd. he is, to me, clearly aspergers and has all the same symptoms my 12yo had at his age and a few more. however, no obvious speech delays or constant hand flapping means i have to go the long way around for him too. i think if they payed better attention they would see the same symptoms i see but i guess they have to go their own route(the dr's) i guess before i knew the symptoms well i saw adhd as well because even when reading the list of symptoms for as it's hard to really know what each of the items on the list means unless you see the behaviour and have someone tell you what it is.

I remember when I first saw how ADHD and autism could be confused.

I was volunteering with autistic kids and was assigned to be a 'shadow in the gym', which meant I stood around while a mixed group of autistic and NT kids did gym activities, and jumped in to help any kid who was having trouble. The teacher rattled off a bunch of instructions to a bunch of five year olds and most of the kids immediately hopped to the activity, except for one kid who just stood there and looked around. I went over and repeated the instructions to him and prompted him to do them, and he did.

He was, of course, autistic. My guess is he was having trouble due to a mix of auditory processing issues and difficulty imitating (most kids if they didn't hear the teacher would just do what everyone else was doing). But imagine you're a teacher and you can't do one-on-one work with the kid because there are 30 others needing your attention. How would you tell that kid from one who got distracted and is daydreaming? The outward behavior is exactly the same.

Plus many of the basic issues are the same in ADHD and autism, just with a different 'flavour'. Both have attention difficulties characterized by alternating between hyperfocusing and inattentiveness, but autistics spend more time hyperfocusing while ADHDers spend more time being inattentive. Both have executive dysfunction, but ADHDers tend to have the worst issues with inhibition while autistics tend to have the worst issues with shifting. Both have social difficulties, but with autism it's more about not knowing what to do while ADHDers usually know what to do but can't do it (both naivety and impulsivity can lead to blurting out embarrassing details). Inattentiveness can also cause delays in nonverbal communication because the kid chronically overlooks socials cues and therefore doesn't get as much chance to learn from them.

Add to that the fact that individual kids are never classic for whichever syndrome they have, and there are many kids who don't fit neatly into either category, or who mostly fit one but have a few traits of the other...

This is all quite interesting. I hope my daughter is not misdiagnosed. I am utterly convinced she is on the AS side and not the ADD side. They just seem very different to me. I have a friend who has ADD and whose son has ADHD so have researched into both conditions before and neither leapt out at me at all; whereas as soon as I started looking into Asperger's lightbulbs started flashing all over the place and it just was my daughter (and probably me too).

The confusion is frustrating. My family has histories of both disorders (largely on my mom's side). I was the only sibling in my generation to have either (technically ADHD. Now, I think I have both, though). Part of the problem is that I'm female, and supposedly Aspergers shows up differently in girls. ADHD shows up differently in girls too, but I think those gender differences are better understood. So although I definitely had weaknesses in social skills, the weaknesses weren't quite enough for a diagnosis of Aspergers. Thus, I was diagnosed with ADHD, but my parents were still told to seek a social worker who specialized in Aspergers, so I think the psychiatrist would theoretically agree with me too.