I Was a Girl with ADHD. My Teachers Never Saw Me

My holiest and most humiliating year was the second grade.

My teacher, a skinny, autumnal Mrs. Claus type named Mrs. V, was old school in that she was super religious and maintained the threat of physical violence decades after it was acceptable to hit children at school. She’d rap a long HB pencil against her twiggy fingers as she patrolled our desks and pop kids on the back of the head for chatting, doodling, nose picking, or having bad posture (among other sins). It’s possible she thought she was doing the Lord’s work since our school was named St. Jude, after the patron saint of lost causes.

I respected and feared Mrs. V, which is what Catholicism is all about. During the first week of school, she took me aside to tell me that I should pray for the soul of Madonna (the pop star) because she was a terrible sinner who had my last name. Apparently, that made us relatives, so she gave me penance that added to my constant, quiet school panic.

I did my best to maintain the illusion I was just like the other kids, but it was in Mrs. V’s classroom, lined with letters, numbers, and cartoon animals, all competing for my attention with the buzzing fluorescent lights overhead, that I first understood the stakes of becoming overwhelmed by my environment. Like many neurodivergent kids who lack the ability to filter out peripheral sensory input, I took it all in. Since I could only sit, that energy sped through my body without an exit.

As we recited morning prayers one day in late September, my body betrayed me. During the Hail Mary, I jutted a hand into the air and Mrs. V’s all-seeing eyes shot to me, narrowed, and looked away. There was no interrupting prayer time on her watch, and we still had a whole “Our Father” to get through, so I crossed my legs and finished praying with a very specific ask of God: Please make no one notice that I peed my pants. That prayer went unanswered when Peter Olensky pointed at the puddle under my desk and howled. Soon, the other kids joined him, and Mrs. V walked over to scold me for not running out of the room to pee in the toilet like a sensible person.

I’m not saying kids with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD, pee their pants more than their peers, but my aunt Tina has a strikingly similar story. Hers happened in first grade, where the strict nuns at her 1960s Catholic school scared her so shitless, she peed her pants on one of her first days at school.

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Extreme sensitivity to our surroundings is common in children with ADHD. We tend to pick up the vibe without wanting to, and many of us lack the automatic filtering that prevents others from taking in too much stimuli. In 2017, Massachusetts researchers who studied the fear circuitry of people with ADHD found that we often have hypersensitive nervous systems that send us into more frequent, intense fear responses. This can look like losing bladder control in the middle of class, but it can also be an invisible, omnipresent internal sensation.

Most schools are veritable danger zones of potential triggers for kids who are sensitive to their environments, and those with ADHD often reach their sensory capacity much sooner than their peers. Since they can also lack the ability to regulate themselves, the chance of their acting out in order to release that buildup is much higher.

But the opposite is also true. ADHD kids aren’t only overstimulated by their surroundings; in the absence of engaging material, they can also become understimulated. If they’re not interested in what they are learning or doing, their brains and central nervous systems can go into overdrive, reacting like they’re under threat of attack and all but forcing them to try to regulate themselves to conquer the all-consuming boredom.

Neurodivergent kids will sometimes release their excess energy or bring their systems back online by engaging in body-focused repetitive behaviours, or stimming. This can look like pencil chewing or tapping, finger drumming, rocking back and forth, hand waving or flapping, fingernail picking or biting, hair twirling, or other (usually) subtle actions that stimulate the senses. There’s now a whole industry dedicated to the act of subtle fidgeting—fidget spinners, poppers, texture strips, chewelry—to provide sensory relief or input to kids in class. It’s also commonplace to use noise-cancelling headphones or earbuds if a classroom is loud and distracting.

In the 1990s, fidget toys didn’t exist, and my fear of getting into trouble or being singled out motivated me to prioritize staying seated above my body’s discomfort. I found that I could dissolve my overwhelming feelings slightly by stimming while still appearing well behaved. I doodled in the margins of my notebooks, rocked back and forth ever so slightly, twirled portions of my hair into ringlets, shook and bounced my feet under my desk, and pinched my leg through the pocket of my pants to prevent my mind from drifting too far away.

Stimming subtly in order to blend in and adhere to social order, as opposed to, say, running around the classroom yelling “I’m a ninja” while performing high kicks, is an element of masking—trying to blend in or act like you don’t have ADHD. ADHD kids, especially girls and BIPOC and trans children, mask all the time.

The pressure to be nice, quiet, and polite makes most girls and women with ADHD so good at masking, we don’t even realize we’re doing it. One reason why it comes so naturally to us is that it’s basically a primal reflex. “The current thinking is that it’s not a conscious adaptive strategy to socially blend in but rather a survival instinct,” says Megan Anna Neff, a psychologist with autism and ADHD who runs the website Neurodivergent Insights.

Since school-age girls learn to internalize their impulsive and hyperactive tendencies, this can make diagnosis by the existing standards incredibly tricky. “There’s no masking screening tool for ADHD,” says Ana-Maria Butura, an ADHD researcher who has conducted studies on masking. “The current screening and diagnostic tools were based on research that was done on boys.” Boys, who normally express hyperactivity, aren’t under the same social pressure to mask their symptoms. Butura decided to fill the gap in the criteria by developing a new set of measures for the inattentive population in her study. To do this, she interviewed primary school children, teenagers, women with ADHD, and the parents of younger girls with the disorder.

Butura noted that masking often happens because of the traditional schooling experience. She also found that hyperactive and impulsive symptoms were felt by many of her participants too, but they, like me, seemed able to use their internal voice to stop themselves from acting out. They couldn’t actually run around the room, since good girls stay seated, so they devised workarounds.

“Instead of getting up, jumping about, and causing havoc, they would either sit on their hands or ask the teacher if they can help hand out papers or if they can go to the toilet,” Butura says.

She also notes that girls often return home from school and immediately become hyperactive and chatty. “There’s a massive disparity in the way that they behave at home and at school, and the school is saying, ‘She’s listening, she’s very quiet.’”

At home, I had the freedom to do a flip off a couch or twirl like Lynda Carter’s Wonder Woman when my body needed to, but at school, I was shy and still. We tend to be good at switching, and it’s one reason why parents of girls with ADHD can run into difficulty advocating for school accommodations. “Teachers and schools were one of the biggest barriers to getting a diagnosis,” Butura says. Unless teachers are incredibly in tune and caring, if the child appears to be listening and not acting out, her struggles often remain invisible.

Many “Nowhere Girls” like me—the girls that science forgot—reported that they did well in school, especially in their earlier years. It’s not uncommon for us to be identified as gifted in grade school, and we can thrive in those younger grades for good reason.

The highly structured days in grade school, along with the built-in body doubling, which is the increased focus that comes from doing work around others who are also doing work, help those who are academically minded and undiagnosed. But getting good grades does not mean these girls had a good time.

Those who commit to academics frequently do so at the cost of their mental health. According to Butura, “Schools are judging [girls] on what they produce and not what they went through to produce it.”

What we go through, not only to do well at school but also to maintain our composure, often leads to emotional dysregulation.

Emotional dysregulation, or feeling like one’s emotions are out of control, happens for 45 percent of children with ADHD, and up to 70 percent of adults with the disorder, according to a 2014 study in The American Journal of Psychiatry. Researchers also found that mood lability, or quick, wildly contrasting changes in mood, is common for at least 38 percent of children with ADHD, which is ten times the population rate. That sample didn’t account for gender, so that number is likely higher for girls and women.

Butura, who interviewed women with ADHD and their families, found that nearly all the women in her study, regardless of age or background, dealt with persistent emotional dysregulation from childhood on. She noted that this dysregulation appeared long before ADHD was typically noticed, in infancy and toddlerhood. “Either they were difficult babies or they were very, very quiet and then they would lash out,” Butura says.

Most of the Nowhere Girls indicated that they experienced emotional reactions that were out of proportion with most situations they were in, and this led to anger and irrational thinking.

As girls grow, emotional dysregulation becomes especially tricky because we become more and more beholden to gender expectations that say it’s inappropriate to display intense feelings. Without an outlet, they can transform into self-loathing and shame. As with masking, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM, has yet to include emotional dysregulation among their criteria for ADHD, even though it’s a symptom that tends to stick around as ADHD persists into adulthood. “It really does highlight that it’s something that should be screened for,” Butura notes.

Since kids with ADHD experience such overblown feelings, the setbacks, slights, and criticisms they receive can feel enormous. What can make this worse and solidify it as scarring is the reactions children typically get from adults when they share or display those big feelings.

Growing up, common adult responses to my emotional dysregulation included “Oh, calm down,” “It’s not a big deal,” “Get over it,” “You’re being ridiculous,” or the classic “Stop being so sensitive.” These might be pretty standard parental admonishments for those of us reared in the ’80s and ’90s, but they also have the effect of stripping a situation, and the feelings it brought up, of its significance. If the event that evoked a big reaction is deemed inconsequential, then the child is more likely to feel like something must be wrong with her for having those feelings. And when this happens enough, a girl might start to feel, as I did, that she isn’t worthy of those feelings at all. It’s a recipe for self-doubt to fester.

While I was getting an education in keeping my head down and mouth shut (and my bladder empty) to survive second grade, I was also trying to digest the Last Supper and what happened after that.

“Did you know his friend did this to him? His friend?” I asked my mom. We had been Christmas Catholics up until then, so my knowledge of the Jesus story was limited. Since I believed in friendship wholeheartedly, Judas’s betrayal made me feel sick. I’d get a stomach ache from thinking about it, lose my appetite, and would be stuck sitting at the dinner table long after the meal ended with a plate of food in front of me that I just couldn’t eat.

Heightened sensitivity to injustice is a common affliction among ADHD kids and one most often seen in the inattentive type of ADHD. We not only have a magnified natural sense of what is fair and what isn’t but we’re also much more likely to experience injustice as we try to operate our fairness-geared minds in an unfair world. Since ADHD kids frequently encounter bullying along with peer and teacher rejection, we experience more injustice, so we become more sensitive to it. And the hits keep coming because not only do we encounter more inequality but the more it happens, the worse our ADHD symptoms tend to become.

Jesus’s story was dramatic and very obviously unfair. Less identifiable to me at the time were the uneven classroom gender dynamics around me.

“Rich, sit next to Carla; Carla, please help Rich behave,” Mrs. V would instruct, and I knew it was my duty to somehow, by osmosis, show him how to pretend like me. Because I was quiet and compliant, my attention difficulties not only went unnoticed, but like many other well-behaved girls, I was also tasked with “helping” to keep boys with behavioural issues in line. Rich talked constantly, couldn’t sit still, pulled my hair, ate Elmer’s glue for fun, and refused to do schoolwork. Not only was it a futile task to try to control him but he diverted my attention completely. I felt like I was drowning, and instead of someone throwing me a rope, I was asked to keep a more obviously flailing boy afloat. I didn’t say anything. I’d been taught early and often, as most girls are, that being compliant is more important than feeling comfortable.

A few Nowhere Girls shared similar stories of these “extra” responsibilities in grade school. We were essentially being punished for being kids who listened (or appeared to be listening) in class instead of shooting elastic bands at our classmates.

According to Ellen Littman, a clinical psychologist and expert on ADHD in girls and women, “ADHD doesn’t differ by gender—it’s the genders that differ from each other.” I felt the same impulse as Rich did, but I stuffed it down until it became my body’s problem instead of everybody else’s. It was important to be a good girl, even if that meant feeling bad all the time.

Gendered socialization starts early, even before kindergarten. It took one week in daycare for my then two-and-a-half-year-old daughter to start displaying the effects of socialized gender pressure. Despite my efforts to keep toys gender neutral, she quickly learned that blue was for boys while pink was for girls. Her baby doll whose onesie is pink and white became the girl, and the other doll with the blue and white onesie was decreed the boy.

“Why is this doll the boy?” I asked.

“Blue,” she said.

“Girls can wear blue too!” I offered, but it was too late for Mom’s opinion. She shook her head no.

Pink and blue rules were the first indication, but soon her social gender learnings included dresses are for girls and pants are for boys. This is not the message she gets at home, but the impact of teachers and peers in the classroom can be stiff competition.

By the time a child is preschool age, they have already developed what researchers call gender schemas, or gendered belief systems about how the world works. What they see at school tends to strengthen these. A 2017 study on gender stereotypes and intellectual ability by University of Illinois researchers found that, at age five, children did not differentiate between “really, really smart” boys and girls, but by six years old, girls not only ranked more boys as really, really smart but also tended to avoid the games for really, really smart kids. That’s really, really sad.

What makes this more infuriating is that, when it comes to brains, girls actually have an edge on boys. A 2015 study on brain connectivity from researchers at Seoul National University showed that the brains of young girls develop connections across the two hemispheres earlier, making our brains mature faster. The researchers don’t postulate as to why this occurs earlier in girl brains, but because of the gendered biases of our caretakers, one likely reason is that more is expected, socially, emotionally, and academically, of girls in early life.

It’s not just happening at school. The media we consume, too, is teaching us gender. After noticing an imbalance between the numbers of male and female characters on the shows her then toddler daughter was watching in 2004, Geena Davis sponsored the largest research project on gender in children’s media. The studies found that of the 101 top-grossing G-rated films from 1990 to 2005, the narrators of four out of five films were male, and only 28 percent, or less than one out of three, speaking characters were female. A different study by the same researchers looked at thirteen female leads in G-rated films and noted that they were more likely to be young, smart, good, beautiful, and depicted traditionally than the male characters. Many of us grew up consuming a lot of media that featured a serious lack of complex, messy girls and women. The consequence of this was that the shows and movies we turned to for entertainment and joy ended up reinforcing the immense pressure to conform and the message that it was our duty to be good.

As an eight-year-old, I had bigger problems than Smurfette being the only female Smurf. All I wanted was to be accepted by my teacher, but I couldn’t stop walking onto a rake in front of her. Around Easter time, our class was giving a performance of folksy religious songs accompanied by Mrs. V on guitar. I practised at home for weeks. On the day of the performance, I showed up in a knee-length leather skirt that my Toronto best friend, Lena, gave me when I visited at Christmas. I was elated to debut my outfit, but for reasons I wasn’t aware of, everyone else in the class came dressed as Jesus-era shepherds, wearing robes, biblical head dressings, and sandals. In a sea of cool desert tones, I stood out like a beacon of sin in my black leather skirt and bright turquoise butterfly sweater. Mrs. V, guitar strapped over her shoulders like a country crooner, tutted when she saw me.

I was already humiliated for bucking the Bethlehem dress code, but after the performance, she announced to our class that “leather skirts are not appropriate school wear.” I hated her for hating me and for giving the kids in my class another reason to pick on me. I was trying so hard to pay attention and be good, but I knew she didn’t see me that way, and I believed her.

Girl shame is often covert, but its impact is palpable. I would rather twist myself into knots trying to behave than be a disappointment to my teacher, or to anyone. “Girls get a lot of direct and indirect feedback,” says Michelle Martel, a clinical psychologist and professor at the University of Kentucky. The social contract girls are ushered into in kindergarten makes us attuned to the subtle ways teachers, parents, and peers react to us. We want to be good and be seen as good, and we pick up on when we’re missing the mark. The catch is, when we give our sense of innate goodness away as children, to be judged and dictated by teachers, parents, or peers, we don’t easily get it back.

Excerpted from Nowhere Girl: Life as a Member of ADHD’s Lost Generation by Carla Ciccone. Copyright © Carla Ciccone 2025. Published by Random House Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited. Reproduced by arrangement with the publisher. All rights reserved.