Symptom: Inability to sit still or be quiet for more than a very short period.
Home care: Hyperactivity always requires professional evaluation and treatment.
Precautions
- Do not confuse a child’s natural tendency to be active with true hyperkinesis.
- Never accept a diagnosis of hyperkinesis from anyone except a professional.
- Do not try to deal with hyperactivity at home; it always requires medical assessment and treatment.
- Note that the hyperactive child is not misbehaving; the behavior is involuntary.
- If a child over the age of two suddenly becomes much more active than usual, look for causes in the child’s environment; true hyperkinesis is present from infancy.
- A child who is overactive with one family member but not others is not hyperactive.
- A hyperkinetic child may need to take medication for extended periods. The child may also need special schooling or counseling.
All healthy children are active – frequently more active than the adults in their lives would wish them to be. Some children are extremely lively and always on the go. Of such children, however, only a small handful (1 to 10 percent) is truly hyperactive. The term is used very freely, and in common use its true medical definition is distorted. In fact hyperactivity-or hyper-kinesis-is part of the clinical picture known as Minimal Brain Dysfunction (MBD) and is a specific condition which makes a child incapable of being quiet and still for more than a few moments. Hyperactivity may be due to late or faulty developments of the brain centers which filter incoming stimuli-things that the child sees, hears, smells, touches, or tastes-and enable the child to react appropriately to these stimuli.
Sometimes children who are either neglected or raised in an over-permissive environment exhibit behavior that closely mimics hyperactivity. These children may have normally developed brain centers, but may have been deprived of the social training that teaches children to control their behavior.
Signs and symptoms
An extremely hyperactive child is constantly in physical motion. The child cannot sit still (for instance, to listen to a story or watch television) for more than a few seconds or minutes. The child’s behavior may be annoying or destructive, but it’s not motivated by malice; the child is not deliberately misbehaving-he or she cannot control the hyperactive behavior. An experienced pediatrician or neurologist (a specialist in nervous system disorders) may be able to recognize a severely overactive child at a glance. Many cases, however, are more difficult to pinpoint, and it may require a number of professionals to confirm the diagnosis.
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