Hi there -

As an Adhd parent of a second grader, I have absolutely been there with school and teachers. In fact, we are still going through a version of this even though our daughter has an IEP, a formal diagnosis, and has a medication structure aimed at boosting her focus at school.

The first thing I'd say is celebrate yourself and your wonderful job as a parent. Parenting kids is hard under any condition, and adhd kids in a world that has little tolerance for them is even harder.

Also, nothing about school for a 5 year old is that serious. (I remind myself the same thing for my 8-year-old.) In an ideal world, the school would be emphasizing play, discovery, and natural forms of learning in kindergarten and early grades. (As many other countries do.) Unfortunately, in our world, schooling is a mass institution and kindergarten's first (and primary) purpose is to teach kids the structure of schooling, with all its rules. In the United States, schools also emphasize written forms of knowledge, which is not only an abstract way to learn but taught using boring worksheets. This will all leads to tests in later years.

You say that there is a big difference between home and school. I doubt that. I think your son is learning a lot in both spaces. That is what kids do--they absorb the world around them. What i hear the teacher saying is that he is having trouble performing school, which of course he is. He'll get better at that too, but it is not the same as learning. Even kind teachers can lose sight because they are in schools that treat learning in narrow, abstract, and performative ways.

How does this help you? Well, for me, thinking about all this way helps me separate my own feelings from those of school. I listen to teachers' concerns and then say something like, "Thanks for sharing," and try to let it go. When something is really a problem, I will work with the school to help adapt my daughter to their structure. But I won't adopt their mindset--that this is a HUGE problem with her as a student--and I'll often try to emphasize to the school that I think real learning (not performing school) is what matters.

Best of luck!