Kids may be overdiagnosed

When the pilot for “The Andy Griffith Show” aired in 1959, Ron Howard was 5 years old. He was born on March 1, so if he’d started kindergarten that year in a state with a Sept. 1 cut-off date for enrollment, he would have been 5 years and 6 months old. That would have been OK.

What’s not OK, according to Harvard and Massachusetts General Hospital researchers, is what happens to the youngest kids in a kindergarten class. They found that when children born in August start school in states with a Sept. 1 enrollment date (they are 5 years and a couple of weeks old when they start kindergarten), they’re 30 percent more likely to be diagnosed with attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) than their slightly older peers.

That’s pretty shocking — not only does it mean teachers don’t recognize developmental differences between children at different ages, it also can lead to medication of many children for a condition they don’t have! The health and emotional repercussions are farreaching.

Smart steps: Have kids born near enrollment cut-off dates evaluated to assess if they’re ready for the demands of an organized classroom.

If you discover your child is iffy for school this fall, let him or her wait a year so he or she will be more comfortable and better able to cope when starting school. Make sure it doesn’t negatively affect self-esteem — there is nothing negative about it (you need to believe that, and transmit that message). You certainly don’t want your child to be misdiagnosed with ADHD!