Better usually means smaller, rarer, or shorter. Pick something you can count, like losing your keys twice a week instead of every day.

The point of treatment is not a tidier score on a questionnaire. It is fewer accidents, a finished course, work that holds, relationships that survive, a longer and better life.

When a child with ADHD and a parent get stuck in daily rows, the rows themselves start doing damage. Getting the ADHD properly managed early takes some heat out of those exchanges before defiance settles in as a habit.

Showing a teenager live pictures of activity in one targeted part of their own brain has been tried once, in a small trial, and it looked encouraging. That was around a dozen young people, and nobody has repeated it yet.