Frequently Asked Questions

This program was developed by David Rabiner, Ph.D., a child psychologist and Research Professor Emeritus in the Department of Psychology & Neuroscience at Duke University. Dr. Rabiner has spent his career studying ADHD and developing practical tools to help parents, educators, and clinicians support children with attention difficulties. He has published more than 50 peer-reviewed scientific papers and received funding from the National Institute of Mental Health, the Centers for Disease Control, and the U.S. Department of Education.

Since 1997, Dr. Rabiner has published Attention Research Update, a free monthly newsletter summarizing recent ADHD research for parents, educators, and health professionals, with over 20,000 subscribers.

The program is designed with privacy in mind. When a teacher submits a rating form, the results are scored immediately and emailed directly to you (and your child's clinician if you've added one). To show trends over time, we retain a small summary from each submission — symptom counts and a few key ratings — but not the full rating form and not any written comments the teacher provides.

The personal information you provide during setup — your name, email address, your child's first name, and your teacher's name and email — is stored securely and never shared with third parties. You can delete your account at any time from your account management page, which permanently removes all of this information from our system. If you prefer extra anonymity, you can use initials or a pseudonym instead of your real name when signing up — just make sure your child's teacher and clinician (if you've added one) will still recognize who it refers to.

The American Academy of Pediatrics' clinical practice guideline for ADHD recommends that clinicians regularly monitor how a child's treatment is working — including gathering feedback from teachers using rating scales — so that treatment can be adjusted as needed. In practice, though, this kind of systematic monitoring is hard to sustain: office visits are infrequent, and there's rarely a structured way to collect ongoing input from school.

This program is built to close that gap. Regular school monitoring gives you and your child's healthcare provider something that's often missing from ADHD treatment: timely, objective information about how your child is actually functioning in the classroom. Without it, treatment decisions often rely on brief office visits or a parent's general impressions — both of which can miss important changes happening day to day.

By tracking ratings over time, you can quickly see when your child is doing well, when things are slipping, and whether treatment changes are having the desired effect at school. That information helps you and your child's provider have more informed, productive conversations and make better decisions together — consistent with the kind of ongoing monitoring the AAP guideline calls for.

No. This program is designed to help parents track their child's school functioning and share that information with their child's health care provider — not to provide, replace, or substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Results should not be used as the sole basis for any medical or treatment decision. See our full disclaimer for more information.

The full set of 18 diagnostic criteria is used to determine whether a child meets the threshold for an ADHD diagnosis. This program serves a different purpose — it's designed to monitor how a child who has already been diagnosed is responding to treatment at school, not to diagnose ADHD. For that purpose, 12 items is sufficient.

We also made a deliberate choice to keep the form as brief as possible. Teachers are busy, and reducing the burden on them makes it more likely they'll complete the form consistently over time. ADHD symptoms also tend to be highly correlated with one another — when one symptom improves or worsens, others typically move in the same direction. This means that a carefully selected subset of symptoms still gives a reliable and accurate picture of how well a child's ADHD is being managed at school.

Not necessarily. Both your child's teacher and clinician (if you choose to include one) will automatically receive an introductory email explaining the essentials of the program — how it works, what will be asked of them, and how the results will be used — before they are asked to do anything. So if reaching them directly first would be difficult or would delay getting started, you don't need to wait; the email covers what they need to know.

That said, there's real value in letting them know yourself when you can. A short heads-up from you can make the process feel more collaborative and gives them a chance to ask questions or share their own thoughts before the first form arrives. If you'd like time to do that, you can use the delayed start option during setup to choose a future date for the program to begin.

You can have rating forms sent to multiple teachers or to a particular teacher from whom the information would be most helpful. If your child is struggling in a particular class, information from that teacher may be especially helpful in evaluating the effectiveness of treatment.

Keep in mind that ratings from different teachers often differ as children can behave differently in different classrooms. Your child's health care provider can help you make sense of any such differences that may emerge.

You can add multiple teachers during setup or at any time from your account management page. Each teacher receives forms independently on their own schedule.

Each results email gives you a clear summary of how your child is doing across four areas: hyperactive and impulsive symptoms, inattentive symptoms, behavioral and social functioning, and academics.

The email opens with an overall assessment — ranging from “ADHD symptoms well-managed, no other concerns” to “ADHD symptoms elevated and other problems reported” — along with a brief narrative explaining what the pattern means and whether it suggests a conversation with your child's provider may be warranted.

Below that, each of the 15 rated items is listed with its score (0–3) so you can see exactly what the teacher observed. Items where symptoms are clearly present or where behavioral concerns were noted are flagged so they stand out at a glance.

It's important to keep in mind that this is a screening tool designed to identify areas of difficulty — it is not intended to provide a comprehensive assessment of your child's functioning. Results should always be interpreted in the context of your child's overall situation and discussed with their healthcare provider.

Over time, comparing results across weeks or months gives you and your child's provider an objective picture of whether treatment is working, whether things are improving or slipping, and where any persistent problems lie.

Yes. Each results email includes a link to a trends page showing graphs of your child's ratings over time, so you can see the overall pattern rather than just a single week or month in isolation. These graphs can cover an entire school year of ratings.

If your child has more than one teacher providing ratings, each teacher has their own separate set of graphs rather than one combined graph. Different teachers often see your child differently, so keeping their ratings separate gives you and your child's provider a clearer, more accurate picture of how things are going in each classroom.

Trend graphs need a small amount of history before they can show a meaningful pattern — they appear after 4 weekly ratings or 2 monthly ratings have been submitted for a given teacher.

Not necessarily. A single difficult week is not always cause for alarm, especially if your child has generally been doing well. Children with ADHD can have off weeks for many reasons — illness, stress, disruptions to routine, a substitute teacher, or just natural day-to-day variation. One rough week against a backdrop of otherwise good ratings does not by itself indicate that treatment needs to be modified.

That said, any week where ratings raise concern is worth discussing with your child's healthcare provider. They can help you determine whether the results reflect a temporary blip or something that warrants a closer look. Sharing the actual ratings with them — rather than just describing the week in general terms — gives them the specific information they need to make that judgment.

A poor monthly rating carries more weight than a poor weekly one, simply because it reflects a longer period of time. If your child's teacher rates a full month as problematic, that is a stronger signal that something may need to change and makes a conversation with the provider especially important.

If your child attends school fewer than 2 days in a week, their teacher will not be asked to complete a rating form for that week. This ensures that ratings are based on enough classroom observations to be meaningful. It also applies to partial weeks due to school holidays or breaks. You will simply not receive a results email that week — this is expected and not a sign of any problem with the program.

Go to helpforadd.com/manage and enter your email address. You'll receive a link that gives you access to your account for 24 hours. From there you can add or remove teachers, change rating frequency, pause delivery during school breaks, update your child's clinician, or delete your account.

Yes — you can switch between weekly and monthly at any time from your account management page. The change takes effect on the next scheduled send date. Your trend graphs keep going across the switch rather than starting over — a small mark on the graph shows exactly where the frequency changed.

Yes. From your account management page, select the teacher you want to pause and optionally set a date to resume automatically. If you don't set a resume date, you can restart manually at any time.

From your account management page, find the teacher and click “Remove this teacher.” They will stop receiving forms immediately. Removing a teacher (or replacing them with a new one, e.g. at the start of a new school year) also clears that teacher's trend history, so a new teacher's graph always starts fresh rather than mixing ratings from two different people.

From your account management page, scroll to the bottom and click “Delete My Account.” This permanently removes all your information from the system. You are welcome to re-enroll at any time.

Check your spam or junk folder for emails from monitor@helpforadd.com. If you find them there, mark them as “not spam” and add monitor@helpforadd.com to your contacts to ensure future emails are delivered to your inbox.

A reminder is sent automatically if the teacher hasn't completed the form within a few days of receiving it. If you still haven't received results, it's worth reaching out to the teacher directly to let them know the email is coming and ask them to keep an eye out for it.

You can also verify that the teacher's email address is correct from your account management page. If the address is wrong, remove the teacher and add them again with the correct email.

Check your spam folder for an email from monitor@helpforadd.com. If it's not there, make sure you're entering the same email address you used when you signed up.