Expert: Sharon Crandall - 8/12/2010

Question
My daughter loves soccer and basketball. During some games she is one of the best if not the best player on the team and other games she seems to lack drive, aggressiveness and awareness. When we talk after the game she thinks she played perfectly fine. My question is, can a person with ADD have these tremendous fluctuations from game to game and if so is there any way I can help her overcome or reduce the times she has difficulty?

Answer
People with the symptoms of ADD, which I believe to actually be personality traits that need a different type of school setting than what we generally have today, can have traits that cause mood swings. Each of us is genetically influenced more by our father's side of the family on one side of our body and the other side of our body is influenced more by the mother's side of the family.

This means that literally, there are two different measuremens/scores on some of our traits that cause mood swings that can effect our behavior/capabilities. This sounds like such a case where the mood swings cause your daughter to be more adept at sports in one mood then when she swings into the other set of traits she has less focus or capabilities of some kind.

The fact that she has fluctuations indicate that she has trait mood swings and I believe that could be what is happening here. The main thing is that if she is happy with the way she plays then I would not be ambitious for her but let her enjoy what she does. Who cares? It is not a life and death matter so let her enjoy the game.

Hope this helps.

Sharon Crandall
www.personalitysciencesays.blogspot.com