When your child is diagnosed with ADHD it can be a worry – and I know from experience that bringing up an ADHD kid isn’t easy! When my son was younger I really used to worry about his future – how on earth would he hold down a job when he couldn’t even settle down in class? How would he find a partner or make friends or start a family when he was flying off the handle every five minutes? He’s now a teenager and while he still has ADHD, he has learnt techniques to help him control his behaviour and I am a lot more confident about his future. And he’s in good company – because there are lots of famous, successful people who have either been diagnosed with ADHD or who appear to have the symptoms. Once you see the names on this list, and realise how well they turned out, your mind may feel more at ease about your own ADHD kid!
Some of the famous people with ADHD – or ADHD-like symptoms and behaviours:
| WRITERSHans Christian Anderson Lewis Carroll Agatha Christie F Scott Fitzgerald Ernest Hemingway Edgar Allen Poe George Bernard Shaw Leo Tolstoy Jules Verne |
SPORTS STARS
Louis Smith |
POLITICIANS & LEADERSNapoleon Bonaparte Winston Churchill Dwight D Eisenhower Benjamin Franklin John F Kennedy Abraham Lincoln Woodrow Wilson |
| ACTORSAnn Bancroft Jim Carrey Bill Cosby Tom Cruise Kirk Douglas Danny Glover Whoopi Goldberg Steve McQueen Will Smith Steven Spielberg (director) Lindsay Wagner Robin Williams |
SINGERS/MUSICIANSDaniel Bedingfield Harry Belafonte Cher John Denver John Lennon Ozzy Osbourne Justin Timberlake Stevie Wonder |
ARTISTSSalvador Dali Leonardo da Vinci Pablo Picasso August Rodin Vincent van Gogh |
| COMPOSERSLudwig van Beethoven Georg Frederic Handel Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart Rachmaninov |
BUSINESS ACESRichard Branson Walt Disney Henry Ford Milton Hershey John D Rockefeller F W Woolworth Jamie Oliver |
INVENTORS AND SCIENTISTSAlexander Graham Bell Thomas Edison Albert Einstein Michael Faraday Galileo Isaac Newton Louis Pasteur Werner von Braun Frank Lloyd Orville and Wilbur Wright |
