A:
Given the age of adoption of your child (about
2 years old?), it's very unlikely that your daughter was able
to acquire at that age any patterns of institutional behavior
and retain them during the next 4 years in her American family.
It's more likely, that her diagnosis of ADD is the real problem.
Though ADD and post-institutional behavior, as you correctly pointed
out, have similar presentation, they are very different internally.
It's important to understand that the second one (post-institutional
behavior) is not a medical condition, it's rather an acquired
and reinforced by the institutional circumstances pattern of behavior,
which was useful as a survival skill. Normally, in a healthy child
these skills, even if they indeed were noted in the child on arrival,
should diminish and disappear and new, more adequate for the family
life skills be learned over the time.
