This essay presents a case study regarding how some preschool teachers describe the diagnosis of AD/HD, and how they express their perception of children who show the symptoms associated with that diagnosis. We also wanted to study how the preschool teachers described their work with these children, and how the teachers responded to the children’s specific needs.

The study draws on a qualitative study based on interviews with six preschool teachers in two municipalities in the Southern Stockholm region. All of the teachers had experience of children with an AD/HD diagnosis. Interviews were recorded and transcribed before analysis. The theoretical framework chosen for this essay is discourse analysis. We applied different parts of Fairclough’s and Foucault's methods of discourse analysis to clarify how language was used to describe children with AD/HD. The framework also allowed us to analyse how language may contribute to construct and maintain discourses about children with that diagnosis.

 We could discern from the interviews with the preschool teachers that children with AD/HD were mainly described as problematic. Another conclusion is that although the teachers showed an awareness of gender issues when speaking of children generally, their choice of words when talking about children with AD/HD implied old stereotypical gender-based expectations. Finally, the preschool teachers described both advantages and disadvantages of diagnosing children, however, most of them emphasised a need for a diagnostic categorization to facilitate their work with these children.