Up to 30% of Children on ADHD Medication Don't Improve. A Denver-Area Psychologist Says What Comes Next Can Change That

Neurofeedback is offered as an alternative. A licensed psychologist and board-certified neurofeedback practitioner says the more important issue is evaluation

ENGLEWOOD, CO, UNITED STATES, October 5, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ -- Stimulant medication is the standard first treatment for childhood ADHD, and for many children it works well. For a substantial minority, it does not.

Research indicates that up to 30% of children treated with stimulants either fail to show improvement or experience side effects including decreased appetite, insomnia and irritability.

Those families frequently begin searching for something else, and neurofeedback is among the most common things they find.

Dr. Steffanie Stecker, a licensed psychologist and founder of Mountain Vista Psychology, said the question parents ask at that point is usually whether neurofeedback works. She said it is the wrong first question.

"The question I would ask is whether anyone has actually looked at this child's brain," Stecker said. "In a lot of cases the answer is no. A family gets a diagnosis, tries a medication, and when that does not work they are sent to somebody who begins training without ever having assessed what they are training."

Neurofeedback uses real-time measurement of brain activity to help a person learn to regulate their own patterns.

The research picture is more complicated than that classification alone suggests.

A 2024 network meta-analysis of 13 randomized controlled trials involving 1,370 children found most neurofeedback approaches outperformed placebo on ADHD symptoms. Other reviews, particularly those relying on blinded raters, have found smaller effects that did not reach statistical significance.

Stecker said she tells families that directly.

"I am not going to tell a parent this is settled science, because it is not," she said. "What I will tell them is that it is well tolerated, that it has been studied seriously for decades. Then we look at whether it makes sense for their particular child."

That last part, she said, is where most of the field falls down.

The gap between evaluation and treatment.

Stecker holds board certification in neurofeedback and is a QEEG diplomate, a credential based on quantitative EEG, which produces a map of an individual's brain activity patterns.

"You would not prescribe glasses without an eye exam," she said. "The evaluation tells you what to target. Training the wrong thing is not neutral. It costs a family months."

One randomized trial comparing neurofeedback with methylphenidate in children aged seven to 14 found comparable reductions in ADHD symptoms reported by parents and teachers across both groups. Improvements in academic performance were found only in the neurofeedback group.

Stecker said results like that are worth understanding carefully rather than celebrating.

"It was a small study," she said. "But it points at something clinicians see. Medication can reduce symptoms without changing how a child functions in a classroom, and parents notice that difference before anyone else does."

What she tells families to ask

Stecker said parents evaluating any neurofeedback provider should ask three things.
What is the training and experience of the provider?
What is the training and experience of the person choosing the individualized protocol?

And what is the provider’s experience, not just with neurofeedback, but also with what I am struggling with (i.e., ADHD, anxiety, trauma).

Mountain Vista Psychology provides psychological testing, counseling and neurofeedback for children, teens and adults across the south Denver metro area, with offices in Englewood, Greenwood Village, Littleton and south Denver.

Media Contact

Steffanie Stecker, Ph.D.
drstecker@mountainvistapsychology.com

Steffanie Stecker
Mountain Vista Psychology
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