Does ADHD just fade away on its own as you get older?

My dad says the same thing about himself and then in the same conversation describes losing his wallet weekly and never finishing a home project in 30 years, so. I think a lot of 'grew out of it' is actually 'built enough workarounds that it's less visible,' not actually gone.

There's a real phenomenon here, but it's more nuanced than 'grew out of it' suggests. Hyperactivity specifically does tend to visibly decrease with age for a lot of people, the bouncing-off-walls presentation common in young kids often shifts into something more internal rather than fully disappearing, which can look like 'growing out of it' from the outside even though the underlying attention regulation issues are often still there, just less visible. Inattention and executive function challenges, on the other hand, tend to be a lot more persistent into adulthood and don't follow the same fade-out pattern, which is part of why so many adults get diagnosed later, the hyperactive piece quieted down enough that nobody flagged it as a kid, but the attention/organization/follow-through struggles kept causing real problems into adulthood. Your uncle's story is plausible in the sense that some people do have a milder presentation that becomes manageable without formal treatment as they build more structure and life experience, especially if it was never severe enough to cause major impairment. But 'grew out of it completely with zero lingering effects' is less common than people think, a lot of adults who say that, when actually screened, still show meaningful ADHD-consistent patterns, they've just built enough coping mechanisms that it's stopped looking like a problem from the outside.