This article reports a case-study of categorizing practices and their consequences in school. One institutional arena in which issues of school-problems are dealt with is the pupil welfare conference (PWC). Here the parents and experts from school participate. Data draws from a micro-ethnographic analysis of the PWC. It is shown that the meetings turn out to be a negotiation about the identity of the child where the school representatives argue for deviance and the diagnosis ADHD as an explanation, while the parents resist a diagnosis and invoke normality. The main explanation used by the parents is that the boy will mature and the problems will disappear with age. Theyalso bring up some worrying consequences of labelling. However, in the end the institution is successful in the negotiations and the boy is later diagnosed as having ADHD and placed in a special class outside the regular school.