ADHD
Can be seen as:
- Difficulty focusing or staying on task
- Inattention to details
- Inability to sustain attention
- Trouble listening
- Disorganization
- Avoidance of tasks that they don’t find interesting
- Frequently losing things
- Being easily distracted by external stimuli
- Forgetfulness
Or as :
- An ability to multitask
- A propensity to thrive in situations of chaos
- Creative, non linear thinking
- An adventurous spirit
- A capacity for hyper focus on something that fascinates you
- Resilience
- High energy
- A willingness to take calculated risks
- Calmness under pressure
— Dale Archer, The ADHD Advantage
ADHD has its advantages! Many successful people both today and in history have had ADHD; many have gone undiagnosed. They learned to leverage their strengths, such as the ability to compare different aspects of several options in their head, or their ability to stay calm in what the rest of us would call chaos.
So how can we help children or adults, for that matter, learn to harness their gifts and use them? First, we have to realize that people with ADHD won’t fit into our conventional inside-the-box way of doing things, so let’s stop trying to make them fit.
People with ADHD tend to:
- Need more stimulation than the rest of us to stay focused
- Need less sleep
- Work best in the wee hours of the morning or the late hours of the night.
- Have hyper-connected brains, so they make connections to things that we don’t always follow
- Get distracted easily—yet when, really interested can be hyper focused on something for hours and lose track of time
- Lose track of time, often being late, and forgetting things
- Thrive off multitasking
- Do really well under pressure
- Be big picture thinkers, and not so good at remembering all the details
- Need help from people in their lives who are strong at the things they struggle with—much like the rest of us!
In a lot of cases, parents, teachers, and doctors jump straight to medicating a child. I am not saying medication is wrong, but in my opinion there are many things we should try first, before dampening their brain and the child’s personality. Meds may end up being the answer for a short while or at certain times in a person’s life, but long term use can have some unwanted side effects. I believe that diet, exercise, coping mechanisms, and an open mind to things being done in unconventional ways are what needs to be considered first.
Supporting kids with ADHD in the classroom
Let’s make classrooms that fit the kids rather than kids to fit the classroom. My first suggestion is to ask the kids what works for them. If they know great, if they don’t here are some ideas to stimulate their brains, and help them focus.
- Fidgeting: Tapping a pencil or playing with a fidget toy
- Wiggle seat/ yoga ball
- Movement breaks every 30 min (I love brain gym breaks for the whole class)
- Changing places—Moving about to a new place in the classroom
- Multi-tasking: Working on a few different assignments at once. I tried this with one of my clients who was super frustrated, having a really hard time with sight words and got stuck in a routine of giving me the same wrong answer over and over again. She always seemed to get distracted even when sitting in a room with only a table, 2 chairs (one for her and one for me), and her work. So I tried alternating between a math equation and a sight word, and she got 50% more sight words correct. Before each question, I’d ask things like:
- “We are thinking about numbers now.”
- “Is your brain thinking about letter sounds now?”
- Build on interest—Work with what they are interested in and build lessons around that.
- Free time—Give them time that is unstructured so they can let their “Bingo brain” run free. It is important for a person with ADHD brain to have space to day dream, freely to make all those connections they make in their brain run freely. Amazing things can happen during those periods.
- Vigorous activity before seated activities
- Short bursts of instructions, so as not to get bored and tune out
- Kick start: When they have trouble focusing sometimes they need what I call a kick start, so start with something they like related to what needs to be done. For example when a friend of mine can’t get into working on his computer he starts by playing a game on it and after he plays for 10- 15 minutes his brain is in computer mode and then he gets down to work. It could be to start reading or listening to something they like before moving on to reading the textbook. It is kind of warming up their brain to get in the zone.
ADHD has an impact on the kid’s social lives, too. They don’t always catch when others can’t follow their train of thought, and often are a lot more self educated on subjects they are interested in than their peers. Sometimes the opposite is true they have trouble articulating what they are thinking. Teaching children with ADHD to be self aware, and read social cues, and control those impulses to interrupt others are essential to their success.
Sports are a great way to help children with ADHD with so many skills while meeting their need for movement and exercise. Teams sports teach them cooperation, communication, and resilience while things like dance, Karate, boxing and wrestling give them body movement to study, which is very complex and always changing so they don’t get bored.