ADHD in high school: special needs in its most special form
RelationshipA recent study from the National Institute of Health has come to an initial conclusion about ADHD. While ADHD is most obvious at the beginning of school, when poor impulse control and attention spans prevent a kindergarten or first grader from sitting still long enough to hear what the homework, it’s more annoying in high school. This is because the developmental delay experienced by children with “significant,” “profound,” or “severe” ADHD has been established at up to thirty percent delay.
This means that for a five-year-old child, the delay is approximately 1.5 effective years; Without outside help, a 5-year-old with ADHD will learn like a 3.5-year-old. But for a 15-year-old, that same 30% translates into a four-and-a-half-year delay. So a 15-year-old with ADHD learns just as well as a 10.5-year-old. That’s the difference between “just starting high school” and “just finishing elementary school.”
ADHD in high school students
9 out of 10 children with ADD (the ‘inattentive’ variation), hyperactivity disorder or ADHD (the ‘combined’ form) will experience school difficulties. Every child is unique, but almost every child diagnosed with some form of ADHD will show one or more of these problems in high school:
• Spacing out: The most common problem for adolescents with ADHD is their tendency to simply daydream during free time, missing crucial events such as homework assignments, the content of a lecture, or instructions for the next activity.
• Lack of attention to detail: Almost as prevalent: the tendency to leave out important details of a task. Teachers who refuse to grade an assignment that has no name or date, for example, can be extremely difficult for students with ADHD. Similarly, any subject in which every detail counts (algebra, for example, or grammar) can be almost impossible for a brain that has trouble noticing that the details exist, much less keeping track of what is happening. are.
• Impulse control: Teens tend to show this problem in the form of shortcuts, don’t show their work (especially in math), and hate typing (it takes too long when you can type!).
• Poor organizational/time management skills: Teens with ADHD are notorious for their inability to delay gratification; they want to do the cool stuff first, and then get to the work part later… which often means never. They often don’t know where to start on tasks that aren’t detailed and essentially don’t plan ahead at all.
• Poor memorization: Rote memorization, such as multiplication tables and especially names and dates (history class!) is very difficult for a teen with ADHD. This same effect often means that a teen with ADHD will simply forget what class they are supposed to follow, or simply forget to turn in her homework.
address problems
The best way to address these issues, unfortunately, is often through pharmaceutical medicine. As much as we would all like to be able to solve our children’s problems with less artificial forms of intervention, none of the standard interventions have a success rate approaching that of pharmaceuticals.