ADHD Blog

I’m sure you know the basics: water is an essential part of good health and we’re encouraged to drink eight 8-0z glasses a day. We all associate water with physical health, but did you also know that water is a critical component of mental health? A researcher at Georgia Institute of Technology recently published an analysis of 33 different studies looking at water and mental health.  The findings?  Overall, in studies where participants were asked to complete tasks when dehydrated, they made 12% more errors that when not dehydrated.

As a therapist I hear over and over again from parents and kids with ADHD that homework is the number one cause of frustration, stress, and arguments at home. This is true whether kids are in elementary school and have only 20 minutes of homework each night or they are in high school and have an hour or more of homework to do each day. Why? While it might seem like it should be simple enough to just sit down and do your homework, the task of doing homework actually requires many complex skills that are hard for kids with ADHD, like getting started right away, staying focused on something that is not interesting, delaying gratification (since homework comes with no immediate reward), organizing and prioritizing assignments, sitting still for an extended period of time, and blocking out distractions. On top of this, the same ADHD symptoms that make it hard to do homework interfere with learning during the school day, which means a child may not have absorbed all the academic knowledge and skills needed to complete any given assignment. When we take a step back and think about homework from this perspective, it starts to become a little clearer why kids with ADHD struggle the way that they do.

Like it or not homework is about to become part of your child’s daily routine when school starts back up in the fall. For kids with ADHD, getting into the habit of doing homework is never easy. Fortunately, parents can help make the adjustment a little less painful by having a homework station filled with supplies and ready to go by the first day of school. Creating a homework station that works for kids with ADHD means considering their unique organizational, motivational, and attention-related challenges when planning the location, the supplies, and the clutter control strategies.

Last week’s post was dedicated to new research about ADHD and risk for video game addiction. While research in this area is still emerging, the finding that we have already are enough to cause parents, teachers, and therapists to be concerned. Up to 90% of kids and teens spend time playing video games,¹ making it very difficult for parents to eliminate video games from their children’s lives altogether. This is especially true for kids and teens who have been playing video games for years with very few limitations. That said, even without eliminating video games, there are many things parents can do to help their kids develop healthy gaming habits.

Earlier this year, a team of researchers published findings from a study examining the connection between problematic video game use and ADHD in the American Journal of Drug and Alcohol Abuse. The results add to a small but growing body of evidence suggesting that kids and adults with ADHD are at increased risk for problematic video game use. This particular study found that among adults who play video games, higher levels of ADHD symptoms are associated with more severe symptoms of video game addiction (the average age of the adults in the study was 22, and over 90% of the participants were men). The study also explored whether specific characteristics of the games being played had an impact on video game addiction symptoms. Surprisingly, factors like how much someone feels the video game encourages them to continue playing, or how reinforcing they find a video game to be, did not have any impact on the connection between video game addiction and ADHD symptoms. While more research is needed in this area, the study authors suggest that individuals with ADHD who play video games should be informed about the signs of video game addiction and the elevated risk that may be associated ADHD.   

It may feel like summer just started, but next year’s school year is right around the corner.  For kids with ADHD getting back into the swing of things at school can be challenging. A rough start to the school year can be difficult to bounce back from, and for some kids with ADHD it can kick off a downward spiral of low self-confidence and poor academic performance.