Ways to help your child with ADHD at home and school

Introduction

How to help your child with ADHD at home, what they should do at school, and if they get a diagnosis, is there is a possibility of them needing medication?

Whether your child has ADHD or is somewhere on the ADHD spectrum, here are a variety of detailed and evidence-based things you can do to support your child.  To get more advice regarding ADHD diagnosis, see the previous post on ‘Might my child have ADHD?’

Develop Better Self-Management

Remember that children with ADHD require more strategies to help them manage at home and at school, and that they are not being deliberately inconsiderate or difficult – their brains are still catching up,they have difficulties in three main areas; inattentive (poor focus), impulsive and hyperactive.

As result they need more external structure to help them learn to focus and organise themselves, they need more encouragement than other children, more help to learn to take more responsibility over their own behaviour and its consequences.  So at school they may need prompting to make sure that they know what they have to do, what they need to have to be able to do it, and prompting so that they begin work within 60 seconds of the teacher’s instruction being given.They need to be very quickly praised if they do it, and reminded and guided to do so if they do not. Seating them near the front of the class, or next to a sensible focused pupil (using the powerful effects of pupil modelling) can also be helpful. 

Increase Concentration Skills

You can increase your child's concentration skills in many different ways, here's some to get you started!

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