ADHD and Negative Back to School Thoughts
Are you finding that your child with ADHD is having negative thoughts about going back to school? The transition back to school can be a mixed bag full of emotions and can have an impact on our children’s mental health.
Let’s consider for a moment some of the negative things our kids with learning differences such as ADHD may experience while they are at school:
Feelings of being behind in class
Missing instructions
Feeling singled out and/or shame for needing extra support
Being corrected/redirected/getting in trouble, sometimes many times a day
Feeling overwhelmed and disorganized with work and assignments
Having to sit still when your body wants to move
It is easy to see how these feelings would contribute to perceptions of negativity when some kids think about going back to school.
We brought in a guest speaker, Arti Kumar-Jain, on one of our SYT Learn calls to help to provide some insights, strategies and support with how to help our kids with ADHD (and other learning differences) with back to school.
One of Arti’s takeaways was to reflect and examine the areas of back to school:
Organization - how can your kids stay more organized?
Accommodations - what is it going to look like for your child and what accommodations can you talk to your teacher about for your child?
Homework - what sort of homework will they get and what support do they need?
Focus - is staying on task an issue, how do we help with that?
Parent-teacher engagement - what do you want it to look like and how do you facilitate this to best support your child?
School behaviour - has this been a problem in the past, what strategies can you look at to help with this?
Consider how each of the above is affecting your child, and whichever is causing the most angst for you and your child, focus on those. Think about what they need, what you need, and what systems or processes you can put in place to help in those areas. It is easy for all of us to get into auto-pilot mode, but it is important to get your kids involved in the discussion, reflecting on their goals and what parts of school may be bringing up feelings of negativity.
Arti also discussed ways that you can bring more positive effects into your child’s life (which may be needed even more based on both the difficult transitions and the negativity they may be experiencing) through support such as:
Empathy - where we try to understand our kid’s feelings, practice active listening with them, helping wants and needs to be examined, and engaging with your kids about the highs and lows of their days.
Compassionate Communication - where we try to be patient and understanding, and we ground ourselves in care for others and self-care.
Focus - provide strategies to help your kids. Focus stands for: Flexibility (what can I do to go with the flow), Overwhelm (what can I do when I feel overwhelmed), Clarity (what are they asking of me?), Understanding (how do I understand the topics), and Simplify (breakdown and simplify tasks).
Scheduling - help your child to determine must do’s and can do’s, break tasks down, create morning and evening task list schedules to make things easier and less overwhelming.
Positive Reframing - make sure that your children are also learning about their strengths, what they are good at and excel at, reframe their diagnosis to not be seen as a deficit, but a different way of learning.
Arti also shared some great activities to help our kids create a more positive outlook and have less overwhelm in their lives through things such as intentional connectedness time, using feelings charts, creating music playlists together, creating a zen box of calming activities, or doing breathing exercises.
Back to school can no doubt bring up many emotions, especially if school can sometimes be frustrating, bring up feelings of shame or of being “less-than”, and feel overwhelming. Through reflection, connection, and an intentional focus on the positive, we can hopefully help make the experience a better one for our kids.
If you would like to learn more about some of these strategies, check out Arti’s SYT Learn Masterclass in our FREE SYT Support Library.