The difficulties in raising a child with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) go beyond what most parents can handle. Many turn to doctors for both advice and treatment and still have trouble getting a grip at home.

Most doctors will advise you to put your child on medication. However, medication can be addictive and detrimental to a developing brain. ¹ As such, you may want to create parental strategies before receiving a prescription.

Within this blog, we’ll teach you how you can help your child focus without medication.

Where Do Kids with ADHD Struggle?

It’s easier to help your child when you can identify where they struggle most. Remember that ADHD affects every child differently. Therefore, not everything mentioned below will relate to your specific case.

Here are the four areas of life where children with ADHD struggle most:

1.) Socializing

As a parent, it’s hard to see your child struggle to make friends or be a part of a group. Keep in mind that these struggles are not their fault. Rather, they are products of impulsive behavior. ²

If you see your child interrupting a game or making a fuss when things don’t go their way, try to role-play or act out these situations with your child. If you can guide them on how to behave, there’s a better chance they’ll replicate or understand how to act when these situations arise.

2.) Organizing

If you’ve been raising a child with ADHD, you’re well aware of the mess they can make. Furthermore, they may sometimes lose items of importance, such as homework, their favorite toy, or a cell phone. ³

To keep up with your child, make a check-list of everything they need daily. From there, keep track of these items and influence their importance to your child.

3.) Finishing Tasks

Whether it’s a chore or a school assignment, children with ADHD have trouble completing a variety of different tasks. This isn’t so much an act of laziness as much as a distortion of time. In other words, ADHD causes people to perceive time differently than most. ⁴

To ensure your child completes various tasks, keep an organization chart or checklist to help them visualize what they need to do.

REMEMBER: Most children with ADHD want to finish a specific task. They simply can’t find it in themselves to do so out of their ADHD symptoms.

4.) Scheduling

Just as children have trouble organizing their bedrooms, it’s also difficult for them to manage time. If you want your child to better plan their time, create a weekly picture schedule to help them visualize where they need to stay on track. This will allow them to develop their own solution which will most likely carry on later in life.

How to Get Your Child to Focus

It’s no secret that one of the biggest difficulties children with ADHD face is having the ability to focus. These days, distractions are everywhere and many parents struggle to get their children’s attention. That said, here are five tips for you to practice the next time your child needs to complete an important assignment:

1.) Be Mindful with Your Child

By this, we advise you to practice meditation or breathing techniques with your child to produce mindfulness. These techniques have proven to help children better their behavior and potential to focus. ⁵

2.) Give Your Child a Time Limit

Before you even begin a project, ensure your child knows they have a time limit for completion. This timer is a great way to allow your child to understand when they’re allowed to take a break. It will also most likely influence them to get more done within their time.

3.) Get Right to Work

When your child needs to complete a project, don’t let them procrastinate. Procrastination is one of the biggest issues with ADHD and can lead to other time management issues. ⁶ Jump right into work when it needs to get done.

Tip: If you break down projects into chunks, your child will feel less overwhelmed with a single task.

4.) Limit Distractions

As a parent, you know exactly what will distract your child. When completing a task, make sure distractions aren’t in the room.

5.) Keep an Open Mind

As you try to get your child to focus on a task, you may find they’re more adaptable to a technique not mentioned here. If so, go with it. Be open to other ways of helping your child out.

Talking with Your Child

A key element to helping your child is developing proper communication. This will allow you to get across your ideas and learn where your child may be going wrong.

Of course, communication isn’t always easy, especially with a child who has trouble focusing. So, what can you say to your child? The most important thing is to listen to what they have to say. If your child trusts you’ll listen to them, they will feel more inclined to listen to what you say.

To get your child to speak, it’s important to ask questions. Questions such as:

• “What do you think helps you focus?”
• “What distracts you more than anything?”
• “Is there anything I can do to help you focus?”

Questions as such will lead you to answers that vary from child to child. Some children with ADHD work better in a neat environment while others find they can focus if another child in their class isn’t so loud and distracting.

Let your child give you the answers to the problems they are thinking of. As adults, we can rationalize how to better help our children. In the examples mentioned above, a good parent will influence and help a child organize their working environment. Or, they may ask the teacher to sit their child away from the distracting classmate.

Still, some parents may simply have trouble influencing their children to want to focus. If you feel that no matter what you try, your child won’t listen to you, you’re not alone.

A solution to this problem is offering encouragement. If your child has a big project due at the end of the week and has trouble getting it done, you have to find a way to encourage them to begin and continue working on it. Since every child works differently, it can be difficult to pinpoint how to encourage yours.

Therefore, you may also want to spend time getting to know your child and figuring out what makes them most happy. Whether it’s a toy or taking a fishing trip, you will find ways to encourage them.

Most Common Distractions

When it comes to your child’s focus, you may need to seek the core of the problem. However, it’s important to note that when you do find the problem, you shouldn’t punish your child. Children with ADHD can’t help but become distracted. Similarly to how you and I can’t help scratching ourselves whenever we have an itch: it’s practically instinctual.

So, when you find the core of this problem, you must continue with encouragement to help lean your child away from distractions. Since every child works differently, their distractions will differ. However, here are the most common forms of distraction a child will come across:

• Loud noises (such as a phone’s ring or a dog’s bark).
• Playing with or touching things they shouldn’t.
• The nature of their thoughts.

It should also be noted that children with ADHD will find the smallest things interesting. Whether this is a fly buzzing around the room or someone walking past the doorway in their class.

Final Word

Though it seems difficult at the current moment, children with ADHD all have a chance to live a fulfilling life. Many will grow into adults who no longer face the symptoms. Even still, adults with ADHD tend to develop their own means of controlling their focus.

As we discussed in the intro, a medical professional will advise your child to undergo traditional ADHD treatment which requires medication. Though this advice will work for some children, it may be in your benefit to try some of the techniques mentioned in this blog before giving your child medication.

You may find that with a little effort on your end and a little practice on theirs, your child will beat their symptoms on their own term.

References

¹ Andersen SL. Stimulants and the developing brain. Trends Pharmacol Sci. 2005 May;26(5):237-43. doi: 10.1016/j.tips.2005.03.009. PMID: 15860370.

² Carpenter Rich E, Loo SK, Yang M, Dang J, Smalley SL. Social functioning difficulties in ADHD: association with PDD risk. Clin Child Psychol Psychiatry. 2009 Jul;14(3):329-44. doi: 10.1177/1359104508100890. PMID: 19515751; PMCID: PMC2827258.

³ Langberg JM, Epstein JN, Graham AJ. Organizational-skills interventions in the treatment of ADHD. Expert Rev Neurother. 2008 Oct;8(10):1549-61. doi: 10.1586/14737175.8.10.1549. PMID: 18928347.

⁴ Ptacek R, Weissenberger S, Braaten E, Klicperova-Baker M, Goetz M, Raboch J, Vnukova M, Stefano GB. Clinical Implications of the Perception of Time in Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD): A Review. Med Sci Monit. 2019 May 26;25:3918-3924. doi: 10.12659/MSM.914225. PMID: 31129679; PMCID: PMC6556068.

⁵ Gu Y, Zhu Y, Brown KW. Mindfulness and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder: A Neuropsychological Perspective. J Nerv Ment Dis. 2021 Nov 1;209(11):796-801. doi: 10.1097/NMD.0000000000001388. PMID: 34292276.

⁶ Oguchi M, Takahashi T, Nitta Y, Kumano H. The Moderating Effect of Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder Symptoms on the Relationship Between Procrastination and Internalizing Symptoms in the General Adult Population. Front Psychol. 2021 Oct 26;12:708579. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.708579. PMID: 34764902; PMCID: PMC8575693.