How to Provide Summer Structure for Your ADD Child

Children with Attention Deficit Disorder Need More Structure Than Most Kids

For most kids, a little less structure is a good thing for these lazy, hazy days of summer. In fact, it's needed.

But if you're the parent of a child who struggles with attention deficit disorder (better known as ADD), you know that the absence of structure can be disastrous. Where summer can be a chance to unwind with less planned activities, to an ADD youngster, summer can be a set back when there isn't much order to the day and a regular routine.

As one who's raised an ADD child, I know. I'll never forget a summer day almost twenty years ago. We'd just moved into our new home in the country and were enjoying our new neighborhood. "There is probably a better place to raise my ADD child," I naively said to a friend one July afternoon, chatting on the phone.

Little did know that as I spoke, my 11-year-old child and his new neighborhood friend (also an ADD kid) were ransacking new homes under construction, shooting out windows with BB guns. Later that night after we'd wrung our head in shock and punished him, we cried out in desperation, "Why?! How could you do this? You lied to us when you said you were at your friend's house and his mom was supervising you."

Both our son and the neighborhood ADD friend were actually shocked they got in trouble. Impulsively, they just wanted to have a little fun, blaming each other as to who talked the other one into it.

First, ADD kids and teens need lots of supervision because their brains just don't function the same as kids who don't struggle with it. For some reasons they don't see danger. I remember how one ADD adult shared at an ADD support group meeting how as a teen he thought it would be funny to go inside a bar with a toy gun and yell, "hands up." Strangely, he said he was shocked when they handcuffed him away and took him oof to jail.

If you're the parent of an ADD child and counting off the hours 'til school starts, here are a few suggestions to get you through the rest of the summer. If it's too late to do some of these activities, then make sure you sign up next spring.