How to Help Your ADD/ADHD Child with Study Habits

Learning something new can be one of the most thrilling parts of life. Do you remember when you finally mastered something difficult - Latin conjugation, quadratic equations, or mitered corners? Didn’t you feel enormous satisfaction that left you glowing for days afterwards?

This experience of mastery builds confidence in our abilities, and for a child with ADD/ADHD, few things will be more thrilling than beating the demons in his brain and learning what he wants when he wants.

So what do I mean by “flexible”? Doing whatever it takes to learn the material. Studying is really a habit of mind, and once your child learns how to think about learning, she’ll be able to create whatever strategies she needs.   

Let me give you an example. When I was a senior in high school, I took advanced placement classes in English, American history, Spanish, and calculus. For the first time in my school career, I was actually challenged enough not to be bored (actually, calculus nearly did me in!), and my Spanish teacher, in particular, made going to class one of the peak experiences of my life.

This was in 1968, when the AP exams were fairly new, so there were no books or outside classes to help me prepare for them. This was also before teachers were forced to teach tests, so we were told the basic setup of the exams - multiple choice questions and essays (long problems in calculus) - and then left on our own to study.

The only textbook I had was for calculus, so I went to the textbook store, and in the basement stacks I found a used college anthology of short stories, a two-volume outline of American history, and a Spanish grammar book.  I didn’t do any cramming - I’d already gotten into the college of my choice and I figured any AP credit I got would be a gift. Instead, I relaxed and enjoyed myself, reading some fine literature, learning all sorts of new details about American history, re-immersing myself in beautiful Spanish, and reworking troublesome problems in calculus.