You want to be able to say, "Job well done!" to your child, but getting through the nightly homework challenge makes it hard to believe that day will ever come. When you're facing off with your child over lost homework or nonexistent study skills, it's not hard to understand why the academic outcomes of kids with ADHD are often so poor. And there's little comfort in numbers that broadcast that these students are more likely to score low on standardized tests and have worse grades than their peers. Your parenting instinct is to fix this problem and fix it now. But how?
If there's a positive to an ADHD diagnosis, it's getting an explanation for the problems your child is facing. Cappie Taylor Suttle, 40, of Atlanta couldn't figure out why homework was such a misery for the youngest of her five children until he was diagnosed with ADHD.
"Before he was diagnosed he struggled with learning a few of the letter sounds in kindergarten - his progress with this task was threatening his ability to move to the next grade," she recalls. "I thought that drilling him and providing a negative consequence if he failed would work. Of course, it didn't. I felt ashamed for trying to bully him into learning, and he felt confused, helpless, and frustrated."
The tug-of-war over homework is understandable once you know that the process and tasks involved are roughly the opposite of the characteristics of ADHD.
"ADHD is really a disorder defined by difficulty organizing materials and time," explains Joshua Langberg, PhD, an assistant professor at the Center for ADHD, part of the division of behavioral medicine and clinical psychology at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center, and author of Homework, Organization, and Planning Skills (HOPS) Interventions, a National Association of School Psychologists training manual for clinicians addressing homework conflicts.
Kids with ADHD have problems with the entire process: They're more likely to write down homework assignments incorrectly, fail to bring home the materials to complete assignments, lose focus and rush through the assignments at home, or forget to take completed homework back to school. It all adds up to frustration for the whole family.
Tackling the ADHD Homework Challenge
Langberg recommends that parents break the homework process into steps and focus on managing one step at a time rather than trying to solve the whole problem at once. Even though this might seem impossible when you start, Langberg emphasizes that you can achieve a better organized and more successful homework time.
Here are actionable ideas that can help:
- Have a homework notebook. The first and worst challenge for parents is to know what homework their child has on any given day. "Some schools have excellent online systems and use them, but most do not," observes Langberg. He recommends teaching your child to write down assignments in a notebook and then ask the teacher to initial those notes.
- Establish rewards. "Try to reward the most important behavior first," advises Langberg. If you're focusing on correctly writing down homework assignments, the first step, you could offer free time after school and before homework as a reward for getting all teachers to initial the homework notebook. Suttle, whose youngest is also dyslexic, advises knowing your child and being strategic with rewards. For example, any screen time has to be the final reward of the evening, she says, or she'll never get her son back on task. Her mini-rewards might include favorite snacks or short breaks. Other parents use sticker charts to help children work toward a bigger reward by earning stickers.
- Create a work space. Homework will go more smoothly if your child has a distraction-free place to work with all the necessary materials, such as pens, paper, calculators, and rulers.
- Allow breaks. Homework can take hours, so breaks are a good idea. "Don't use time to determine breaks," cautions Langberg. Instead of saying your child can take a break in 20 minutes, allow a break when a concrete amount of homework is correctly completed. And use breaks wisely - don't allow your child to get involved in a distracting activity.
- Break down the tasks. As kids with ADHD progress through school, they will have more homework of different types. In keeping with the breaks, you can divide the work up into different tasks and even different locations. At the same time, find ways to make the unpalatable tasks a bit more pleasant. As Suttle says of this experience with her son, "Reading is a special time for us because he hates to read, so I usually do it at home, cuddled up in bed or a comfy chair."
- Use timers. Timers and clocks can be handy because children with ADHD may be bad at guessing how long a task will take. Setting a timer for 10 minutes and challenging them to beat the timer may give them confidence when they see that a worksheet or assignment doesn't have to take as long as they fear it will. (Of course, set the timer for the amount of time within which you believe they can be successful.)
- Organize materials. Without organization, even students who manage to complete their homework might never get those finished projects to school. You will have to step in and design a system that works. You might set an expectation for how their binders will be kept (neat, without loose papers) as well as the organization of backpacks and lockers. Create a folder for homework, with one pocket for homework assignments and one for completed homework. You might even provide rewards for neatness.
- Scan and copy. In some cases, you might want to maintain digital records of your child's homework. "If all else fails, homework can be faxed to school," says Linda O'Brien of Sterling Heights, Mich., who used a variety of strategies to keep her two sons on track with homework during their school years. Both have ADHD, and one also has Asperger's. "Copies allow for lost homework sheets to still be turned in and provide a record of completed homework for the parents."
- Identify natural consequences. Kids with ADHD have plenty of negative experiences during the day, so you don't want to go overboard with consequences. However, some may be fair and natural, depending on your philosophy. O'Brien required her sons to compensate her for the time she spent bringing them material or homework that they forgot at home. This compensation usually took the form of additional chores around the house. "This was the way I eased them into the needs of keeping house," she recalls.
- Add some fun. Suttle notes that many parents complain that too much of their time with their children becomes a homework battle. She advocates finding ways to make homework time a bit more fun, such as building in "wiggle" breaks to jump and dance together or making homework practice into games.
- Plan for the next day. Once you check that all homework has been done and is in the correct folder, make sure all backpacks are ready for the next day. "When my sons were younger, they would choose their clothes for the next day at this point too," says O'Brien.
As added encouragement for parents, O'Brien points out that although she was actively involved in trying to solve her kids' homework problems from an early age, by the time they got to high school, they were much more self-sufficient. "They had gotten in the habit of keeping their homework where they could find it in their backpacks," she says. "Some tricks were picked up by watching other kids; some they came up with themselves." And now they are happy young adults in college, and the homework battles are in the past - as yours one day will be too.
Last Updated: 6/28/2013