How can Educational Therapy help ADHD? (Part 1)

Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder is a neurodevelopmental disorder that impacts a child's functioning & development and, according to the DSM-V, it can affect many areas of a child's personal and academic life ranging from organization of thoughts & school work to regulating and controlling emotions & reactions. Luckily for parents, educational therapists leverage many teaching and intervention techniques to help these students grow to their potential. In today's blog post, I am going to discuss some of the ways educational therapy can help remediate some of the struggle areas for children diagnosed with ADHD.

Time management

For many students with ADHD, the concept of time is elusive....at best. There is little difference between 5 minutes and 5 hours. Often they feel that they have plenty of time in the day to get all of their work done and in a blink, it is bed time and they didn't do anything they needed to accomplish.

One way educational therapy can help these students is through helping them accurately predict how long it takes to complete a task. Sometimes overlooked, understanding how much time is needed for a project/assignment/task is a vital skill to time management, and since it truly is a skill, it can be worked on and practiced. Educational therapists can provide guidance and interventions to grow this skill while providing scaffolding to a student as they learn.

An additional technique is helping students structure their time to properly plan their day depending on what tasks they need to accomplish. This skill goes hand in hand with the previous one. Even if somebody can accurately predict the amount of time a task would take, they still need to set aside that time to complete the task. Educational therapists work directly with students on this exact skill through modeling and guided practice. They make sure to start with small victories that in time grow to a developed routine.

Emotional Regulation

A not widely known symptom of ADHD is difficulties with self-regulation, and more specifically emotional regulation. There are three hallmark emotions that children with ADHD have difficulties regulating: frustration, impatience, and excitement. Parents of these children can likely tell countless stories involving a child overreacting, struggling to inhibit their movements, or getting wildly enthusiastic about something that just happened.

Educational therapy can offer a solution to families by providing a safe outlet for child with ADHD to express these emotions while learning how to reflect upon and regulate them. They do this by tracking how the child reacts to certain events and giving the child an opportunity to understand why they felt the way they did so that they can better control their emotions in the future. These outbursts, whether positive or negative, can be disruptive to any family unit and one of the best benefits from using an educational therapist is that it allows the child to work with a non-family member on these emotional struggles while allowing the family to be exactly that - a family.

Organize School Material

"Where did you put your homework?"........"I don't know". A brief conversation I had with my parents way too often as a child that parents today are all too familiar with having. Arguably the most apparent struggle that people with ADHD have is organization. This is because brains affected by ADHD have difficulties with executive functioning, which is the area of the brain in charge of organization, planning, prioritization, and much more.

No two brains are the same, so to follow suit, no two organization systems are the same. Educational therapists are trained in understanding different ways to individualize their work and organizational systems are one of the most customizable areas of intervention. By taking a holistic approach, educational therapists can work with your child to develop a system that fits into their lives smoothly. Once a system has been created, it gets reinforced through structured repetition designed to have your child develop an organzational habit over time.

Makes sure to tune in next post when I continue to breakdown ways that educational therapy can help students with ADHD. If you have any more specific questions, or want a free consultation for your child with ADHD, please contact The Learning Navigators at thelearningnavigators@gmail.com. See you next post!