ADHD in High School: Not a Bad Boy, Just Misunderstood
High school students with untreated ADHD are possibly some of the most misunderstood kids in school. A high school teacher’s assumption is that if the student had a ‘genuine’ problem, she would have a ‘genuine’ diagnosis and a history of attempted interventions and treatments. If your child makes it to middle school before their disorder becomes fully obvious, and 1 in 12 do! It can be a terrible situation if your ADHD is not quickly recognized and understood.
ADHD and the problem of motivation
One of the most fundamental reasons for this phenomenon is that teens with ADHD are not motivated by the same things as their peer group. The threat of failing grades is too far away to mean anything to a child with ADHD; her brains can’t connect her day-to-day, hour-to-hour behavior with an evaluation that occurs months later. Because of this, they can seem to teachers that they just don’t care about their grades. That’s not true; they just feel powerless to affect those grades, they feel like they happen to the student, not that they are caused by the student.
Misconduct as a result of inattention
“Ready, FIRE!…Aim?” — The classic battle cry of tweens with ADHD. Oftentimes, a high school student with ADHD has the best intentions and launches into a new task with enthusiasm… only to end up distracted by the way Vanessa’s hair bounces when you kick her chair over. Or they will volunteer to take on a duty they shouldn’t have a problem with, and then just forget they had volunteered. Despite the frustration they cause, they are not trying to cause trouble; ADHD simply kicks in to push thoughts relevant to your promise (or task at hand) completely out of your mind.
Impulse control: the clever devil
Children with ADHD are often smart in unexpected ways; The ADHD brain is known to be highly creative and capable of connecting subjects along lines that seem highly intelligent to an adult. Unfortunately, this often plays directly into the idea that tween with ADHD is problematic because it blends so well with their lack of impulse control.
The classic example is the teacher who says something negative about a tween with ADHD’s behavior or the quality of their work, and the child returns almost instantly (and completely out of line) with a scathing comment about something the teacher did wrong or wrong, not because the child was trying to attack the teacher, but because the ADHD brain connects 1) the teacher and 2) the concept of “poor quality,” and simply conjures up the last time those two ideas were connected: performance teacher deficient. And the impulse control problem means that the thought that arose immediately comes out of their mouth, coming off as a direct attack on the teacher even though it happened practically without any thought or conscious will on the part of the tweens.
Middle school is a place where teens with ADHD can get along fairly well with their peers, but teachers are finding it increasingly difficult to keep them functioning normally both socially and academically.
