Just curious what you all think. It seems like it's standard that all the 'experts' (books and such) always recommend 'routines' for ADHD and it supposedly helps them learn, accomplish things and is generally a good thing. However I have two sons - one ADD and the other ADHD and they both object strongly to strict routines and claim to feel more distracted etc. when they experience a lot of boredom (which they do from routines). The ADHD one, claims that he is more productive when his teachers allow him more flexibility. But they are a little to young for me to know if this is REALLY the case or it's just wishful thinking on their part.

Your thoughts?

weez

weez,

This is a good topic! Perhaps one could think about the difference between "structure" and "routine".

The structure is the outside time schedule (when it has to be done, or when it has to be worked on every day), the rules for performing or understanding a task (how it should be done), and the prioritizing (what order to do the various parts of a task).

Routine, to a person with ADD, is deadly. This word to me means doing a task that we have already learned how to do over and over and over. Our brains freak out. We can't focus.

We need an outside structure because we have a great difficulty creating one ourselves. Without this outside structure our brains also freak out, because we don't know how to make order from all the little details.

However, when we are interested in learning something, or when a task has just enough creativity to make its thousandth iteration interesting, we can dive in and hyperfocus.

ADD brains are over-active. A structure gives us a "container" in which to keep our thoughts from flying all over the place. But if we are asked to solved yet more arithmetic problems that we already know how to do and that the teacher is handing out for homework because she thinks that the class needs repetition and I've already learned how to do them --- my brain goes crazy and screams out for something -- anything -- exciting and new and if the boring old schoolwork doesn't give me something exciting then my brain will create it and I'm in chaos and (ahem) those around me might suspect that I have ADD.

Within the structure of the rules for a new lesson, can the teacher allow your sons to have enough freedom to be creative? Just doing the same lesson over and over may be important to get the idea across for a lot of students. I can recite my times tables decades after I left school because of such repetition. But I would have gotten a lot more out of my math lessons if I had been able to do creative things with it -- write stories, solve "mysteries", draw colorful pictures to illustrate a point, etc.

But sitting in class day after day doing the same thing over and over and over -- no.

Your sons need intellectual stimulation. Yes, they need structure and rules of good classroom behavior, and enough repetition to get the ideas to sink in. But their brains are hyperactive, and the best strategy is to give their brains a direction to focus on. Even the repetition of the times tables or whatever can be made exciting, if the teacher at randome times just calls out to the class "what's 6 times 9?" That's enough of a distraction from what the kids are currently doing to get their attention, and they have to stop and think, and their brains are working on something specific, and it's fun because it's unexpected.

At any rate, I certainly have no qualifications to tell a teacher how to teach, but I can tell you that very few of my teachers knew how to engage my attention. I was extremely bored through a great deal of my school years. This was, in my opinion, a great deal of wasted time sitting in class doing routines because that's what the teachers had been taught was the latest and greatest method for teaching children. Any child who tuned out or was unruly or couldn't understand the lesson was labeled a troublemaker or an underachiever and left to fend for themselves.

Different people learn differently. Your sons do indeed need to learn how to get along in this modern western society, and schooling teaches that, along with the math and history and language lessons. But they have ADD/ADHD. They need a bit of help that kids without ADD don't need. Listen to your son. He isn't going to learn if he's bored out of his mind. And what's wrong with creativity and having the kid be a part of the learning process? Too many teachers think that their job is to teach. And they forget that the other half of teaching is learning. In my opinion, if a child isn't learning, then the teaching methods for that child aren't appropriate.

Structure, yes. Routine -- it needs to be varied just enough to engage his chaotic mind.

My two cents as I'm looking back on my own school years,

--Rheanna