Parents of children who have ADHD understand that there are no simple, quick, answers about how to help their child. Treatment for ADHD can include medication and behavior modification, and those things take time before they can become effective. What about trying some positive feedback? At least one researcher thinks it could help.
Think for a moment about something you were working on that was difficult for you. It should be something that you didn’t find particularly fun, and that took a long time before you saw any results. For many people, this could describe a diet.
Most people do not enjoy changing their eating habits, especially when it means resisting the urge to grab their favorite foods. It takes time to lose weight, and you may have weeks where you didn’t lose any at all, even though you followed your diet. It is very easy to get discouraged, and to feel like just giving up.
Now, think about how good it feels when your friend, or your spouse, gives you some encouragement. Your friend asks if you have lost weight, or your spouse says that you look great. Suddenly, it gets a little bit easier to find the drive to continue to work towards your goal. You become less frustrated, and more hopeful.
Those negative feelings you had while trying to lose weight are very similar to how children who have ADHD feel towards school. Many symptoms of ADHD are not compatible with the school environment.
It can be extremely difficult for a child who has ADHD to sit still the entire time a story is being read, or to focus on everything the teacher is saying. It is a struggle that medication and behavior modification can help with, but not entirely erase. It becomes worse when the distraction results in failing grades. This dynamic is what causes many kids who have ADHD to hate school.
Adriana Bus, at Leiden University, in the Netherlands, believes that some “positive feedback” can be especially helpful for children who have ADHD.
She looked at 182 four year old children. Forty percent of this group had a longer variant of a dopamine D4 receptor gene (DRD4). Kids who have this gene were more likely to do poorly in school because the gene also connects to shorter attention spans. Adriana Bus noted how the children performed in electronic reading games when they got supportive feedback, and compared it to how they preformed when they did not get any positive feedback.
The results showed that the kids who got the positive feedback did better than those who did not. She also found that the kids with the DRD4 gene did significantly better than their peers after receiving positive feedback. The gene made these children more sensitive to positive feedback. Parents of kids who have ADHD could try putting some extra effort into giving their child lots of positive encouragement about his or her homework and schoolwork. It just might help!
Image by Rudy Herman on Flickr