It’s estimated that about 11% of children have an ADHD diagnosis. These are high numbers, and ADHD is the most common diagnosis we work with at LearningRx Woodbury. Strategies to help with ADHD abound like medication or coaching. However, before identifying the strategy that is ideal for your loved ones we should be asking, what is happening in the ADHD brain?
Recent peer-reviewed research published in the Journal of Mental Health and Clinical Psychology sheds light on this. Surprisingly, when you look at a cognitive profile for individuals diagnosed with ADHD and compare attention levels against core cognitive skills like working memory, processing speed or reasoning, attention is not the lowest skill! This is a bit surprising as isn’t it called “attention deficit disorder”?
Yes, but this peer-reviewed research shows that attention is often a symptom of other cognitive weaknesses like processing speed or working memory.
Why do these other cognitive weaknesses result in attention issues?
Let’s look at processing speed, which is the speed at which our brains function. If processing speed is slow, it requires a student to exert much more mental energy to complete a task or keep up in the classroom than their peers who do not struggle with processing speed. The result is difficulty maintaining this high level of energy and struggling to sustain attention or getting easily distracted.
These findings are critical as to how we help those with ADHD. Strategies like ADHD medication or IEPs can help, but they are often band-aids that focus on the symptom, not the root cause.
This was true of my youngest daughter, Catie.
Catie was diagnosed with ADHD at a young age, and we tried the traditional strategies of ADHD medication and an IEP. However, Catie had difficult side-effects from her ADHD medications. At first, we were grateful she had an IEP but quickly realized an IEP is not a long-term strategy as it was mainly accommodating her weaknesses with attention, not improving her attention skills. Catie’s cognitive profile was consistent with this research. She was very smart but had slow processing speed which inhibited her ability to stay on task.
Her LearningRx training strengthened these weaker skills and Catie has been excelling ever since and is a recent college graduate.
To date, we have worked with hundreds of clients at LearningRx Woodbury who have struggled with attention or ADHD.
If you want to see significant and lasting attention gains, strategies like ADHD medication or IEPs can be a bridge to help a child in the short-term but identifying and strengthening the weak skills like processing speed and memory that are often the root cause need to be part of that process to see long-term improvement.
An ideal first step is to contact the LearningRx Woodbury location and schedule an initial assessment.
The assessment takes only 60 minutes and will help identify the root cause as to why your child struggles with attention.
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*Results are from past clients. You or your loved ones may or may not achieve the same outcomes.