Education is one important key to success in life. Of course, to have a brighter future and to better compete, learning and acquiring skills are needed. These skills are not exclusive to normal kids who learn faster, but these are extra important for special children who are confronted with many kinds of challenges. Children suffering from ADHD are among those special kids who are extra challenged to learn skills that can help them cope better. To survive and to thrive for the rest of their lives, it is critical that they first overcome the ADHD challenges in school.
How can they survive the challenges that school brings? How are they supposed to handle the pressure and stress? How can they finish schooling without getting into major troubles such as fights with kids and battle under achievement? Whew! That sounds like finishing school is really tough.
The most important thing that parents can do so their kids can survive school is to look for a school for special children who have learning and attention disabilities. These schools have teachers, policies and programs that are cut up to suit the needs of special children. These are not all intellectually handicapped students that they are dealing with; rather, their students need special approaches to learn certain basic skills that can help them better handle life situations.
These schools also understand the fundamental problems and ADHD challenges in school. These schools understand ADHD and their core issues which are: inattention, hyperactivity, and impulsivity. These conditions can cause major problems to the school life of a child. Briefly, these mean:
• Inattention
Kids suffering from the said condition get easily distracted or lost in daydreaming; therefore it is not their fault if they cannot listen to the teacher. They have a hard time in doing and finishing assigned tasks. They make mistakes repeatedly such as losing things and do things in a different way because they do not pick the details of instructions.
• Hyperactivity
Kids with ADHD just cannot stop moving. Even if you put them in one place, they cannot stop fidgeting. This affects the behavior of the kids. If teachers are not fully aware of the situation, they may be subjected punishments that can cause trauma and worse behaviors.
• Impulsivity
Kids who suffer from ADHD cannot wait patiently for their turn and because of that they can get into fights in school which is again too traumatic for them.
Undiagnosed, these kids with ADHD are found in regular schools where they need to compete and deal with kids their own age with normal behavior and brain functions. Under such situation ADHD kids are lost. They are pitted and compared with kids whose behaviors conform to standard norms. They are therefore labeled by many stereotypes; none of them is positive.
Without diagnosis and special education, these kids grow to become adolescents with much emotional baggage. They become non-conformists and unsociable not because they are, but because they were forced to be such having no skills to deal with the rest of the society. They become underachievers even when they become adults. These are the ones who, later in life, will have difficulty keeping jobs or climbing the ladder of promotion. By then it is too hard to mend the irreparable damages made in their lives.
Just because they have ADHD as a kid does not mean that they will be losers for the rest of their lives. The first obstacle to hurdle is getting over the ADHD challenges in school. If they are given the chance to learn skills and be guided on how to handle life situations better in a school that understand them, there is no reason not to be prepared for a life of battles.