Routines for Kids with ADHD

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Let’s get real here. For most of us parenting a child with ADHD – myself included – it can be really frustrating.  They forget their backpack in the morning, they step right over the shoes they left  lying on the floor without even noticing them, and god forbid if they are watching t.v. and you need to get their attention!  Until you are standing between them and the t.v. they won’t even notice you’re in the room.  This reality, along with the always present challenges of parenting in general, can really take a toll on your relationship with your child. As a result, difficult emotions like anger, confusion, frustration, and disconnect can arise. And yet, when a child has ADHD, none of these actions is a conscious choice. The symptoms of ADHD are forgetfulness and distractibility, it’s just the nature of the beast. 

The key to managing some of these behaviors is routine, consistency and structure!

When a child with ADHD has a consistent routine, they are far more successful in completing these daily tasks that give them so much trouble otherwise.

When the household routine dictates that as soon as you get home from school you go straight to your room and take off your shoes and unpack your backpack, it is far more likely to actually get done.  Now, there is no reason to expect it will get done every single day, nobody's perfect after all!  But if it gets done 3 out of 5 days per week we will call that success.

Here are some sample routines that might help make your household run a little smoother at the critical times of day: morning, after school, and night time.

MORNING ROUTINE:

If your household is anything like mine, getting out of the house in the morning can be a major challenge. Between packing the lunches and making sure everyone is dressed and has their shoes on, it’s a busy time of day! I like to keep my routines as simple as possible.

The most important thing about routines is to try to make them simple and logical; build on your current habits. 

Almost all of us have activities that we do consistently without even thinking about it. These daily activities have just become habits.  When we are trying to start a whole new behavior, there is a higher likelihood of success if we attach this new behavior to our existing habits. 

For the morning routine, I have made washing up the very first step of the morning, because most of us start our morning with a trip to the bathroom.  If you have your child use that time when they are already in the bathroom to wash their face and brush their teeth, then you are not adding an additional step that takes them out of their normal routine.  You are just building on their current schedule.  The morning could look like this:

1.  Wake and Wash  (wash face and brush teeth)

2. Get Dressed

3. Get  Food

4. Grab Backpack and Go

AFTER SCHOOL ROUTINE:

After school is probably the most challenging time of day.  It’s really such a difficult point to manage when everyone is coming back into the home after being gone all day.  The dog needs to be let out, the dinner needs to be started, the school agendas need to be reviewed and signed.  It’s the time of day when a parent could really use 3 or 4 extra hands. So for this part of the day, I like to have my kids be as autonomous as possible, so that I can put some energy into watering the plants and taking my own shoes off before helping the kids with their tasks. 

An after school routine could look like this:

1.  Put away backpack

2. Put away shoes

3. Have a snack

4. Start homework 

NIGHT TIME ROUTINE:

And yet another time of day that is extremely challenging is bed time.  At this point everyone is exhausted.  After a full day there is probably very little energy left. 

It’s extremely helpful to have the same exact routine each night.  It creates consistency to a time of day that is bound to be fraught with excess emotion and dearth of energy.  Here is the simplest and most basic 4 step routine to make the transition to bed as easy as possible.

1.  Bath

2. Brush

3. Book

4. Bed

Remember, it’s never going to be completely seamless. There will always be little things they forget to do, and you may still need to stand between them and the t.v. before they know you’re in the room, but research shows that consistent routine WILL help improve these symptoms of ADHD. When your child gets used to the rhythm and consistency of the routine, he will start doing these tasks by habit. That will free up some of your energy to spend quality time together connecting, instead of using all your energy correcting.

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