By Wendy Harron - May 4, 2012

I WANT to get my homework DONE!

Wow, did you ever think you would hear those words come out of your child with ADHD’s mouth? Homework tends to be a struggle with our kids affected by ADHD. Afterschool can be rough in general, as they have held it together all day long in school, and then there is the issue of their medication wearing off around that time. No matter what, homework tends to stretch into the evening hours as you work with your child to get all of their homework done. This is such a bad cycle, as then the kids don’t have time to go outside and play or to just be a kid!
One of the children I have worked with really struggled with his homework time. There was crying, lying, procrastinating, hunger, thirst, fatigue – you name it, he would use it to try to get out of doing his homework. So when this same child got home from school one day, got his homework out and told his mom he wanted to get his homework done, she almost fainted!
During our IM sessions, this child worked hard on rhythm and timing. This 9 year old boy had very poor time awareness as well. We worked specifically on him keeping track of time during our sessions. He learned to “get the job done” so he could have time to choose an activity that he enjoyed as his reward. We did this for 5 or 6 sessions, and then his mom told me that he was coming home from school and going right to his homework so that he could do other things like go outside or play his video games. These were things that usually were only weekend activities for him as he never had time afterschool to get them done. Family life actually got much easier for this family as night time routines changed into much calmer evenings with homework, play, dinner, family time and bed time. Over the next few weeks, his mom told me that he was actually sleeping better at night time as well. It seemed that as his internal timing improved so did his overall sense of time. Yes, he was still medicated, but after school hours became a time of fun for this family, even though his medication had run its course for the day. Internal timing influences many parts of our daily life – How does your internal clock run?