What Difficulties do Children with ADHD Experience when they Converse with Children or Adults?What Interventions can we Try in order to Help them to Converse more Easily? Use Literature!!!

Don’t children with ADHD know how to converse with children or adults? Certainly they know how to speak to another person. However, what I mean by converse is to use words as a way of communication to another person. The way they converse is not always socially appropriate. Three things, among others, happen to children with ADHD when they begin to converse with children and adults.

 First, they have a difficult time listening to the other person, based on the fact that they typically have a difficult time attending to the person who is talking.

 Second, they feel a need to tell these people everything that they are thinking at the moment, instead of listening to the topic of the conversation.

 Third, when they want to respond to another person, they have great difficulty waiting for the other person to stop talking, so they tend to interrupt that person.

 Those problems, therefore, pinpoint three main difficulties that these children experience: they have difficulty listening to another person; they maintain a constant verbiage unrelated to the current conversation; and they interrupt whomever is speaking.

 Let’s tackle first things first. How do you teach a child with ADHD to listen? Here is one way:

 Start by finding out what specific learning style is the strongest one through which the child learns. In other words, the teacher should evaluate through which modality the child with

ADHD learns most effectively. Let us say, for example, that the child’s learning strength is auditory. Find out what kind of story (let’s assume that the child is of elementary age) the child likes. Either obtain a CD of the narrated story or, better yet, read the story on to an audiotape yourself. You can read a story into a voice recorder that has a USB drive and download it right on to your computer.

 Listen to the story with the child. Ask the child questions such as:

Ø  Who is the character you like the most? What is the first thing that happened to that character in the story?

Ø   What is the next thing that happened to the same character?

The answers to these questions reflect whether or not the child listened.

Ø  If he could not answer the questions, listen to the story again with the child.

Ø  Stop the audiotape or CD the first time something happens to that character.

Ø  Then ask the child, what just happened to that character?

Let me know if this intervention worked with your own child or with the child with whom you teach.