AD/HD and Hitting the Wall

12 February 2008 By Brenda 0 In ADD, School

I had a question today from a parent about her son. For the first time, instead of all A’s and B’s, he had several poor grades on his report card. She and the teacher both felt that he was capable of bringing the grades up if he just applied himself.

This is one of the areas where understanding Attention Deficit Disorder gets a little tricky. Of course her son is capable of bringing his grades back up; like most people with AD/HD, he is a very intelligent person. The act of doing so, however, has gotten harder than it used to be for him because of his AD/HD symptoms. What has happened to him is what I call “hitting the wall”.

Now how does that make sense? Hasn’t he always had his ADD symptoms? Well, yes he has, and always will. So then, why, all of a sudden, are they causing him trouble? Why has he suddenly “hit the wall” and what does that mean?

Briefly, what it means is that his intelligence is at such a level that he has been able all this time to get good grades without paying a great deal of attention or putting forth a tremendous amount of effort. This is not something he has been doing on purpose - he isn’t even aware of it - it’s just that, up until recently, his intelligence was enough to overpower his ADD symptoms. Now, though, he’s older, classes are harder, he has more teachers. He has more to keep track of, and his brain is being taxed to the limit. He has come to the point where his intelligence alone can no longer overcome his ADD symptoms and still maintain his grades.

Let me see if I can explain it like this: have you ever been on the phone, and had someone stand right in front of you and talk to you when it was clear you had another conversation taking place? Aside from being annoying, it’s a little hard to attend to both conversations at once, isn’t it? When you focus on one, you lose part of what was going on in the other one.

Now imagine that school is the conversation taking place on the phone. You recognize that it’s the more important one, so you try to tune out the one taking place in front of you (let’s imagine your ADD symptoms as a person, usually an insistent child). Maybe you plug your free ear, or turn away from the child in order to hear what’s being said on the phone. You can get away with that for a while, until the child gets tired of not being heard. They may come around in front of you again, or raise their voice in order to be heard. The conversation on the phone, unaware of what’s happening in front of you, continues on, neither stopping for you to catch up nor increasing it’s volume so that you may hear.

At some point, the child may begin screaming, or throwing a tantrum on the floor. When this happens, you will most likely have to hang up the phone. You might as well - it’s not doing you any good anyway. This is what happens when you “hit the wall”.

For many kids, “hitting the wall” is the first sign that’s something’s wrong, or out of order at least. That’s usually when parents or teachers start thinking Attention Deficit Disorder. For this particular young man, however, this is not the case. He has been diagnosed and in fact, is on medication. So what can be done? Well, there are still options, such as:

Re-evaluating medication. Has it been a while since the dosage was increased? Has there been a growth spurt since then that would possibly require a bigger dose of medication? Are hormones a consideration? If the child in question is going through puberty, ADD medications may not be as effective.
Even if the child has been diagnosed and is on medication, if there have been little or no real problems for a while, it’s possible that your child is experiencing new symptoms that he has no idea how to cope with. ADD symptoms seem to change as we get older; our lives change and that may trigger new symptoms. Also, as we learn to manage our symptoms, other ones that were hidden before may surface. So it’s possible that some new skills are needed here.
Take a look at lifestyle changes. As children get older, their lives often get busier. Is there too much going on? Are sleep patterns being affected? (We all know how much sleep teens seem to need.) What about eating habits? Once again, as children get older and more social, they are making more of their own food choices, which may not be as healthy as we would like.
Talk to your child, especially if they are in middle or high school, and see if you can find a source of the problem there. It’s surprising to find out how many kids with ADD get that far in school without knowing how to do basic things like write a paper, take notes, or listen to a lecture and pick up verbal cues.
Above all, remember that this is more than just something they can do if they apply themselves. It’s not that simple or that easy. The grades can be turned around, but not without a clear idea of what happened to begin with, and some effort made towards resolving the difficulty.