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Sense of Time in Children with ADHD
One complaint that I frequently here from the parents is that their child often loses track of time. A study published by Dr. Russell Barkley in the July 1997 issue of the Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society (359-369) suggests that difficulty in monitoring time may be a basic feature of ADHD.
In this study 12 children with ADHD and 26 children without ADHD (ages 6-14 years) were tested using a time reproduction task in which subjects had to reproduce intervals of 12, 24, 36, 48, and 60 seconds. During half of these intervals subjects were presented with a distracting stimulus to determine how this affected their performance. In a second study using the same basic procedure, the effects of methylphenidate on the ability of children with ADHD to accurately estimate the different time intervals was also examined.
Results of the initial study indicated that children without ADHD were significantly more accurate then ADHD children at most of the durations that they were asked to estimate. (This was especially true at the longer intervals that children were asked to estimate.) In addition, the ability of children without ADHD to accurately estimate the different time intervals was not adversely affected by the presence of distracting stimuli. For children with ADHD in contrast, their performance was even less accurate when distracting stimuli were present.
What is particularly interesting is that the performance of children with ADHD in accurately estimating different time intervals did not improve when they were tested on medication. This suggests that maintaining an accurate sense of time may be an especially fundamental problem for individuals with ADHD. This is certainly the point that Barkley emphasizes in discussing the results of his study.
What are the implications of these results for parents? First, knowing that accurately keeping track of time may be a fundamental problem for children with ADHD can hopefully help this be a little less frustrating.
This study also underscores the need to help your child develop effective strategies for monitoring time. For example, if your child is told that they can play outside for 20 minutes but they need to come back in then to do their homework, this may be very very difficult for them to do without concrete assistance. When they wander in 20 minutes after they were supposed to, it is easy to feel upset and frustrated, and this can lead to the start of an interaction that often escalates into a real conflict.
Something that I have found to be helpful is to provide a child with a watch that has an alarm function. If your child is told that he or she has 20 minutes to play before coming inside for homework, you can make sure that the alarm is set to go off in 20 minutes. The alarm becomes a concrete reminder that it is time to come inside. If your child does not come inside when the alarm prompts him or her to do so, then it is likely that they are deliberately choosing to ignore your directive, rather than simply losing track of time and forgetting to do so. In this case, a parent would be quite justified in providing an appropriate punishment for this defiance.
An important benefit of this alarm strategy, is that your child can eventually learn to set the alarm him or herself to provide the prompts that he or she needs. This means that your child can become increasingly able to use this strategy to better keep track of time on their own. Even though they may continue to have difficulty with this without an external reminder, they are still learning to manage this important function on their own. In other words, you'll be helping them to develop an effective strategy to cope with a real difficulty that they have. Developing effective coping strategies to deal with the difficulties that ADHD can cause is certainly one of the most important things that parents can do to help their child be successful.
Note: This article originally appeared in Attention Research Update, an online newsletter written by Dr. David Rabiner, a Duke University psychologist and former member of CHADD's Professional Advisory Board. You can learn more about Attention Research Update and sign up for a free subscription at www.helpforadd.com.