Checklists to Help ADHD

A child who has been diagnosed with ADHD lacks the ability to pay attention to details required to complete activities of daily living. Often, the simple routine tasks are not completed independently without verbal prompts, as the attention span of the child is limited. This leads to frustration for the child, the parent and teachers. A child can build these crucial skills through consistency and encouragement.

Skills-Building Checklists

• Checklists can be used to track behaviors. There are a minimum of 34 skills that a child with ADHD can be lacking and needs focus on building. The skills can be placed in order of importance and worked on in that order. For example, the skill "staying on task" would not need to be added to the checklist, as that is what the checklists are focusing on in whole. The checklists could track dealing with boredom, frustration, waiting your turn, doing quality work, being patient, listening to others, accepting consequences, completing homework, accepting "no" answers and accepting criticism.

  The purpose of the checklists is to remind the child to complete a task completely before moving on to something else. This checklist process is meant to be an encouraging opportunity to mark the success your child is making.

Activities of Daily Living

• Each task from each time frame of the child's day can be broken down into multiple steps to keep the child on track for the entire day. The checklists can include pictures, words or a combination of both.

  Morning routine could include the following: Use toilet, wash face, brush teeth, comb hair, clean up sink, change out of pajamas, put pajamas into the dirty clothes and dress into clean clothes.

  A checklist for chores should break down specific tasks. For example, if the task is to sweep the kitchen floor, the checklist could be: Get the broom and dust pan from the closet, pick up the rugs and shake them off, place them outside the kitchen entry, start sweeping by the pantry and end up at the kitchen entry, use the dustpan to sweep up the dirt, place the dirt in the garbage can, put the rugs back in the kitchen, and put the broom and dustpan back in the closet.