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ADHD kids might find fidgeting helpful when they have to do a task
STATES CHRONICLE – Children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder have problems focusing and staying put. What they usually do is fidget and get bored and pass from one activity to another more quickly than kids who don’t have this disorder.
These “symptoms” become an issue when the child goes to school and is required to stay in his seat and pay attention. Many teachers cannot handle children with ADHD and claim they are disrupting class activities because they fidget too much.
However, according to a new study, fidgeting could actually help kids with ADHD to learn. The study was conducted by a team of researchers from the Florida State University trying to show that hyperactivity is not a core problem in ADHD.
The study had 25 participants of both sexes between 8 and 12 years old. All of them had ADHD, and they were asked to do some memory tasks so the researchers would monitor them and see how much they actually fidget while resolving the tasks.
The tasks were as it follows: the first required students to remember dots appearing on the screen and put them in the same order of color after they disappear; then they were given letter and numbers to memorize and reorder from smallest to biggest.
Although the children fidgeted all the time during the test, they fidgeted even more when they couldn’t remember what they had to memorize. Therefore, the researchers concluded that if there is a high demand on the memory, children become more stressed, and the level of hyperactivity increases.
Another study shows pretty much the same results suggesting that kids with ADHD do well or even better when they fidget. However, scientists are not yet sure why children do this. There are two main reasons: fidgeting either helps them think, either is a result of anxiousness.
Either way, both parents and teachers should start focusing on the results of the kid and not the process through which they get to that result. In this way, although children will continue to fidget, they will be more able to focus only on the task at hand and not on the parent’s or teacher’s opinion, which will be less stressful for the kid.
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