Summer Sports, Part 2
Maintaining keen focus and acute awareness is challenging for any child. For kids with ADHD, it's almost impossible. "Often they do not look around at other players and get hit or hurt during plays," Giabardo says.
"Basketball may be even worse," says Patricia Quinn, M.D., a developmental pediatrician specializing in ADHD at the Pediatric Development Center in Washington DC. "They have to learn the plays, anticipate moves, and strategize. These are exactly the things people with ADHD don't do well."
Giabardo agrees. "They have trouble understanding zones and how defense works. ADHD children just want to get the ball and dribble it. And they get frustrated because basketball requires the player to exercise several skills at one time, such as jumping, passing, dribbling and running."
"So they keep the ball and do all the shooting, or they're in the wrong place at the wrong time," says Quinn, who has watched many a painful scene from the sidelines. "People are yelling at them. The other parents start telling teammates to keep the ball away from the ADHD kid. It's terribly deflating, exactly the opposite experience you'd want your ADHD child to have."
Individual sports: home run
As a general rule, children with ADHD do better when they get plenty of individual attention from coaches. That's why they're more likely to succeed with individual sports such as swimming and diving, wrestling, martial arts,and tennis - or even more rarified endeavors such as fencing and horseback riding. "It's easier for ADHD children to focus when they have that one-on-one with their coach," says Giabardo.
Even though these sports themselves may be "individual," ADHD children still derive many of the social benefits of being on a team because they're frequently taught in groups with other kids. "In the case of swimming, wrestling and tennis they often are on teams," says Quinn. "It's just that the effort and instruction are individual."
Even so, individual sports are not for every ADHD child. The volatile youngster who is prone to outbursts and fits when under pressure may be better off on a team, as long as the coach can monitor strictly sportsmanship and behavior. "In individual sports all the pressure is on the individual," says Giabardo. "In team sports, they can get lost in the group."
The team situation also enables such a child to spread the guilt for a loss over the group, not just on him or herself - which is acceptable as long the child understands his or her role in the loss, and doesn't verbally blame or abuse teammates. Which means parents need to be closely involved.
In fact, parents are the key to sports success for most ADHD kids, particularly when they're young and selecting activities to pursue. "You have to work at seeking out what your kids are good at, what they're interested in, and what fits their personality," says Quinn. "There's no one formula because no two ADHD kids are alike."
One group of activities that Quinn promotes for nearly all ADHD kids, though, are martial arts such as taekwondo. "Martial arts are all about control. You learn to control your body. The movements are smooth. There is an element of meditation (internal self control) in taekwondo." In addition, she says, teachers instruct rather than coach; when the child is shown step by step how to do something, there's little opportunity for distraction.
A lasting benefit of martial arts comes from its use of rituals such as bowing to the instructor, Quinn believes. "Rituals are good for ADHD kids because they make behavior automatic," she says. "For most of us, daily actions such as remembering to take your medicine are automatic. But without rituals such as 'every time I brush my teeth I take my medicine,' people with ADHD don't remember." Martial arts rituals can help teach kids with ADHD to accept, develop and use rituals in other areas of their lives.
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