Why ADHD Kids Struggle with Reading and Writing

Welcome everyone in today's episode we're going to talk about a big topic that I don't think gets enough attention. It's not talked about enough and that is why kids with ADHD struggle with reading and writing and what no one is telling parents. The goal of this episode is to show you what is actually happening in your child's brain when they struggle with reading and writing because it's not what most people think and once you understand it everything starts to make a lot more sense. We're also going to cover what actually helps and what just makes things worse. Welcome to the ADHD Parenting Podcast with Mike McLeod of Grow Now ADHD and Ryan Wexelblatt of ADHD Dude. Learn about parenting kids with ADHD from a licensed clinical social worker and speech language pathologist who specializes in ADHD. No fluffy parenting advice, only practical information that will equip you to help your child with ADHD effectively. Alright to get started so Mike as we know a lot of parents with ADHD have probably said when they see their child you know have difficulty with writing or reading. They say things like you know I know they're smart they just won't do the work because a lot of times kids seem like they're being oppositional or they'll say things like you know they read the whole chapter and couldn't tell me a single thing about it. That was certainly the case with my son or they sit there staring at the paper for 20 minutes and write one sentence. And you know you've probably wondered you know is that about effort or attitude or whether they just don't care. So the goal of this episode is to show you what is actually happening with your child's brain when they are struggling with reading and writing because it is not what most people think and once you understand it everything starts to make a lot more sense. Exactly so what we should do here is focus on the first aspect here is when parents say they'll read the whole page and remembered nothing. This is really one of the most frustrating things parents describe. They see their child sit down read the words they get through the whole page or even the whole chapter if they're able to and you ask them what it was about. Parents love to ask them what was it about what did you read what what happened at school what all these kinds of things. But what the reading is really they genuinely don't know. And what we what we are here to tell you is that this is not your child being difficult. This is not laziness. This is a working memory problem always rooted in executive functioning. Mike why don't you explain a little bit about the difference between working memory and nonverbal working memory so people can have a better understanding of it. Absolutely. And we learn about this in my book the executive functioning playbook. I describe them as the foundational skills. This is the foundation to the four pillars of executive functions. But the foundation is number one of course nonverbal working memory the visual imagery system of the brain by far the most important thing for parents to understand because all executive functioning starts with nonverbal working memory and the visual imagery system. And you can hear Dr. So Barkley talk about this. Sarah Ward is a great friend of Ryan and myself really break this down and very easy to understand ways. So nonverbal working memory is the ability to create mental movies. And there are two separate aspects to it. There is nonverbal working memory hindsight where we re-image the past and learn from the past and nonverbal visual imagery foresight where we use our imagination to visualize what the future might look like. So we know what to do now. And what do we have to do while we read. We have to visualize what we're reading and making mental movies while we're reading. If we don't it's not going to stick. And verbal working memory is the ability to talk to yourself and have an internal dialogue through self stated intentions and an internal privatized conversation which is very important for social communication. And of course reading and writing. So we see that reading and writing written expression reading comprehension are the two academic tasks. ADHD kids struggle with the most because so much executive functioning and so much working memory is needed to be successful at both of those tasks. And it all revolves around the ability to visualize what you're reading and comprehend it through self directed self directed talk. Like when I give presentations I have a slide in my presentations based on something you know I've heard both Sarah Ward and Dr. Barkley say which is that ADHD basically you know cuts verbal working memory from nonverbal working memory. You know it disconnects them really. And I think that's a really important part to remember about this as we're talking about you know difficulty with with reading comprehension. So what is some of the evidence say about this. Well a large research review by Martin Neusen and colleagues in 2005 looked at dozens of studies on kids with ADHD and they found that working memory problems are one of the most consistent things we see in this population. Even more consistent than attention issues. And I think that is so significant. I mean think about that for a minute. This is more prevalent this disconnect between working memory. I'm sorry verbal working memory and nonverbal working memory. That's more prevalent than attention issues alone. Another study by a CESMA and colleagues in 2009 found that executive functions especially working memory explained why kids struggled with reading comprehension. Even they even when they were perfectly capable of reading the actual words out loud. In other words the issue is not that they can't read or difficulty with decoding is that they can't hold what they read for the reason Mike just explained before. Selling your car can be super simple. If you choose we buy any car. Now in their 20th year they're on average 11 minutes away. So help is never far. If only they could make finding a good driving song simpler. No. No. Oh definitely not. We buy any car. Selling made simple. To sell your car today enter your register number now at webuyanycar.com. From the co-author of Attached the book that reshaped our understanding of anxious avoidant and secure attachment styles comes the new audio book Secure. Dr. Amir Levine's latest research shows that those with secure attachment styles feel more at ease both in their relationships and within themselves. Learn how to rewire your attachment style and unlock stronger relationships, better health, greater resilience and more fulfilling life. Listen to Secure on Spotify now. Exactly. So reading comprehension is not just about understanding words on a page. It's about holding those words in your brain long enough to make meaning out of them. And that is exactly the part that with ADHD that it affects the most. So when parents are talking to the school about what reading curriculum, what writing curriculum, what reading program, all of those different things. If it's ADHD and the program or the curriculum or the approach is not rooted in working memory, it's most likely not going to create the desired progress. So moving on, you know, Mike mentioned the term mental movie. My term for that is actually future thinking skills. I think I learned that, you know, from from Sarah Ward. I don't know where movies from. Did you make that up? Mental movies is Sarah Ward and Dr. Barclay. Oh, yeah. OK. Yeah. So let's talk about the mental movie that never gets made. So here's something most people don't realize about how reading works. When a strong reader reads a story, their brain is building this mental movie. They see characters. They picture the setting. They are living inside the story as they go. And for a child with ADHD who struggles with this, they're trying to build that same movie. But the time by the time they get to, you know, paragraph three, the images from paragraph one have already faded. The movie keeps stopping and restarting. By the end of the page, there's nothing left to hold on to. And that is this difficulty with nonverbal working memory or the mental movie. So basically think of it this way. They're watching a movie and they're going along, you know, they're watching it, but then it keeps reminding to part one. And when it finally gets to the end, they don't remember, you know, the whole thing and can't really put it together as a whole. Mike, one of the things, you know, I think we want to mention is, you know, the brain's ability to hold pictures and sequences and visual information in mind. The term for that is called Gestalt Processing. And why don't you give, you know, a working definition of what Gestalt Processing is in relation to this? Yeah, so Gestalt Processing really involves both aspects of nonverbal and verbal working memory to work together in harmony, in unison. And this is the ability to sequence events over time between like Ryan was saying, chapter one, chapter two, chapter three, and sequence certain events, which is why all the steps to the morning routine may be hard for your child. All the steps to initiating, persisting and completing homework. All the steps to the evening routine. All of these different things. So just like that, that citation Ryan gave earlier, where this is really more working memory than it is attention, because that's really what ADHD is all about. This weakness and disconnect in nonverbal and verbal working memory, which is why I highlight it so much in my book as these foundational skills. Because if you look back at all the things your child struggle with, it's all this need to hold pictures and visual information in mind. So they're able to follow things in sequential steps from initiation, persistence to completion over time. And you're probably seeing that with reading, writing, morning routine, homework, evening routine, all of these things that require sequencing. So Dr. Barkley, who, if you don't know, is one of the leading researchers on ADHD in the world, he's now retired, he describes nonverbal working memory or, you know, these mental movies or future thinking skills. He talks about it in his two, two thousand fifteen handbook as the ability to hold these mental images and sequences in your mind so you can use them to guide your behavior. And he identifies this as one of the core things that works differently for kids with ADHD. Some other research showed that working memory when applied to ADHD studies for decades, showed that part of the brain responsible for holding visual and spatial information is consistently underperforming in kids with ADHD. So another quote of Dr. Barkley, since we're talking about him, you know, ADHD is a condition of inconsistent performance to, you know, the point of this research. And the last point I want to make, there's this book I found on Amazon called The Executive Function Playbook by somebody named Mike MacLeod describes this experience from the child's perspective. So they are not ignoring what they read. They finish the page and genuinely feel like they read nothing because that mental image never fully formed or held. So, Mike, let's talk about a little bit, you know, how, you know, why people often don't understand this. And I think part of it and tell me if I'm wrong is because the kid doesn't really articulate that, right? Like kids tend to not articulate this because they don't have context for understanding it, right? They might say things like, I don't know, you know, or I don't remember because, right, they don't they don't remember. I mean, they genuinely don't remember, right? I mean, how would you explain to somebody, you know, how kids are going to explain this or with this person? Yeah. And this takes us back to the first pillar of the four pillars, which is overall self-awareness. So like I always go back to, you know, back in the day when I used to do all those intake calls for grown out and parents would call me to learn about grown out services, every single parent had the exact same concern is how am I ever going to get my kid to agree to do executive functioning coaching because they don't even think they have a problem. They think they're totally fine. They don't see their problems at all. So how am I going to get them to agree to do coaching sessions with you? And I have to remind them, of course, they don't think they have a problem. It's a disorder of self-awareness. They're not it's very hard for them to take a bird's eye view and understand the cause and effect of all their behaviors. And that's really exactly what's happening. And that's why I gave the reference earlier to, you know, there's, there's few things, few things parents love more than as soon as their kid gets in the car or as soon as they walk in the front door, what happened at school? Who'd you talk to? Who'd you sit with at lunch? What'd you learn? What happened? And it's always, it was fine. I learned nothing. That was it, whatever. Or if your kid is doing coaching sessions or they go to summer camp, oh, what did you learn? What happened today? And you're not going to get any information out of them. And guess what? Neurotypical kids, you know, struggle with that as well. It's very hard for them to break down in language what they experienced earlier that day, and it's going to be a thousand times harder with ADHD, with this weakness and this disconnect. So number one, reading comprehension, sitting down to read a book, especially if this is a kid that has screens in their lives and their brains are hardwired towards instant gratification of screens. It's going to be very hard for them to sit and read a book. It's becoming a very lost art in a very sad way with this generation of kids because it requires a lot of self-regulation. It's very hard to sit and read when you know a TV, a phone, an iPad, a video game, the internet is a couple of steps away. So being able to sit down and self-regulate enough to read and then to be able to have your internal skills, your nonverbal and verbal working memory, continually work in unison as you're already regulating enough to read is so incredibly hard for these kids. And the mental movies simply are not sticking. You know, we've taken so much of the play, the boredom, the struggle away from childhood, they're simply not developing these mental movies as organically as they should. And we're most often seeing it with reading becoming a major problem. And it's quite fascinating how in all these countries now where they've eliminated social media and taken phones away from a lot of kids, we've now seen book sales and reading skyrocket in those countries, which is pretty fascinating. So the bottom line is your child is not choosing to zone out while they're reading. They're part of the brain that builds that mental movie is not working consistently or reliably. And that is not a character flaw. That's just how the brain works. So moving on next, we're going to talk about something that I call brain voice with kids. Some people call it brain coach. It's also called the inner voice. We're going to talk about when that inner voice or brain voice goes quiet. So when most people write something, there is a voice in their head helping them. So think about this. When you write, you're thinking to yourself, OK, I'm going to start with this. Now I'm going to say that, you know, and I'm thinking about what I'm going to say next. And then you might say, no, wait, you know, I want to edit this, you know, put in that part first or move things around. And what happens is it keeps the plan alive while, you know, you're typing or your hand is moving. So your brain voice is really, it's like a little coach narrating from the inside what you're going to write. So kids with ADHD often do not have consistent use of this internal dialogue, their brain voice. So what happens then it fires up for a few seconds, then it cuts out, then it comes back, but the thought is already gone. And that has to do with verbal working memory. So it's again, it's a brain's ability to use self talk to stay organized and on task. And it's a major reason why writing is so hard for kids with ADHD. So with Barclay's research, it describes verbal working memory as internalized self talk, the ability to talk yourself through a task quietly in your head. He identifies the development of this inner voice as significantly delayed in kids with ADHD, which then means they are missing one of the key tools that helps most kids plan and organize their writing. And another study done in 2008, 2008, found that executive functions, including verbal working memory, predicted how well children performed in both reading and writing tasks, of course, independently of how intelligent they were. The kids who struggled most with writing were not the least capable kids in the room. They were the ones with the weakest inner organizational voice, which is of course, working memory skills. And another study from 2008 showed that children with working memory challenges struggle most with tasks that require them to hold information in mind while producing something at the exact same time, which is exactly what writing asks them to do every single time. So we talk a lot about why they struggle with reading comprehension, because number one, they have to be able to self regulate with that book. And they also have to be able to visualize what they're reading. But writing, written expression is even more difficult for these kids, because think about it, you have to have everything organized up in your mind with your working memory, which is already a delayed system. And then a delay is involved, where you have to very slowly transfer all of that information about what you want to write from your mind down your arm to the keyboard or the pen and paper. So it's an even slower, more arduous, more meticulous process, which of course is very, very difficult for ADHD kids and teens. So the last thing I want to mention about this is, you know, a lot of times Mike parents will say, well, my child is fine if they can like do creative writing, you know, if they're writing something they want, but it's structured writing assignments that they struggle with. And part of the reason for that is think about this. And when you can write whatever you want, you know, that's much easier because you can just kind of flow when you have to follow somebody else's structure, you know, and then at the same time you're trying to hold this information, you know, think about what you're going to say next, you know, go back, revise all that. That's much harder when you have to follow somebody else's structure and try to write for what somebody else wants. Whereas, you know, so really what it is, it's a much greater expectation. Whereas when you're just doing creative writing, you can just say whatever you want, you know, that's why it flows much easier with creative writing. So Mike, let's talk about, you know, the idea of, you know, a child not producing, you know, writing, you know, or the blank page, you know, being, you know, an oppositional behavior or an attitude problem. So, you know, if you have watched your child sit in front of a blank page and do nothing for 20 minutes, you've probably felt one of two things. You felt frustrated because they clearly don't know what they want to say, or you're worried because something seems genuinely wrong. Or in some cases they might become argumentative because they're frustrated. Mike, there's a video I use when I do presentations and I want to preface this by saying I hate this is on YouTube, but it's something that, you know, I use because I think it makes a good point. And the video Mike is, you know, a little boy, probably, I don't know, second grade. And he's sitting there with a piece of paper in front of him, you know, and there's nothing on it. And he's crying at his mother's filming him, which I can't stand when people do this. And, you know, she says to him, like, you know, it's just English, man, like, what's your problem? You know, and he like starts screaming at her, you know, when he runs away and like, you know, and it just, you know, the whole thing is sad. But, but basically it's an exact example of what's happening here. You know, he got frustrated because he can't produce, you know, this writing assignment that his teacher gave him. So he's frustrated. He's crying. He's too young to be able to verbally articulate that. And his parent thinks that he's, you know, being difficult and oppositional. So when you see your child struggling with these things, what is actually happening is your child will sit down the inner voice that would normally say, start here, say this first, simply isn't there yet. Or it shows up for three seconds and then disappears. The page stays blank. They look like they are doing nothing. They are not doing nothing. They are searching for a starting point that their brain is not giving them. And what all the evidence is telling us from 2001 found that reading and writing difficulties we see in kids with learning and attention challenges are fundamentally, fundamentally working memory problems. And they made an important point. The interventions most likely to help are ones that reduce the working memory load, not ones that simply ask the child to push through harder. So Barclay's model of ADHD describes it as a disorder of performance, not knowledge. Your child is not stuck at the blank page because they don't know how to write. They are stuck because the brain systems that are supposed to launch and organize that process are not firing the way they should. So the blank page is not your child being difficult. It is a working memory system that cannot find the on ramp. Once you see it that way, everything about how you help them changes. So Mike, finally, let's talk about what actually helps and what just makes things worse. So what most parents are told to do is, you know, more reading to build a habit, longer writing assignments for practice, just start and see what comes. And the child either forces themselves through it or as many of you know from experience, just shuts down completely. Either way, the underlying problem does not get better because more repetition of a broken process does not fix the process. Research from GatherCole and Allaway showed that working memory limitations need external supports built into the task itself, not just more attempts at the task. This means giving them something outside their brain to hold on to while they work, something like a writing rubric. Mike, this guy who wrote this book called the Executive Function Playbook, McLeod speaks to this directly in the book that for kids with ADHD, the goal is to make external what other kids do internally. I like how you describe that. The inner voice that most kids have automatically, your child needs you to help build that out loud with tools until it becomes more automatic over time. And I think one of the important things, Mike, is, you know, people often say, you know, well, how long is this going to take? Well, we don't know how long it's going to take. There's no way to be able to like predict that. OK, but Mike, talk a little bit more about what you mean from this part in the book about we have to help, you know, their internal voice by making it external until it starts developing more. Inspired by jet engine silences. The Dyson Hushjet Purify powerfully purifies the entire room quietly, capturing pollen, allergens and pet dander, removing odours and harmful gases such as NO2 day and night. Hushjet, powerful, compact purification. That's quiet. Yeah, so what I really break, break down in the executive functioning playbook is what I have seen as one of the most effective written expression strategies for kids with ADHD. So what we're discussing here is that the real issue is a weakness and a disconnect in nonverbal and verbal working memory. And everything sort of breaks down with those working memory challenges. So what we're looking to do here is have the child explain verbally what they want to write about, have them talk about it, describe it out loud as much as possible. And then what you can do, of course, you have these resources is record them talking about it, record them talking about what they want to write, the characters, the story, the thesis, the hypothesis, whatever it may be, have them verbally talk about it in their own voice, in their own words, the way they want it written. And then using noise canceling headphones or headphones, whatever you have available to you, have them listen to their own voice, have them listen to that recording while they write. I have seen that work wonders for kids with ADHD that are really struggling writing. And I've seen that really help them to be able to initiate, persist and complete by having that constant feedback of externalizing that internal voice that breaks down so easily because you're recording the voice and they're hearing it on a continuous repeat while they're writing. So in closing, what we want you to take away from this episode is to remember your child does not need to try harder at something. Your brain is not yet equipped to do alone. We need to provide the scaffolding to help them. So we need to make the process visible, external and manageable, as Mike just said, until the skill has somewhere to grow. So it is easy to look at your child staring at that blank page and feel like something is being withheld, like if they just tried, it would come. But the research, as we showed, tells a different story. Exactly. And the inner tools that most kids use automatically, the mental movie, the inner voice, the ability to hold a plan are genuinely underdeveloped in kids with ADHD. This is not a choice. That is how their brain is wired right now. And we have a lot of hope from all this information, all this research to change that, build that muscle, build that skill. So when you stop asking, why won't they and start asking, what do they need? That is when things actually start to change. So if you would like to see the research that we cited in this episode, please go to the show notes and you can see it there. And please make sure to get the executive function playbook written by Mike, because I think you'll find it really practical and really helpful. So thanks, everyone. We will talk to you soon. Take care. Thanks for listening. To learn more about Mike's practice, grow now ADHD. Please visit his website, grow now ADHD.com. To learn about the services Ryan provides, please visit ADHDdude.com. You can find Mike on Instagram at grow now ADHD and Ryan on the ADHD dude YouTube channel. We'd love to hear your feedback or questions. So feel free to contact us at the ADHD parenting podcast at gmail.com. The ADHD parenting podcast and content posted by grow now ADHD or ADHD dude are presented solely for general information and educational purposes. Our goal is to provide valuable insights and knowledge, not to replace professional services. Mike and Ryan cannot provide clinical consultation or free advice through social media or other forms of communication. The information on this podcast is not a substitute for professional advice. If you or your child have any medical or mental health concerns, please consult your healthcare professionals.