5 Tips to Keep Motivation High

Kids with ADD often have more experience with frustration and failure than they do with success.  As such, motivating them to do difficult tasks can be very challenging.  To combat this, we have to orgainze things in such a way as to allow them to have more successful experiences than failures; in other words, catch them being good - set them up for success.  Otherwise, their brains are constantly in "escape" mode, thus trying to avoid the experiences they have come to expect will result in failure.  They're trying to "get away from" the things they've found painful in the past, which are usually the very things we need them to do,  such as school work.

Here are five tips to help keep motivation high.

1. Early on in the process of getting a child to do a task or tasks they don't want to do, offer lots of short term rewards.  We want to constantly reinforce positive behavior as frequently as is feasible in the beginning (catch them being good).  Don't worry so much about long term rewards right off the bat, because for a child with ADD, a long term reward might seem so inaccessible to them, they don't want to even try, (at least initially).

2. Engage the child in the selection of those rewards.  Ask the child what they want to work for.  In other words, find out what they assign enough value to, to make it worth their while to carry out a difficult task.  This not only pinpoints those things that are most motivating, it empowers the child by involving them in the process.

3. Change those rewards as their efficacy wears off.  Kids with ADD will often be very receptive to a reward that is new to them.  But as they become used to it, and the novelty wears off, its value as a positive motivator likewise wears off.  By changing things up often, we keep the motivating value of a reward system high.  As before, be sure to include the child in the reward selection process.

4. Rewards should be earned by genuine successes, but make sure you define a success (quantitatively) in very achievable portions.  Instead of rewarding for something that may seem insurmountable to the child, like, say, completing their homework in 30 minutes or less all week; instead go for something they can manage.  For example, if homework took 2 hours last night, a reward worthy success might be if they can complete their homework in a hour and fifty minutes or less.

5. Log each and every success.  Make a record of them, so that you and your child have a constant, tangible thing you can refer back to in hard times.  "No, you weren't able to do all of your reading assignment, but you got through all but the last page.  Remember last month when you couldn't finish even one page?  See here, I wrote it down in our success log on January 3rd."

ADDitude magazine hosted an in depth webinar on these kinds of motivational strategies by Jerome Schultz, PHD, which is now available on youTube.  It has tons of useful information on this subject.  Please click here to see it: