Strategies to help an 11-year-old with ADHD and constant forgetfulness

[glowfrog]

DD (11, about to start secondary school) is in the process of being assessed for ADHD - we've had appointments and a questionnaire and waiting on results. She's always been extremely forgetful but at the moment it seems to be getting worse. In the last 5 days, she's lost a swimming costume, the cap for her water bottle rendering it unusable, left her swimming goggles behind on another day, and today lost her purse (thankfully with only 50p in it and nothing else). When I picked her up from the swimming pool and told her I was putting her bag for her on the bench outside the changing room, she left that behind and came out carrying her swim stuff in her arms.

Which she then left behind on another bench after putting her shoes on. Just as well I was there to ask her where everything was!

Even with her phone - which she spends a lot of time on and therefore actively cares about - she just won't pay attention to the battery levels so she lets it die all the time. I'm reluctant to get her a newer / better phone with more battery capacity as she just loses so many things so often.

Are there strategies out there to help ADHD kids do better with this kind of thing? For her residential trip, I typed a list of all her things and laminated it so she could use it to bring everything back and that was successful. I am dreading secondary school as she will need to carry so much more with her, and from classroom to classroom.

If a checklist helped, you could do that for other situations. You could make a checklist with DD for swimming, then laminate it so DD can check off each item when leaving. Same for school things. It will help to have 2 pencil cases - one stays at home, the other remains in the school bag and never comes out at home.

For the phone, can you help DD get into a routine of charging her phone? Also, a power pack.

The two pencil cases is a great idea!

We do need to get her a battery pack but I suspect she’d forget to charge that as well. She’s the same with her iPad, although at least that has a decent battery capacity. I don’t know how we can help her remember that she needs to check. We periodically ask her “what’s the charge like on your phone?” But not sure what we can do beyond that.

For DS2, we have two calculators too. That way, he never forgets to put it back in his bag.

We have a set time every evening where things that need to be charged all go on charge. You could help DD get into a routine of doing that. Over time, you can step back to just prompting. Then later (maybe much, much later) hopefully just checking it has been done and eventually not need to be part of DD’s routine.