Surviving School with ADHD

School is where children with ADHD experience the most frustration.

For a child who barely holds on at school to become a child who makes his own way, school life has to change.

A practical school-life manual for school-age children with ADHD, from a special education teacher of 25 years who raised a son with ADHD.

From starting elementary school to choosing a path after high school, the real school survival strategies a teacher could never say out loud.

This book is a practical manual on school life for school-age children with ADHD. The author is a special education expert who has supported children with ADHD in schools for 25 years, and a mother who raised her own son with ADHD into a scholarship student at a national university. She brings together the many problems and solutions she has experienced firsthand at school and at home.
For a child with ADHD, school is where the most learning happens, and also where the deepest hurt happens. Daily criticism and failure build frustration in the child, and parents wear themselves out wondering what more they should do. But what a child with ADHD needs is neither more nagging nor more kinds of treatment. It is understanding your own child’s particular ADHD traits and building strategies that fit the society called school.
This book starts in the classroom, not the doctor’s office. It sorts the children the author has met into types: high-IQ, borderline intelligence, with autism spectrum traits, inattentive, hyperactive-impulsive, with sensory regulation difficulties, highly anxious, and combined. For each it offers checklists, cases and solutions, and it explains the challenges and responses of each stage, from the start of elementary school through middle and high school.
It also covers school life broadly: working with the homeroom teacher, telling peer conflict from school violence, dealing with school refusal and bullying, using safe spaces such as the Wee Class, career options outside the college-entrance track, and checking parents’ own burnout and adult ADHD. It will be a realistic guide for parents and teachers alike, helping children with ADHD discover their strengths and grow at school.

A special education expert who has long supported the school lives of children with ADHD. She earned a doctorate in special education (lifelong education for people with disabilities) from Dankook University and is a certified clinical psychologist. For 25 years in public middle and high schools, she has watched up close the difficulties children with ADHD face and sought ways to help them have a stable school life.
She is also the mother of a son with ADHD and multiple overlapping traits. Through years when her heart sank at every call from the homeroom teacher, she searched for and tried countless ways to protect her child, armed with professional knowledge from the classroom and a mother’s urgency. She runs the blog “Life Strategy Lab for Struggling Children.”

● A practical school-life manual for school-age children with ADHD from a special education teacher of 25 years with a doctorate in special education.
● The real experience of a mother who raised her son with ADHD into a scholarship student at a national university.
● School-life strategies by type: high-IQ, borderline intelligence, autism spectrum, sensory sensitivity, quiet ADHD and more.
● A school adjustment guide covering the entire school-age period, from elementary through middle and high school.
● How to work effectively with homeroom teachers, with know-how for school–home communication.
● Solutions for key school challenges, including school refusal, medication holidays, peer conflict, learning attitudes and responding to bullying.
● A practical guide for parents that also covers parental burnout, family conflict and adult ADHD.
● 15 checklists and many forms, including a medication adjustment log, a child user manual, a behavior observation sheet and a conflict record sheet.