Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › What ADHD actually is
If a young person says they do not feel ready to drive, take that as information rather than something to talk them out of. Plenty of them know their own attention better than the adults around them do.
Waiting a year is not a failure, and there are other ways to get about. Do ask what sits behind it, because there is a difference between a sober read of their own driving and an anxiety that is quietly shrinking their world. If it is the second, the answer is still not pressure. It is smaller steps with somebody alongside them.
Qur’an and Sunnah
Man was truly created anxious (Quran 70:19). Caution is treated there as part of the ordinary human make-up rather than as something to be argued out of somebody.
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A quality of life measure for adults with ADHD was built on the premise that symptom counts miss what impairment means in daily life, and it works by asking people about their own experience. That premise supports listening to a young person's own account of how they drive. It is a measure validation study and says nothing about driving decisions.
Brod M, Johnston J, Able S, Swindle R. (2006). Validation of the adult attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder quality-of-life Scale (AAQoL): a disease-specific quality-of-life measure.. Quality of life research : an international journal of quality of life aspects of treatment, care and rehabilitation doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Someone who can see their own limits is using a skill worth encouraging rather than a fear worth arguing with.
This one is still a draft. It is waiting on a scholar and a clinician to read it before it is published.
Near this one
When homework takes three hours instead of one, the missing two hours come out of friends, rest and family. That loss is part of the problem, not a side issue.
With ADHD the one dependable thing is that you are not dependable in the same way each day. A day when everything works and a day when nothing does can arrive with no reason you can find.
Many people who end up in trouble with the law have never had their ADHD recognised. Behaviour read as defiance can be the same difficulty with stopping and thinking ahead.