What is AuDHD?

Transcript

 AuDHD is a term that's used to describe folks who are autistic and ADHD like me. And the best way that I can describe it is it is within one person this conflict, push and pull between the need for order and sameness and, uh, routine of autism combined with this need for stimulation and variety and yeah, sometimes chaos with ADHD.

And when it comes to working with students that are AuDHD, it can create some really interesting but also very frustrating contradictions. For example, a student might be hyper-organized, super meticulous, but also make careless mistakes and forget things a lot. Or a student might thrive on routine one day and then the next day be super understimulated and crave variety.

Or it might mean that a student is super hyper-focused one day and then the next day they are struggling to focus or even just start a basic task. And I think the most important thing that you can do when working with these students is to help them figure out when they're having more of an autism day or an ADHD day, because it can vary on a daily basis, and being able to help kids understand whether they need more of the calm, the focus, the sameness of autism, or whether they need more of the variety and overstimulation of ADHD is going to help them really figure out what they need in the long run.

It's also really great to focus on executive functioning skills because particularly for AuDHD students, that is difficult and that is due to a lot of the time the perfectionism of autism combined with the difficulty in starting tasks that's associated with ADHD. So if you can help students with, you know, this more combined outlook, combining different resources from autism and ADHD supports, you are going to be doing a great service to your AuDHD students.

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