Children With ADHD Rate Only School Lower Among Their Strengths

What the research found

Fifty-six children between the ages of ten and seventeen were asked to rate themselves on five kinds of strength: how they manage their emotions and behaviour around other people, how involved they are with their family, what they make of their own competence and accomplishments, how they are doing at school, and how readily they accept affection and express feeling towards others. Thirty-eight had a diagnosis of ADHD made by a psychologist or physician, confirmed by elevated scores on a parent rating scale. Eighteen did not.

The children answered for themselves, over video calls, with a researcher reading each question aloud and recording the reply. Emma Charabin and Emma Climie, working with three colleagues at the University of Calgary, reported the results in 2023 in the Journal of Attention Disorders.

Four of the five domains produced no significant difference between the groups. Interpersonal strength averaged 9.66 among the children with ADHD and 9.33 among the comparison children. Family involvement was 8.97 and 9.22. Intrapersonal strength was 8.61 and 8.83, and affective strength 9.18 and 8.83.

School functioning was the exception. The children with ADHD averaged 7.92 against the comparison group’s 10.22, t(54) = -2.90, p = .005, with a Cohen’s d of 0.85, above the conventional threshold for a large effect. It was the only comparison to survive a Bonferroni correction, the stricter standard researchers apply when several tests are run at once. Set against the instrument’s norming sample, the comparison group’s school rating fell in the typical range and the ADHD group’s fell below it.

Children in both groups who rated themselves as strong in one domain also rated themselves as more resilient overall, with correlations between .576 and .818. The exception was family involvement, which was not significantly associated with resilience among the children without ADHD. Overall self-rated strength reached 92.05 for the children with ADHD and 94.94 for the others, both average against the norming sample, and on a separate hundred-point measure of coping and adaptability the two groups reached 63.03 and 63.22.

What it means for you and your child

What the study records is what these children said about themselves. It does not measure how they are actually doing, and the two can part company. The authors are direct about this: children with ADHD are known to show a positive illusory bias, rating their own competence above what performance measures show, and more strongly than other children do. That possibility stands over the four domains where the groups matched, and it cannot be resolved from self-report alone.

The sample was small and favourable. Thirty-eight children with ADHD and eighteen without is an uneven split, boys predominated in the ADHD group and girls in the comparison group, and every participant had average or higher intelligence, both groups averaging around 112. Children carrying a second neurodevelopmental diagnosis such as autism were excluded by design. A result from a group this narrow does not automatically describe a child whose profile is more complicated.

Within those limits, one thing the study does establish is where the discouragement went. A child who says school is going badly is often heard as saying something larger about themselves. These children did not extend the complaint. Their ratings of friendship, family, self-regard and affection stayed in the ordinary range while their school ratings dropped below it, and the drop was confined to the domain that names the classroom.

A school can use that specificity. A child rating their own school competence as below average is reporting something they are aware of, and awareness of difficulty is not the same as a diminished sense of self. Support aimed at the classroom addresses the domain these children identified, and it does so without treating the whole child as the problem.

A school report answers a different question from the one these children were asked. If your child speaks bitterly about lessons and warmly about their friends, their family and themselves, they are describing what these fifty-six children described. Among them it was the ordinary case.