Supporting Teen Girls with ADHD
Updated on November 21, 20224
By Catherine Mutti-Driscoll, MA, PhD, CALC
Being a teen girl was extremely challenging for me, to say the least. Even though it would be decades later that I would learn that I had ADHD, many of my experiences resonate with what authors Nadeau, Littman, and Quinn (2016) found about the experiences of teen girls with ADHD, including social, emotional, academic, and self-image challenges.
Highly Intelligent with social, emotional, and self-image challenges
For example, like other teen girls with ADHD, my intelligence was above or on par with my peers. However, in contrast to my peers, my social and emotional regulation skills lagged. My lack of popularity and ease in social situations blundered my fragile self-esteem. Like many other neurodiverse girls, I struggled with body image, especially when emotion and impulse control issues made it difficult to control my eating.
Academic challenges
Because I felt socially unskilled (“uncool”) and felt unattractive due to the body image distortions that I experienced, I clung to the one persona that seemed possibly attainable for me, the smart girl persona. I knew that this persona further compromised my “coolness,” but it was all that I had! However, even my ability to attain this persona was tenuous due to my undiagnosed learning disabilities (dyscalculia). I worked hard to keep my grades up and seem like a smart girl, but it wasn't lost on me how easy academic achievement and performance appeared for others in comparison to myself, especially when it came to standardized testing.
Friendship & masking
I was lucky, however, that I had a best friend from my neighborhood, and she became a safe haven of sorts, a relationship in which I didn’t have to mask very much. Nadeau, Littman, and Quinn describe how even having one supportive friend is extremely protective for girls with ADHD. This is because neurodiverse teen girls want to be accepted and belong more than anything. As a result, they can often hide their emotions and true selves in order to fit in, a strategy that I frequently employed at school in order to hide my challenges. The unfortunate cost of this strategy was that I lost track of some of my strengths and interests during those years.
Supporting teen girls with ADHD
So how, might you ask, do we do to make it easier for teen girls with ADHD who face these kinds of challenges? Nadeau, Littman, and Quinn advocate that teen girls be encouraged to develop self-awareness, advocacy skills, personal interests and strengths, and to cultivate meaningful personal relationships. Like these authors, I have found that working on the aforementioned skills can be immensely helpful for the teen girls I coach and support in online groups.
If you have a teen girl in your life who could use some extra support, I encourage you to check out our upcoming groups and classes and contact us to learn more about ADHD treatment options for teen girls.
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