ADHD and School Holidays: The Importance of Rest and Reset
Why slowing down may be just as important as preparing for what comes next
As another school term is drawing to a close, there is often a temptation to look immediately towards what needs to happen next. There may be work to catch up on, routines to improve, subjects to prepare for or goals that did not quite get achieved during the term. For parents of young people with ADHD, the school holidays can easily become an opportunity to address all the things that have been difficult over the previous ten weeks. We finally have some time, so perhaps this is the moment to get organised.
I understand that temptation. As both an educator and an ADHD coach, I spend a great deal of time thinking about strategies, scaffolds and ways we can help young people manage the demands placed upon them. Yet as we approach the holidays, I find myself thinking about a different kind of support. Sometimes what a young person needs most is not another strategy, another goal or another opportunity to catch up. Sometimes they simply need the chance to recover.
Stephen Covey described this idea as “sharpening the saw”: the need to renew ourselves rather than continually pushing for greater output (Covey, 1989). It is a concept that has stayed with me because it challenges an assumption that is deeply embedded in the way many of us think about productivity. We tend to treat rest as something that happens after the important work is finished. The difficulty, of course, is that the work is rarely completely finished.
For young people with ADHD, this matters particularly because the demands of a school term extend far beyond completing assignments and sitting tests. Executive functioning is involved throughout the day: remembering equipment, shifting between subjects, starting tasks, prioritising competing demands, keeping track of deadlines, regulating attention, managing impulses and adjusting when plans change. Executive functions include processes such as inhibitory control, working memory and cognitive flexibility, all of which contribute to goal-directed behaviour and learning (Diamond, 2013). ADHD is associated with difficulties across a range of these executive processes, although individual profiles vary considerably (Willcutt et al., 2005).
There is also a great deal happening that may never appear on a timetable. A young person may be managing friendships, sensory demands, expectations from teachers and family, extracurricular activities, disappointment, social uncertainty and the effort involved in appearing as though everything is under control. A student can arrive at the end of a term having met most of their obligations and still be exhausted by what it took to do so.
This is why I think we need to be careful about interpreting the sudden collapse that sometimes happens when holidays begin. Parents may notice their child sleeping considerably more, spending long periods gaming or watching television, becoming less interested in organised activities, or simply wanting to be left alone. After weeks of structure, reminders and constant demands, the change can look concerning. It can be tempting to respond by quickly establishing a holiday routine or finding productive things for them to do.
Some structure can certainly be helpful, particularly for young people who find complete unpredictability difficult. Rest and structure are not opposites. A loose rhythm around sleep, meals, movement and family commitments can provide enough predictability without recreating the demands of school. The distinction I find useful is between structure that supports regulation and structure that exists primarily to maintain productivity.
Research on recovery from work provides an interesting parallel. Recovery involves psychological and physiological processes through which depleted resources are restored after sustained demands. Sonnentag and Fritz (2007) identified experiences such as psychological detachment, relaxation, mastery and a sense of control as important dimensions of recovery. Although this research was conducted with adults in occupational settings rather than children with ADHD, the underlying idea is worth considering: human beings are not designed for continuous demand without opportunities for restoration.
For young people, restorative time will not necessarily look the way adults imagine it should. Reading for hours, drawing, gaming with friends, kicking a football, spending time with animals, listening to music, sleeping later or simply doing very little may all provide different forms of recovery. What matters is not whether the activity looks productive from the outside, but whether it allows the young person some relief from the demands they have been managing.
This does not mean that school holidays need to be completely unstructured or that responsibilities disappear. It means recognising that recovery itself has value. There will be time to prepare for the next term. Bags can be repacked, calendars checked and routines gradually re-established as the return to school approaches. Those tasks do not necessarily need to begin on the first Monday of the holidays.
There is also something important here for parents. Supporting a child with ADHD can involve an enormous amount of invisible executive functioning on their behalf: remembering appointments, monitoring deadlines, anticipating what might be forgotten, prompting routines, managing emotional fallout and constantly thinking several steps ahead. The end of term may be a time when parents need some recovery too. We cannot always create idyllic, responsibility-free holidays, particularly when adults are working and family life continues, but perhaps we can give ourselves permission not to optimise every available moment.
As an educator, I also think this applies to teachers. The end of a term can bring its own peculiar exhaustion. Teaching requires constant attention, decision-making, emotional regulation and responsiveness to other people's needs. Holidays often arrive accompanied by lists of things we intend to catch up on, organise or prepare. Covey's metaphor is as relevant to us as it is to the young people we support. There comes a point when continuing to push a blunt saw harder is less useful than stopping long enough to sharpen it.
Perhaps, then, the school holidays do not always need a plan for improvement. There is nothing wrong with setting goals, maintaining routines or using some of the break to prepare for what comes next. The important question is whether we have also made room for recovery.
For some young people with ADHD, the most useful thing we can offer during the holidays may be permission to step away from the constant experience of being measured against what they have completed, remembered, organised or achieved. There is value in having periods of life in which there is nowhere to be, nothing to hand in and no expectation that every hour should be used well.
When the next school term arrives, we can sharpen the pencils, reset the calendars and begin again. Until then, perhaps we can allow the saw to be sharpened too. 🌿
References
Covey, S. R. (1989). The 7 habits of highly effective people: Powerful lessons in personal change. Free Press.
Diamond, A. (2013). Executive functions. Annual Review of Psychology, 64, 135–168. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-113011-143750
Sonnentag, S., & Fritz, C. (2007). The Recovery Experience Questionnaire: Development and validation of a measure for assessing recuperation and unwinding from work. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 12(3), 204–221. https://doi.org/10.1037/1076-8998.12.3.204
Willcutt, E. G., Doyle, A. E., Nigg, J. T., Faraone, S. V., & Pennington, B. F. (2005). Validity of the executive function theory of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder: A meta-analytic review. Biological Psychiatry, 57(11), 1336–1346. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsych.2005.02.006
