The Child Who Couldn't Learn Motor Commands

Imagine a young child with ADHD sitting in a laboratory, being asked to learn a sequence of motor commands. The researcher demonstrates a movement, the child attempts to reproduce it, and the researcher measures accuracy, timing, retention, and the ability to repeat the sequence. The child performs poorly, and the resulting study may report evidence of impaired motor learning in children with ADHD.

But there's a question that should have been asked before interpreting that result.

Was the child engaged?

Not merely awake, cooperative, or looking at the researcher, but genuinely engaged in the activity. Because if engagement determines whether someone with ADHD can access their abilities, then a laboratory task that fails to engage the child may tell us considerably less about motor-learning capacity than the researchers believe.

The problem becomes even more complicated when we distinguish learning a motor command from demonstrating one that has already been learned. A child might struggle to acquire a sequence because the instruction never captured their engagement. Another child might acquire the sequence but struggle to reproduce it when the testing conditions are uninteresting. Both children could receive poor scores, but neither result, by itself, establishes the limits of their underlying motor-learning capacity.

The distinction matters because performance is something we observe, while capacity is something we infer. If the conditions of the experiment influence access to the abilities being measured, then those conditions belong inside the scientific explanation, not outside it.

The Goalkeeper Who Walks Into a Cabinet Door

I played Division I soccer as a goalkeeper. I also played extensive boarded indoor soccer, where the ball remains in play after striking the walls and rebounds can produce point-blank scoring opportunities in fractions of a second.

The demands on a goalkeeper are extraordinary. You must track multiple moving players, anticipate trajectories, process spatial relationships, recognize developing patterns, select an appropriate movement, and execute it almost instantaneously. You don't have time to consciously deliberate over every motor command. In the most intense moments, your body responds before you have time to think about what you're doing.

And yet, outside that environment, I can walk into a cabinet door I've left open.

How does someone capable of extraordinary sensorimotor coordination become so inattentive to something directly in front of him? The conventional temptation is to describe one performance as evidence of capability and the other as evidence of deficit. But there's another possibility: the capabilities are there, while the conditions governing access to them are different.

Inside the goal, the game supplies interest, novelty, challenge, urgency, and immediate feedback. The goalkeeper is continuously engaged. Walking through the kitchen provides none of those things. The cabinet door doesn't become less dangerous because I'm disengaged, but my access to the attentional processes that would help me avoid it may be substantially different.

The same brain, the same person, and two dramatically different performances. Any theory claiming to explain ADHD must account for both.

Dr. William Dodson's Question

Dr. William Dodson has spent decades treating people with ADHD and investigating the experiences that conventional diagnostic descriptions often fail to capture. One of his most revealing clinical questions is deceptively simple: If you can get engaged and stay engaged, is there anything you cannot do?

Dodson describes hearing a remarkably consistent response from his patients. When they are genuinely engaged, they can accomplish things that otherwise seem extraordinarily difficult.

In his ADHD Owner's Manual, Dodson distinguishes two problems that are frequently conflated: becoming engaged and remaining engaged. He argues that stimulant medications can be remarkably effective at preventing distraction once engagement has begun, but they do not automatically create the engagement itself.

His Interest-Based Nervous System framework emphasizes the conditions that frequently drive engagement in ADHD: interest, novelty, challenge, urgency, and passion. These are not necessarily the same conditions that determine whether a task is important.

An overdue bill may be critically important, while a fascinating creative project may have no immediate practical importance whatsoever. Yet the person with ADHD may spend six uninterrupted hours on the creative project while struggling to initiate the bill payment.

If we interpret that difference solely as a deficiency in executive-function capacity, we risk overlooking the most obvious experimental variable. The person demonstrated sustained attention, planning, working memory, sequencing, and goal-directed behavior during the engaging activity. Where did those abilities go when the task changed?

Perhaps they didn't go anywhere. Perhaps the conditions required to access them disappeared.

The Runway After the Hurricane

Consider a runway after a hurricane. The airplane is intact, its engines work, and its pilot knows how to fly. But the runway is covered with fallen trees, debris, and wreckage, preventing the airplane from taking off. Clearing the runway doesn't create the airplane's ability to fly. It removes obstacles preventing that ability from being exercised.

This offers a useful way to think about the potential role of stimulant medication in ADHD. Adderall does not manufacture personal interest or automatically make every task fascinating. But by changing neural signaling and reducing certain forms of interference, it may make engagement easier to initiate and sustain.

My hypothesis is that emotional noise and competing internal distractions can raise the threshold of interest required for engagement. When that interference is reduced, activities that previously lacked sufficient appeal may become accessible. The person may no longer require an extraordinary level of novelty, challenge, or urgency to get started.

The medication hasn't supplied a new set of abilities. It may have changed the conditions under which existing abilities can be used.

This distinction is particularly important when interpreting emotional dysregulation. In his unpublished draft chapter Regulation of Emotions in ADHD, Dodson discusses studies reporting complete remission of emotional dysregulation in approximately two-thirds of subjects treated with methylphenidate and resolution of emotional-control impairments in approximately 60 percent of subjects treated with lisdexamfetamine.

He also distinguishes emotional dysregulation from trauma-related sensitivity to rejection and the clinical phenomenon he calls rejection sensitive dysphoria. In his own practice, he reports that approximately 98 percent of patients acknowledged unusually painful rejection-related experiences when asked directly.

These observations matter because they point to emotional functioning that can change dramatically through pharmacological intervention without requiring instantaneous anatomical reconstruction of the brain. They do not establish the complete neurological mechanism, but they give us something experimentally useful: a way to investigate how reducing emotional interference changes access to performance.

And the runway analogy has another dimension. Some airplanes need long runways, some need short runways, and some are helicopters. The conditions required for successful engagement may differ considerably from one individual to another.

Passion Singularities

There are activities so intensely engaging that people with ADHD may enter and sustain hyperfocus without medication. I think of these as passion singularities.

For one person, it's playing an instrument. For another, programming, mathematics, painting, filmmaking, or competitive athletics. The activity supplies enough intrinsic engagement to overcome distractions that would derail less compelling tasks.

That doesn't mean the person has no ADHD. It means the activity creates conditions under which their ADHD-related difficulties may become far less apparent.

This suggests an important extension of the medication hypothesis. If medication reduces the amount of interference that engagement must overcome, then its additional benefit for sustaining attention may be smaller during an intensely compelling activity than during a moderately interesting one.

That's a testable prediction, but the larger insight is that engagement isn't merely a reward for possessing an ability. It may be the gateway through which the ability becomes available.

Early Childhood Hyperactivity: The Developmental Engine

Consider the hyperactive child growing up before smartphones and tablets became convenient ways to keep children occupied. Where did all that energy go?

Playgrounds, climbing structures, jungle gyms, trees, bicycles, basketball courts, and backyard games. The child was constantly moving, often from one physical challenge to another, without anyone needing to create an artificial incentive.

Climbing required planning a route through three-dimensional space. Jumping required judging distance and timing. Running around obstacles demanded rapid adjustments to movement, while catching a ball required coordinating visual information with motor commands. Every tumble, recovery, change of direction, and successful landing provided feedback, and the child did these things voluntarily, often for hours, because the activities were engaging.

The conventional description of hyperactivity emphasizes excessive movement, difficulty remaining seated, and behavioral disruption. Those characteristics can create genuine problems in classrooms and other structured environments. But what if some of that movement also serves an important developmental function?

What if hyperactivity helps create the experiences through which children develop sophisticated motor and spatial abilities?

Repeated physical exploration gives the developing nervous system opportunities to refine representations of the body and its relationship to the surrounding environment. Children learn distance, trajectory, balance, timing, force, and spatial relationships through experience. The hypothesis is that, for some children with ADHD, a strong drive toward movement increases exposure to precisely these learning opportunities.

This offers a possible explanation for an apparent contradiction. Researchers identify motor coordination difficulties in some children with ADHD, yet other individuals with ADHD develop exceptional motor and spatial abilities. Those findings need not be mutually exclusive.

A child whose hyperactivity leads to thousands of hours of engaging physical exploration may accumulate an extraordinary foundation of sensorimotor learning. Another child whose movement is consistently restricted, criticized, or discouraged may have fewer opportunities to develop those same skills. A third child may have genuine motor-learning difficulties that persist even in highly engaging environments.

These are different developmental pathways, even though all three children may share an ADHD diagnosis. The important variable is not simply how much the child moves. It is what the child experiences, explores, learns, and practices through that movement.

The Developmental Feedback Loop

Now connect this to Dodson's Interest-Based Nervous System.

The hyperactive child seeks movement because movement is engaging. Engagement sustains physical exploration, and physical exploration provides repeated opportunities to acquire motor and spatial skills. As those skills improve, increasingly complicated activities become accessible and rewarding.

The child who learns to balance can ride a bicycle. The child who develops coordination can play soccer, and the child who enjoys soccer may become fascinated with goalkeeping. Each successful experience opens the door to another, providing more opportunities to practice, experiment, and refine increasingly sophisticated abilities.

The proposed developmental sequence is:

Hyperactivity → Engaging movement → Repeated sensorimotor experience → Motor and spatial skill acquisition → More sophisticated opportunities for engagement.

This creates a potentially self-reinforcing developmental process. It also changes the question we're asking. We're no longer investigating only whether exercise temporarily improves cognitive performance. We're asking whether a child's natural drive to move influences the development of the abilities that researchers eventually attempt to measure.

That distinction matters because an experimental assessment at age fourteen may reflect a developmental history extending back to the playground at age four.

When Screens Replace Formative Play

There is another consequence we need to consider, particularly in an era when electronic devices have become convenient babysitters.

When we hand a young child a tablet or smartphone to keep them occupied for hours, we may be taking away something far more important than we realize: opportunities for formative physical play.

This concern isn't limited to children with ADHD. Research on sedentary behavior, screen exposure, physical activity, and child development has already raised concerns about associations between excessive recreational screen use and poorer performance on some measures of executive functioning, motor development, and cognitive development in children without ADHD as well.

The evidence is not uniform across ages, activities, or study designs. Interactive educational activities are not equivalent to passive entertainment, and associations do not automatically establish that screens caused a particular deficit. But the displacement problem deserves serious attention because time is finite.

A child spending hours sitting with a tablet is not spending those same hours climbing, running, balancing, throwing, catching, or exploring the physical world. Those experiences are part of how children develop their understanding of three-dimensional space, and the developmental opportunities they provide cannot necessarily be replicated by moving a finger across a screen.

For a hyperactive child with ADHD, the implications may be particularly important. Running, climbing, jumping, and exploring aren't necessarily meaningless expressions of excess energy. They may provide the sensorimotor experiences through which the nervous system learns to coordinate movement, anticipate trajectories, and navigate its environment.

A child can be intensely engaged with a touchscreen, but touchscreen engagement does not reproduce the full range of vestibular, proprioceptive, and whole-body spatial experiences provided by physical play. Those missed opportunities can accumulate over years, and their consequences may become more apparent later, when students encounter increasingly demanding tasks involving spatial reasoning, geometry, physical coordination, and the manipulation of abstract representations.

I saw reasons to worry about this when I taught mathematics at Poinciana High School, a Title I school. Teaching geometry gives you a particularly revealing view of how students reason about space.

A student may memorize a formula yet struggle to visualize the object the formula describes. Rotating a figure mentally, understanding how a two-dimensional representation corresponds to a three-dimensional object, or anticipating how a geometric transformation changes spatial relationships can be unexpectedly difficult.

These difficulties do not establish what caused them in any individual student, but they raise a developmental question that deserves more attention. How much of a student's later difficulty with spatial mathematics reflects differences in the opportunities they had to explore physical space during childhood? And what happens when those opportunities are increasingly displaced by screen-based entertainment?

The consequences may not be obvious when the child is five or six. They may become apparent in middle school or high school, when teachers expect students to draw upon spatial representations that were never developed as fully as they might have been.

The danger isn't simply that screens occupy a child's attention. It's that they can occupy the very hours during which the child might otherwise be building the motor and spatial abilities they'll need for the rest of their life.

This isn't an argument against technology. It's an argument against confusing digital engagement with the full range of developmental experiences children need.

The Developmental Consequence

Now return to the child in the motor-learning laboratory.

Learning requires experience. Repeated experience strengthens skills, refines motor commands, improves timing, and allows increasingly complex actions to become coordinated. But what happens when a child cannot sustain engagement long enough to accumulate those experiences?

A poor result on a motor-learning task may reflect several different things. The child may have difficulty acquiring the motor command itself, or difficulty remaining engaged during instruction. The child may have learned the command but struggled to demonstrate it during testing. Or the child may have accumulated fewer relevant practice experiences over the preceding years.

These possibilities are not interchangeable, and they have different developmental implications.

Dodson makes a closely related observation in The ADHD Owner's Manual. In his discussion of skills acquisition, he describes people with ADHD who missed opportunities to develop important skills because they were not engaged when those skills were being taught.

That observation has implications far beyond adulthood. If engagement repeatedly limits access to learning opportunities, then an initially situational difficulty can eventually contribute to a genuine developmental difference in acquired skill.

A difficulty accessing learning experiences can eventually become a difference in what has been learned.

This is the missing causal bridge. It would be a serious mistake to assume that every observed developmental difference must have originated as an intrinsic deficiency in the capacity being measured.

The Soccer Practice That Prepared the Brain to Learn

Think about a traditional soccer practice. We didn't arrive at the field, sit down, and immediately begin learning complicated motor commands. We started by running, then spent approximately fifteen minutes warming up, moving, and performing familiar drills before progressing into more demanding technical instruction.

By the time the coach introduced something new, we'd already been exercising, and that may have mattered for much more than warming up our muscles.

Research on acute physical activity suggests that exercise can temporarily improve aspects of attention, arousal regulation, and cognitive performance. Exercise can also influence emotional state, potentially reducing some of the interference that makes sustained engagement difficult.

Now combine that with Dodson's interest-based engagement framework. The child begins with physical activity that may improve readiness to engage. The coach then introduces a drill involving movement, immediate feedback, challenge, and often competition. Rather than being asked to learn a motor command in isolation, the child encounters the instruction within an activity that already has their attention.

The practice may have created the physiological and motivational conditions that make learning the command possible.

Coaches have been doing versions of this for generations, not because they were consciously applying ADHD neuroscience, but because warming up, moving, and progressively increasing the demands of practice are established parts of athletic instruction.

What if those familiar practices have been helping children with ADHD access learning abilities that conventional laboratory conditions fail to reveal?

The Taiwanese Table Tennis Research

This is where research from Taiwan becomes especially interesting. Chien-Yu Pan and colleagues investigated the effects of table tennis training on children with ADHD.

In a study published online in 2015 and in print in 2019, fifteen children with ADHD participated in a twelve-week table tennis program. Compared with a group of children with ADHD who did not receive the intervention, they demonstrated significant improvements in locomotor skills, object-control skills, and performance on selected measures of executive functioning, including the Stroop and Wisconsin Card Sorting tests.

A separate study published in 2016 used a crossover design in which two groups of children with ADHD received table tennis training during different twelve-week periods. Both groups demonstrated improvements in executive-function measures following their respective interventions, alongside improvements in some motor and behavioral measures.

The importance of these findings is that table tennis is not simply repetitive aerobic exercise. It requires continuous visual tracking, anticipation, spatial judgment, rapid motor selection, and adjustment to changing trajectories. The ball moves, the opponent responds, and the player must adapt. Feedback is immediate, and every exchange presents a new spatial and motor problem.

That makes table tennis an especially interesting activity through which to investigate the interaction between physical exercise, engagement, and cognitive performance.

The studies demonstrate improvements following weeks of training. They do not independently establish that engagement caused those improvements or that the same effects would appear after a single exercise session. But they provide an empirical foundation for asking what happens when physical exercise and sustained engagement occur together.

What if the exercise is improving the conditions under which the child can engage, learn, and demonstrate cognitive and motor abilities? And what if those improved conditions, repeated over weeks and years, help explain developmental differences in acquired skills?

This is a hypothesis generated by connecting observed improvements in cognitive performance with Dodson's clinical observations about engagement. It deserves experiments designed to distinguish the effects of exercise, engagement, practice, and the interaction among them.

Thirty Minutes at McDonald's Playland

Now imagine a different experiment. Take a child with ADHD to a McDonald's Playland for thirty minutes and let the child climb, crawl, run, balance, navigate obstacles, change directions, and interact with other children.

The child is physically active, but something else is happening: the child is engaged. The movement is self-directed, and the environment supplies novelty, immediate feedback, spatial challenges, and opportunities to explore.

After thirty minutes, bring the child into the laboratory and administer a motor-learning assessment. How does that performance compare with the same child's performance when arriving without the physical activity? How quickly does the child acquire an unfamiliar motor sequence, how accurately can it be reproduced, and how well is the new skill retained?

To isolate the causes, researchers would need to distinguish the effects of exercise, engagement, fatigue, and prior practice. The motor tasks would need to be unfamiliar enough that the Playland experience didn't simply rehearse the assessed movements. A stronger design would compare enjoyable active play, less engaging exercise, engaging sedentary activity, and a control condition, while measuring engagement rather than merely assuming it occurred.

The experiment addresses a fundamental question.

Are we measuring what the child can learn, or what the child can learn in the neurological and emotional state in which we happened to test them?

That distinction could change how we interpret an entire category of developmental research.

The Athlete and the Laboratory

Now consider children who find their way into activities that provide the engagement they need.

A child who loves hockey may spend hundreds of hours developing skating, spatial anticipation, balance, and coordinated movement. A child fascinated by baseball may practice pitching mechanics long after formal practice has ended, while a young goalkeeper may accumulate thousands of repetitions of rapid visual tracking, anticipatory movement, and split-second decision-making.

These are not merely examples of children performing well despite ADHD. They are examples of developmental environments that may provide unusually rich opportunities for acquiring sophisticated abilities.

The child who spends hours enthusiastically practicing a motor skill is receiving an entirely different developmental experience from the child repeatedly asked to perform uninteresting motor sequences. That difference matters when researchers later compare their abilities, particularly if the researchers have little information about the children's histories of physical activity, engagement, and skill acquisition.

What would we discover if we studied the highest-performing ADHD athletes with the same intensity that we study children who perform poorly on laboratory tasks?

Not to romanticize ADHD or suggest that every person with ADHD possesses exceptional athletic ability, but to investigate the conditions under which remarkable abilities are acquired and expressed.

A complete account of ADHD must explain the extraordinary performances as well as the impairments.

The Executive-Function Question

Dr. Russell Barkley's executive-function framework has profoundly influenced how ADHD is understood. But an important distinction must be maintained between observing poor executive performance and establishing an underlying deficiency in executive capability.

A person can demonstrate excellent planning, inhibition, sequencing, working memory, and decision-making under one set of conditions while struggling with those operations under another. That doesn't establish that executive functions are irrelevant to ADHD. It raises a more fundamental question about what executive-function assessments are actually measuring.

Are they measuring the limits of an individual's capabilities, or are they measuring how reliably those capabilities can be accessed under the particular conditions of the assessment?

Those questions demand different experiments, and an executive-function deficit demonstrated on a neuropsychological test is not required for an ADHD diagnosis.

In private correspondence with me in October 2021, Dodson challenged Barkley's tendency to present associations within ADHD as causal explanations. He also questioned the assumption that placing emotional dysregulation inside an executive-function framework establishes its underlying cause.

That criticism is relevant here because naming a difficulty an executive-function deficit does not settle whether the difficulty originates in an inability to perform the function, an inability to access it reliably, or a developmental history in which opportunities to acquire the function were restricted.

Those possibilities require investigation. If a person can demonstrate sophisticated executive abilities when deeply engaged, that performance must be incorporated into any satisfactory explanation of their difficulties elsewhere. It cannot simply be dismissed as an exception.

The Adults Who Never Needed Treatment

Dodson's clinical curiosity extends beyond the patients who sought his help. In The ADHD Owner's Manual, he explicitly asks what went right for people with ADHD who grew up to become successful, functional adults.

He emphasizes the importance of having someone in the developing child's life who consistently recognizes the child's worth, supports their efforts, and helps identify obstacles without interpreting those obstacles as character defects.

Consider a man diagnosed with ADHD in his early forties. He grew up in a supportive home, attended a public arts magnet school that suited his interests, and spent hours each day engaged in vigorous physical activity. He encountered difficulties associated with ADHD, but his environment gave him opportunities to succeed, recover from mistakes, and move forward without being overwhelmed by shame.

He never had to fight himself or his past.

His life presents a question that deserves systematic investigation: How much of what we call ADHD impairment depends on the interaction between the person's neurological characteristics and the developmental environment?

Dodson has also described adults who functioned successfully while maintaining demanding exercise routines, only to experience substantial ADHD-related difficulties after those routines disappeared. Their ADHD didn't necessarily begin in adulthood. The conditions that had supported their functioning may have changed.

If exercise, engagement, emotional safety, and environmental fit can influence the expression of ADHD so substantially, then studying impairment without studying those conditions leaves a major part of the developmental story unexplained.

Epistemic Status & Testable Predictions

Several elements of this argument rest on established research. Physical activity can improve aspects of executive functioning in children, including children with ADHD. Structured table tennis interventions have produced measurable improvements in motor and cognitive performance. Research also documents associations between extensive screen exposure and aspects of motor development, although the size and direction of effects depend on age, activity, and study design. A 2025 systematic review specifically examined the relationship between screen time and motor development in children under five.

Dodson's clinical framework describes the importance of engagement and the conditions under which people with ADHD can sustain it. His unpublished writing and private correspondence identify important questions about emotional regulation, treatment responses, and the interpretation of executive-function difficulties.

My observations at Poinciana High School provide educational context, not a controlled longitudinal dataset. They raise questions about spatial development but cannot establish the causes of individual students' difficulties.

The specific proposal advanced here is that engagement regulates access to cognitive and motor abilities, while repeated differences in access and developmental opportunity influence the abilities children acquire. The proposed causal relationships require direct experimental and longitudinal testing, including careful measurement of physical activity, motor development, family environment, educational opportunities, screen use, and co-occurring developmental conditions.

Prediction 1: Engagement-Dependent Motor Acquisition

Children with ADHD learning identical motor sequences under high-engagement conditions will demonstrate better acquisition and retention than under low-engagement conditions, even when practice time and instructional content are controlled.

Prediction 2: Acquisition Versus Execution

When engagement is manipulated independently during learning and testing, researchers will identify children who successfully acquire a motor sequence but fail to demonstrate it under low-engagement testing conditions. This would distinguish learning capacity from performance access.

Prediction 3: Early Hyperactivity and Sensorimotor Development

Among children with ADHD, the relationship between early hyperactivity and later motor or spatial abilities will depend partly on the opportunities that hyperactivity creates for physical exploration and skill acquisition.

Prediction 4: Formative Play and Adolescent Spatial Reasoning

Longitudinal research will find that the amount and variety of active physical play in early childhood predict aspects of spatial reasoning and motor proficiency in adolescence, after accounting for other developmental influences.

Prediction 5: Screen Displacement

Children whose recreational screen use displaces substantial amounts of active physical play will show different developmental trajectories in motor proficiency and spatial performance from children with comparable backgrounds who maintain more opportunities for physical exploration. This prediction concerns displaced experience rather than an assumption that all screen activities are equivalent.

Prediction 6: The Exercise Priming Effect

Children with ADHD who complete a moderate aerobic warm-up before motor instruction will demonstrate improved acquisition of unfamiliar motor sequences compared with children completing a matched low-exertion activity.

Prediction 7: Exercise and Engagement Interaction

An engaging instructional environment following exercise will produce greater motor-learning gains than either exercise or engaging instruction alone, if the two interventions reinforce one another.

Prediction 8: The Engagement Threshold

Reducing emotional interference through appropriate treatment will lower the level of task salience required for some people with ADHD to initiate and sustain engagement.

Prediction 9: Passion and Medication

For some individuals with ADHD, the additional benefit of stimulant medication for sustained attention will be smaller during highly engaging activities than during moderately engaging activities.

Prediction 10: Developmental Opportunity and Environmental Scaffolding

Adults with ADHD who experienced supportive childhood environments, strong educational fit, and sustained access to engaging activities will show different developmental patterns of impairment from adults whose environments provided fewer such opportunities.

These predictions do not require assuming that every ADHD difficulty has the same cause. They require researchers to measure variables that may substantially alter what their existing tests appear to reveal.

The Question We Should Have Asked First

We began with a child struggling to learn a motor command in a laboratory and arrived at a goalkeeper capable of extraordinary motor coordination who can still walk into an open cabinet door.

Along the way, we encountered hyperactive children whose movement may be helping build their spatial and motor abilities, adolescents struggling with spatial mathematics, soccer practices that may prepare the brain for learning, Taiwanese researchers measuring cognitive improvements after table tennis training, and a clinician who spent decades asking what happens when people with ADHD become engaged.

The difference between success and failure may not be explained simply by what a person is capable of doing. It may depend on whether the conditions permit access to those capabilities. And because learning itself requires repeated access, engagement may influence not only what a person can demonstrate today but what they have the opportunity to develop tomorrow.

That is why engagement belongs at the beginning of the investigation, not as an afterthought once researchers have already labeled the performance a deficit.

Before we conclude that a child cannot learn, we should determine whether the child was engaged in learning. Before we conclude that an adult lacks an executive ability, we should investigate whether that ability appears under different conditions. And before we construct a theory of ADHD entirely around failures, we should investigate the people whose abilities flourish when their environments allow them to engage.

Engagement gives you access to your abilities. And sustained access gives those abilities the opportunity to grow.

References

American Psychiatric Association. (2022). Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition, Text Revision (DSM-5-TR). American Psychiatric Association Publishing.

Barkley, R. A. (1997). Behavioral inhibition, sustained attention, and executive functions: Constructing a unifying theory of ADHD. Psychological Bulletin, 121(1), 65–94.

Barkley, R. A. (2012). Executive Functions: What They Are, How They Work, and Why They Evolved. Guilford Press.

Dodson, W. The ADHD Owner's Manual: From Definition to Effective Therapy. Unpublished manuscript supplied to the author.

Dodson, W. (2021, October 19). Private email correspondence with the author concerning executive-function theory, emotional dysregulation, and Dr. Russell Barkley's framework.

Dodson, W. (2024, August 12). Regulation of Emotions in ADHD. Unpublished draft chapter, version 20. Consulted as background; not reproduced.

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Pan, C.-Y., Chu, C.-H., Tsai, C.-L., Lo, S.-Y., Cheng, Y.-W., & Liu, Y.-J. (2016). A racket-sport intervention improves behavioral and cognitive performance in children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder. Research in Developmental Disabilities, 57, 1–10. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ridd.2016.06.009

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