Why your ADHD child's behaviour might not match their age, and what that means for supporting them.
← Back to ResourcesIf you've ever felt like your ADHD child's behaviour doesn't match their age - brilliant with complex ideas one moment, unable to remember their PE kit the next - there's a well-known concept from ADHD researcher Dr Russell Barkley that might explain the gap.
Children with ADHD tend to develop executive function skills - things like planning, impulse control, working memory, and emotional regulation - at roughly 70% the rate of their peers. To estimate a rough "executive function age", take a child's actual age and subtract around 30%.
What that can look like in practice:
It reframes a lot of what can look like "not trying hard enough" or "being difficult" as, actually, a genuine developmental gap: not a choice, and not something that responds to more willpower or stricter consequences. A child isn't failing to remember their homework out of carelessness; their working memory may simply be doing the job of a child several years younger.
This is a helpful rule of thumb, not a diagnostic measurement. The actual gap varies a lot by person, and even within one child, by skill. A child might be close to age-typical in working memory but noticeably behind in emotional regulation, or the other way round. It's a lens for understanding, not a label to apply rigidly.
Meeting a child where their executive function genuinely is, rather than where their age "should" put them. That might mean more external structure and visual reminders than peers need, more scaffolding for multi-step tasks, and, importantly, patience that treats these gaps as developmental, not behavioural.
This is exactly the kind of pattern we work with in Support Sessions and 1:1 Tuition: building the external structure and strategies that help a child's environment catch up to where they actually are, while their executive function skills keep developing in their own time.