Always on the go: making sense of ADHD in the early years

It’s 9.15 on a Friday morning and one child has already been a firefighter, emptied the maths basket, climbed the low wall in the garden twice and started three jigsaws. At carpet time he lasts ninety seconds. By lunch, the staff in his room are tired in a way that’s hard to explain to anyone who wasn’t there.

Every setting knows a child like this, and plenty of practitioners will quietly admit to feeling under-prepared when the usual approaches don’t seem to touch the sides. That gap is exactly what good ADHD training is for.

What ADHD is, and what it isn’t

Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder is the most commonly diagnosed mental disorder of children. Children with ADHD may be hyperactive, act on impulse before the thought has caught up, or find paying attention genuinely difficult. Those things touch the skills daily life keeps asking of young children: waiting, focusing, taking turns, sitting through a story.

Here’s the part that changes how teams respond. ADHD is caused by differences in brain anatomy and wiring, and it often runs in families. It is not caused by poor parenting, and it is not naughtiness. Once a team genuinely understands that, frustration gives way to strategy, because you stop trying to discipline away something that was never a discipline problem in the first place.

A note of caution that matters in our age group: very few children under five will have a diagnosis, and it isn’t our role to hand one out informally. “He’s so ADHD,” said in the staff room, is a label, not an observation. The honest alternative is to describe what we see and support the need in front of us, whatever it later turns out to be.

Working with the energy, not against it

The strengths-based view is more than a nicety. The same child who exhausts the room brings energy, curiosity and enthusiasm that, pointed in the right direction, are a joy to work with. Strategy in the EYFS classroom often means working with that grain. Movement built into the day rather than fought against. Instructions kept short and given one at a time. Predictable routines. Jobs that carry a bit of status, like being trusted with the snack trolley. Praise that lands immediately rather than being saved up for home time.

None of that is complicated. It works far better, though, when the whole team understands why they’re doing it and applies it consistently, which is where training earns its keep.

Parents belong in the picture too. A family living with a whirlwind at home is often braced for criticism at pick-up, because they’ve had years of tuts in supermarkets. A practitioner who leads with the good stuff, who says “he concentrated on the guttering and funnels for twenty minutes this morning” before anything else, changes the whole temperature of that relationship. And where home and setting use the same routines and the same calm responses, children feel the consistency and do better for it.

Careful observation matters here as much as it does anywhere. Recording when attention wanders, what pulls a child back, and which parts of the day go smoothly builds a picture that’s useful to parents now and to other professionals later, if the family ever seeks an assessment.

Training that fills a real gap

Our ADHD course for childcare practitioners covers what attention deficit hyperactivity disorder is, what causes it, the symptoms and how they affect focus and self-control, the positives that deserve just as much attention, and a range of strategies for supporting children within the EYFS classroom. It takes around an hour, online, at your own pace.

Because ADHD can continue through the teenage years and into adulthood, what your team learns here doesn’t stop being useful when a child moves on. You’re shaping how that child gets understood for years to come.

The firefighter with the three jigsaws isn’t a problem to be managed. He’s a child with a brain that’s wired a little differently, in a room that can learn to meet him where he is.