What Is Inattentive ADHD?

When my son was about eight years old, he was diagnosed with inattentive ADHD, a process that started with his second-grade teacher and unfolded over several months. If you’re not familiar with inattentive ADHD, here’s what it actually looks like in real life.

Inattentive ADHD symptoms include having a hard time staying focused on tasks, struggling to pay attention to details, getting distracted easily, difficulty staying organized, and forgetting things even with a routine in place. Hyperactivity is very minimal.

Understanding inattentive ADHD symptoms starts with knowing what they actually look like day to day, and that looks different for every child. Here is how they show up for my son.

Staying Focused

Difficulty staying focused is one of the most recognizable inattentive ADHD symptoms, and it shows up for our son every single day. The inability to remain focused on schoolwork, tasks, or long-term projects is most easily observed in a classroom, during playtime, or at recess, as these children present difficulty committing to an activity for any significant amount of time.

Our son’s biggest challenge is that he is unable to stay focused at school and will often forget the simplest things such as what his homework is that day, or to turn in an assignment that is due, or you’d be shocked about how many times he has forgotten to put his name on his assignments when he turns it in.

What’s crazy to me about inattentive ADHD, is that the same brain that struggles to stay focused can also completely lock onto a single activity for hours, that’s what hyperfixation looks like in our house.

Paying Attention to Details

Paying attention to details can be a problem at school. My son’s teachers can tell him things, and he forgets everything his teachers have said. He will miss assignments or turn something in late because he didn’t pay attention to when the assignment was due.

A child with inattentive ADHD may not pay careful attention to classroom assignments or household chores. Accordingly, a lack of attention to detail can be classified as a symptom if the child displays consistent careless mistakes or almost never completes a task thoroughly.

Distracted Easily

Getting distracted easily is one of the areas that I notice a great deal at home. I will ask him to take something downstairs and come back, and he never comes back. He will take the item downstairs and not even put it away where I ask, and then he gets distracted doing something else and doesn’t come back. I will ask him to shower, and he gets distracted and forgets to even get in the shower. Just like when he was younger, I had to ask him to do one thing at a time.

A child with inattentive ADHD frequently becomes distracted, even during tasks that are typically enjoyed. This behavior is often most noticeable when the child is telling a story, playing with friends, or watching TV and movies.

Staying Organized

This area is a big one. His room is constantly a mess. My son cannot keep anything organized, and I mean anything. Over the years, we have realized that he can only have minimal things in his room, or it gets incredibly messy. This also affects him at school. He cannot organize all of his papers and assignments. We’ve had to work closely with his teachers to keep him organized, and over time, we’ve developed a set of school strategies that actually work for our son.

Having a Schedule

Having a schedule and a routine is very important to us. Even though we try and have a routine for my son, it doesn’t always work to keep on task. It does most of the time, but he can still get distracted even when he is doing his routine.

Those are the inattentive ADHD symptoms we deal with most in our house. Every child is different, but if any of these sound familiar, you’re not alone.