[fatnoah]

Very much this. My son has ADHD (full neuropsych eval) and he has attention issues, but his main challenge is executive functioning. Daily routines do exist, but are achieved through literally months of repetition, not by conscious effort to identify and organize all of the things that need to happen before school, after school, etc.

Establishing and sticking to a formal program to read books is literally the hardest thing he could do, but when he finds a book he likes, he'll stay up late to read it, and would stay up all night if we let him.

[InitialLastName]

It sounds like your kid has a similar ADHD experience to how mine was when I was younger, so I feel compelled to say this:

The best thing my parents did raising me (and it wasn't easy) was to put a lot of effort into exposing me to books I was interested in and to exercise a very light hand in terms of how late into the night I read. The combination of reading habits and a practiced ability to educate myself from books has served me very well in the decades since. It's operated as both a coping mechanism for the drawbacks of ADHD (such as habitual inattention to in-person communication) and, as my other skills have caught up, a key tool that some of my peers are lacking.

Daily routines were more difficult for me, and took a set of experiments in my early 20s (think daily alarms/calendar events on the order of "wake up" ... "work out"... "eat breakfast" ... "take shower/brush teeth" increments) to really lock into place (although they have taken a blow in the last year).

[fatnoah]

Thank you for your reply. Unless he's up super-late, we let him read as late as he wants.

Despite the cost, doing the full neuro-psych evaluation was the best thing we've ever done. It helped us (the parents) really get insight into how his brain was working, which completely reset our own ideas of how to best help him.