For Martial Arts School Owners

ADHD in Your School

What It Is, How to Teach It, and What to Do When It Costs You Enrollments

Chief Master Greg Moody, Ph.D. · August 24, 2026

A parent is sitting in your parent waiting area watching their kid’s second lesson. Halfway through, one of your students blows the class up and you spend the next two minutes getting the room back.

You aren’t thinking about a diagnosis in that moment. You’re thinking about the parent.

A school owner asked me about exactly this. He has students with ADHD and autism in his school, some of them do great, some of them are disruptive, and he believes the disruptive ones may be costing him enrollments in front of prospects. He asked whether he should start a special needs class.

Short answer on the last part: no. Never. I’ll get to why.

There’s a companion piece to this one on autism, and I’d read both, because a lot of the kids we’re talking about carry both diagnoses.

One thing this article does NOT cover, because I just wrote it up separately: telling real ADHD apart from attention that’s been conditioned short by everything outside your school. Those two students might look identical from where you’re standing and they need opposite fixes. That’s in my Go2 Karate Magazine piece on teaching in a world of TikTok attention spans.

Part 1: Identify, Don’t Diagnose

One in Nine Kids, and You See More of Them Than a Teacher Does

The 2022 National Survey of Children’s Health puts it at 11.4% of children aged 3 to 17 with an ADHD diagnosis at some point, which is 7.1 million kids (Danielson et al., 2024). About half currently take medication. A little under half got any behavioral treatment in the past year, which is the gap you’re standing in.

What does that mean in your school? If you have 200 active students you’re teaching something like 20 kids with a diagnosis, plus however many nobody has evaluated yet. In truth it’s likely higher because we are known as a great activity for these kids so let’s consider that a low estimate.

A classroom teacher gets maybe 25 new kids a school year. You might see 200 new kids a year, several hours a week each, in an environment that demands sustained attention and physical self-control. You’re often the first adult outside the family in a position to notice a pattern. That’s a professional advantage, and it’s a big part of why clinics refer to us!

You’re Not a Doctor, and You Still Need to Know the Criteria

Nobody’s asking you to diagnose. In fact, that’s specifically not your job - that belongs to a doctor or a mental health professional. But you’re a professional educator working with kids all day, so you need to know what the professionals are looking at.

What is the DSM-5-TR? It’s the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, fifth edition, text revision, published by the American Psychiatric Association. It’s the guide trained clinicians use to evaluate whether a child meets diagnostic criteria, and the current revision came out in 2022.

It defines ADHD as a persistent pattern of inattention and/or hyperactivity-impulsivity that interferes with functioning or development (American Psychiatric Association, 2022). Three presentations: inattentive, hyperactive/impulsive, and combined. Symptoms have to show up in more than one setting and persist at least six months, at a level that doesn’t match the kid’s developmental stage.

That last clause is the one you use on the mat. Every 6-year-old fidgets, so what separates one from the other? The pattern. Does it hold across most classes, most weeks, regardless of what you’re teaching? That’s the question, and you’re in a better position to answer it than almost anyone.

The Inattentive Ones Are the Ones You’re Missing

The hyperactive and impulsive kids you already spot. They’re tapping in ready stance, breaking line mid-instruction, blurting the answer before you call on anybody, moving like there’s a motor running.

The inattentive presentation looks like nothing at all. They stare past you during a demonstration. They lose the belt, the gear, the third step of a three-step combination. They start the drill and drift out of it. The tricky part is it’s easy to miss these behaviors (in school these are the ones who don’t get diagnosed). They aren’t being lazy. Their executive functions just aren’t holding focus, and because they’re quiet, nobody complains about them and nobody evaluates them.

Boys get diagnosed roughly twice as often as girls. Current research indicates that girls are under-recognized because inattention is more often the predominant behavior and it may not disrupt the class. Girls and women may therefore be identified later (Young et al., 2020).

It May Not Travel Alone…

ADHD often co-occurs with autism, anxiety, learning disorders, and oppositional defiant disorder. Is it caused by sugar, bad parenting, or screens? No. Those may make a rough day rougher, but they aren’t the cause.

The sugar one has been settled for thirty years and almost nobody knows it, so it’s a good one to have in your pocket. Wolraich and colleagues pooled 23 double-blind randomized trials covering 1,414 children and found sugar did not affect behavior or cognition (Wolraich et al., 1995). The pooled effect on hyperactivity was essentially zero. Their read on why parents are so sure otherwise: expectancy. You hand out cake at the birthday party, you’re watching for the sugar rush, and those kids were going to be wound up anyway.

It has genetic and neurobiological underpinnings and it tends to run in families, which is why a parent conference sometimes ends with a parent recognizing themselves.

Have that ready before a parent asks, because most of what they’ve read blames something.

In 159 children and adolescents with high-functioning autism, ADHD and anxiety disorders both showed up in high percentages (Margari et al., 2019). Plenty of the students you think of as your autism kids are carrying an ADHD diagnosis too. There’s another article for that but it’s something to be aware of.

Montes and Halterman (2007) looked at bullying behavior among children with autism nationally and found 44% prevalence, then split the group. Children with autism and no ADHD were NOT at greater risk than the general population. Children with autism AND ADHD had 4.6 times the odds, controlling for income, age, and gender.

In that study, comorbid ADHD marked the higher-risk group.

What You Actually Say to the Parent

Start with observation, never with a label. “In class, I’m noticing Jordan has a hard time holding attention when I give three steps, and it’s pretty consistent. Is that something you see at school?” Then listen.

If they already have a diagnosis, ask what’s worked, what’s blown up, and what the medication timing looks like on class days. If they don’t have one, and the pattern is strong, you can say that some of what you’re seeing is something to bring to their doctor. You never say the word diagnosis and you never say you think their kid has ADHD. You can say “I’d recommend you ask their doctor what they think. They’ll give you a professional direction.”

In the end it doesn’t matter if they have an official “diagnosis” or they just have some of these behaviors. You can do great things with them if you keep some of this in mind.

Part 2: Teach It

Keep the Standards, Improve the Method

A diagnosis is not a reason to lower a standard. Owners get this backwards. We’re not suggesting even changing your strategy, just improving your overall skill set and the skills of your instructors to manage a higher level of discipline. This makes it work for these kids AND makes it even better for all your students (as well as saves your instructors’ sanity!).

Set the behaviors clearly (stand still on their spot, “Yes Sir” or “Yes Ma’am,” eyes on the instructor) and hold everybody to them. High expectations communicate respect. These kids hear all day, at school and often at home, that they can’t focus and can’t behave. Don’t be one more adult echoing that.

We improve the METHOD. We NEVER adjust the standard.

Reward Immediately, and Reward the Kids Who Are Already Right

Kids with ADHD focus on the moment, so a reward that arrives at the end of class arrives too late to be attached to anything. Use a star or stripe system and hand it out in real time, on the behavior. Staying in a stance. Holding attention through a full count. Waiting their turn.

In my Ultimate Class Management and Discipline Seminar I point out three categories of behavior. Target (they’re doing exactly what they are supposed to), Off-Target (they’re doing it incorrectly) and Consequence (behavior repeated or severe and requires a consequence).

Most instructors positively reinforce only by contrast. You notice three kids drifting, so you say “look how still Sally is standing.” That’s fine, and you’re all good at it. That’s a great skill to positively reinforce when another has off-target behavior. But what does it mean? It means you’re only ever praising when something is going wrong. When the whole class is right, you go quiet and move on to curriculum.

It’s not just you… I have interviewed hundreds of elementary school teachers (I was in class with them during my Ph.D. program) and asked them “do you positively reinforce or praise kids a lot?” They all said “of course!” and I believe them. But then I asked “OK great! When you reinforce them is it because one or more of the other kids in class are not doing the behavior you’re reinforcing?” and every one of them thought a moment, tried to think of when they reinforced 100% great behavior and couldn’t think of any. They do it too.

Why? The easiest example is “when you’re hungry you notice it, when you’re full you don’t.” We as humans tend to notice when things are off or incorrect or wrong. We tend to be blind to consistent good behavior. A few other examples:

Do you notice:

Do you notice this…	OR this…
Everyone driving on the right side of the road at a good pace	Someone cutting you off
Your spouse keeping the bathroom clean all the time	Your spouse forgetting to take out the trash
The 40 flights that took off on time	The one that got cancelled
The referee getting every other call right	The one call that went against your kid
Your car starting every morning for four years	The morning it doesn’t
The instructor who has never once been late	The one who is late every other day
The 28 students standing perfectly still	The two who are not
Your internet working	Your internet working slowly for nine minutes

This has a name, and knowing it is what makes the fix stick. It’s negativity bias – bad events register harder and get processed more thoroughly than good ones. Baumeister and colleagues went across everyday events, major life events, relationships, social networks and learning and found the same asymmetry in every one of them (Baumeister et al., 2001). Their title is the whole finding: bad is stronger than good.

Stack habituation on top of that (anything constant stops registering at all) and consistent good behavior goes invisible on you and it’s not your fault – it’s how we’re built. It’s not because you’re a bad instructor… it’s because you’re a human being with a working nervous system.

This means we miss the opportunity to massively reinforce the target behavior. When everyone is 100% right it’s easy to miss so I want you to do something unnatural. Train yourself to notice the things they do right all the time.

Higher praise-to-reprimand ratios predict higher on-task behavior across 151 elementary classrooms in 19 schools over three years, and the relationship was linear with no magic threshold (Caldarella et al., 2020). More praise, more on-task, all the way up. I want a 5-to-1 ratio of real praise to correction, and it isn’t hard to hit once you’re praising the kids who are already right.

I don’t use praise-correct-praise. “Great job, now fix your foot, good.” That “sandwich” came out of 1980s management books, it confuses people, and it especially confuses these kids. The rule is: correct some… praise a LOT!

Long Explanations (Or Long Drills) Are Where You Lose Them

You’re probably doing a lot of this but (for all students) cut the standing around. Stop long explanations. Use follow-along drills where they copy you immediately instead of standing through a demonstration five times. Let them run a full form several times before you correct anything. Alternate high-energy work (kicking drills, pad work) with focused work (basics, blocks).

Break combinations into smaller pieces than your curriculum suggests. If a belt level has 12 blocking techniques, teach 2–3 at a time and progressively increase. Did you lower quality? No. You changed the chunk size, and every kid in the room benefits. (I invite you to do more exploration on memory and “chunking”… we’ll save that for another article).

Mark positions on the floor. We use spots for everybody, not just the kids (if we teach a class at an elementary school, blue painter’s tape works anywhere, and I carry a roll in my go bag for outside events). Put the distractible student in the middle and front, away from the door and the parent viewing area. Keep verbal cues short and point at what you mean.

If a Third of Your Class Is Failing the Test, It’s Your Curriculum

That’s the number I use. When more than about a third of a belt level is struggling to pass, stop blaming attention or lazy students and look at how much material you’re asking them to remember.

Teach less per cycle and add cycles. A semester at our school is 8 weeks (we call our testing cycles semesters), and what goes into an 8-week block should be something nearly everybody can actually get. You don’t send kids to first grade expecting a third of them to fail it!

What the Research Says

An 18-month taekwondo program improved selective attention in adolescents with ADHD, with large effect sizes (Kadri et al., 2019).

You’ll get asked about the other side of this, so here it is. A 12-week judo program produced no significant improvement in response inhibition for children with ADHD, though it did help children born very preterm (Ludyga et al., 2022). One art, one dosage, one null result. These two studies don’t prove that duration was the difference. Long-duration training looks better than a 12-week block, which is what we’d expect and also what we sell.

What if a skeptical parent says this is just martial arts people promoting martial arts? Fair point, and the answer is outside our industry. Diamond and Lee reviewed the full range of programs shown to improve executive function in children aged 4 to 12 in Science: computerized training, non-computerized games, aerobics, martial arts, yoga, mindfulness, and school curricula (Diamond & Lee, 2011). Every successful program shared two features. Repeated practice, and progressively increasing demand on executive function. That’s a description of a belt system and what we suggest in here.

The children with the weakest executive function gained the most.

Part 3: The Business Decision

Screening Happens at the Introductory Lesson, Not in Week Three

Everything the owner asked me about traces back to one thing. Kids got into regular class before anybody found out whether they could handle regular class.

Do one-on-one introductory lessons initially. Every student, every time, no exceptions. Not “come try a class and we’ll see,” because that’s not an evaluation, that’s abdicating your ability to evaluate the student. We’re serious that the first lesson is an evaluation… NOT for the parent or the student to evaluate US but for US to evaluate THEM. That is where you find out what you’re working with, and where the parent finds out what we do.

Three outcomes:

A. They handle the intro fine. Enroll them. If the transition into regular class gets bumpy later, run a few short private lessons to acclimate / train them and move on. (by the way – that’s true for any student with an issue).

B. They struggle in the intro, but you believe you can get them there. Run a few privates and reassess. The bar at the end is PARTICIPATION in a regular class. Not perfection. Participation.

C. They can’t participate and you don’t believe they will (too young, or behavior severe enough that it isn’t workable right now). Then you say so, honestly and kindly, and you tell the parent what would need to change.

C is rare, and owners reach for it way too fast. Severe means not functional under typical circumstances in most situations. Think severe Down syndrome, severe autism – if you haven’t seen Rainman, watch it. That’s a small group and it is not the kid who had a rough class last week.

And C isn’t always a no forever. Sometimes it’s “not at this age.” Sometimes it’s a few sessions to acclimate them and then a real look. Sometimes it’s a referral to somebody better set up for that child right now, and you should know who that is in your town before you need them. What you don’t do is enroll them, hope, and let it come apart in front of everybody four months later.

The Parent Takes Class, and the Parent Never Directs the Child

For kids who need extra support, get the parent on the mat. Actually ALL parents need to do the introductory lesson and start on the mat. Some kids that are more severe (the parent has to guide them in everything) need a parent there. I’ll let you decide if you’ll take these students (we do and have had great results). Parent and child in class together can mitigate behaviors like the kid being distracted by “where mom is” and other behaviors.

One rule, and it’s absolute. Unless it’s the severe case where a parent has to help physically move a child, the parent never directs their own child. No pointing, no “watch the instructor,” no correcting from the bench. That’s 100% our job, every time. If a parent starts doing it, do you hold a meeting about it? No, you just say “we’ve got them, you don’t need to direct, we’ll let them know” and keep teaching. We line all students up by height so the parent is usually not near the child.

In genuinely severe cases (less than 4%), the parent can serve as the helper, including sitting with the child through a time-out, and a trained instructor can fold that into class without it becoming a production. Occasionally the parent adds to the distraction and you’ll need to separate them. That happens, and you adjust.

Don’t Build a Special Needs Class

I’ve watched schools try this multiple times. It becomes a distraction for the instructors, it doesn’t produce good martial artists, and it doesn’t work economically. Even at 10% of your students you can’t staff enough sections to make it real.

It’s also counterproductive for the kids, which is the part that should decide it for you. The whole point is acclimating them to a regular environment with regular expectations. A separate class trains them to need a separate class.

Elementary schools often use a similar model, pulling a student out for specific services and returning them to the regular room. That model is used across almost every level of severity. You’re already doing that version. You have them for 30–60 minutes and they can hold it. If they truly can’t, that’s outcome C above.

Grouping by ability is not the same thing as grouping by diagnosis, and it’s the tool you actually want. If a 9-year-old can’t hold memorized material yet, they go in the class where memorization isn’t required and the material is led. Nobody announces why. It’s just “this is that group.” That’s one reason the “Tiny Tigers” (or dragons or whatever you call it) is not designated as a “preschool class.” It’s just the “Tiny Tigers” class once they enroll, and maybe there is an 8-year-old who is better served by this ability grouping until they develop.

The research on inclusion is mixed and I’ll say so. A meta-analysis of inclusive versus segregated settings found a small-to-medium positive effect on cognitive outcomes and no significant effect on psychosocial outcomes (Krämer et al., 2021). Education researchers are still arguing about it. My position here doesn’t rest on that literature. It rests on 34 years of watching separate classes fail in martial arts schools, and on what a parent’s face looks like when their kid holds their own in the regular class.

Renew Them to Leadership

We renew these students into the leadership program exactly like everyone else, and our rate with special needs families runs higher than our overall rate. These parents are looking for the development, not just the kicking, and they’re motivated in a way that makes them some of your best long-term families.

Same price, too. NO discount because of a diagnosis. If anything these parents are more committed, and a family paying a real rate shows up.

The Real Problem Is Usually Your Discipline, Not Their Diagnosis

For most of you this may not apply. But if it does, it’s the whole answer and everything above is detail.

I look at a class in a fixed order. DISCIPLINE first, then motivation, then knowledge. If discipline isn’t there I don’t evaluate the curriculum at all, because none of it is landing anyway. When I watch one of my instructors teach, I watch discipline and nothing else until it’s right.

Most owners have that order backwards. They’re worried about getting the form in before testing, or getting through the drill, and the class isn’t behaving well enough for any of it to stick.

What is discipline? Doing what they’re supposed to do, when they’re supposed to do it. That’s the definition we use for the life skill and it’s the one that works in a classroom.

Now notice what that demands of YOU. If discipline is doing what they’re supposed to do, somebody has to have decided what that is. If you haven’t defined it, you can’t enforce it, and what you actually have is a preference that changes depending on who’s teaching that night.

The Whole Discipline System Is Already Recorded

Defining target behaviors, running the three zones, and the 1-2-3 consequence system with time-outs is its own seminar, and I’ve already taught the whole thing (Phelan, 2016; Porzig-Drummond et al., 2014). It’s free and it’s here: the Ultimate Class Management and Discipline Seminar. Watch it with your instructors and by yourself.

Two pieces of it matter specifically for ADHD students.

If a student already has a track record of pushing, shrink the target. They get counted the moment they drift, not after five minutes of escalation. What you’re working toward is a raised finger being enough, because they know exactly what’s coming and how fast it gets there.

And if you’re counting students every single class, that’s not a diagnosis problem in your student population. That’s a reinforcement problem upstream and the fix is back in Part 2. A couple of counts a week across a whole school is about right.

What the Visitor Sees

A disruptive class doesn’t cost you the trial student because of the kid with ADHD. It costs you because a visitor watched an instructor lose the mat.

Fix the system and that same student stops looking like a problem to anybody watching. The standard of discipline in the room becomes obvious – to the students, to your staff, and to the parent sitting in the waiting area with a decision to make.

And the class gets MORE fun, not less. That surprises people’s intuition. An undisciplined class is one where nobody’s learning and everybody’s waiting… and the students feel that long before the parents do. A disciplined class (just like games with clear rules) is more fun and you get a lot more done.

What to Do This Week

Run your introductory lessons one-on-one so nobody gets into a regular class unscreened. Get the parent on the mat and keep them out of the coaching. Keep every student you accept in the regular program, grouped by ability and never by diagnosis. Renew them like everybody else.

Then before you change one thing about how you handle ADHD specifically, spend a week watching your own classes for discipline only. Not curriculum. Discipline.

Try this: pick one class and watch one of your instructors count two things – how many times they correct, and how many times they praise a student who was already doing it right. If that second number isn’t at least five times the first, you’ve found your starting point, and it isn’t the kid. (For more specific versions of this reach out to me for an Instructor Grade Sheet and you’ll have it all!)

These ADHD students and these families can be some of the best in your school. The role models… later the instructors and one day they may start their own school… because you helped them that much!