According to new research, children with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) are at increased risk of being hit by a car when crossing the street.
University of Alabama researchers found that children with ADHD do not process information as well as non-ADHD children, and tend to make incorrect decisions on when to begin crossing a street.
According to the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, one of the leading causes of unintentional injury in middle childhood is pedestrian injury.
“The kids with ADHD in our study displayed the behaviors parents want to see ““ they stopped at the street and looked both ways. But that doesn’t mean they are ready to cross a street by themselves,” Despina Stavrinos, assistant professor in the UAB Injury Control Research Center and the study’s lead author, said in a statement.
The researchers said that parents of children with ADHD may want to delay the time they allow their children to cross a street by themselves.
The study involved 78 children between the ages 7 and 10, 39 of which had ADHD and 39 who did not. The participants completed 10 simulated street crossings in UAB’s Youth Safety Laboratory.
The simulation shows a typical street scene, with vehicles approaching on monitors from both left and right. The children are asked to gauge the proper moment to safely cross the street and then step off the curb.
Stavrinos said the children with ADHD took the right steps when approaching a street, similar to the non-ADHD control children.
“However, at some point in the decision-making process, things appear to go awry, resulting in a dangerous crossing environment,” Stavrinos said in a press release. “It seems children with ADHD are attempting to properly assess the environment’s safety, but are failing to process the information in a manner that enables them to cross safely.”
The children who had ADHD picked shorter gaps between oncoming traffic, had more “close-calls” with traffic and a shorter amount of time left to space before reaching the other end of the crosswalk.
Stavrinos says that the cause may be executive functioning, a term that describes the processes by which the brain controls behavior.
“Proper executive functioning would entail recognizing the speed of the oncoming vehicle, the interval between vehicles and the speed of the walker as they cross the street,” Stavrinos said in the press release. “Children with ADHD seem to be behind their typically developing peers in these sorts of computing skills.”
She said continued practice might be valuable in teaching the child with ADHD how to recognize a safe gap in traffic.
The study was published on July 25 in the journal Pediatrics.
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