I have talked about VAST in a previous thread here but this bears repeating: a lot of neurotypicals, especially younger kids who grew up for several years on screen-based learning while the pandemic raged, have environmentally-caused ADHD-like symptoms, and we need to find ways to help them as well.

From ADHD 2.0 (highly recommend this book):

Modern life compels these changes by forcing our brains to process exponentially more data points than ever before in human history, dramatically more than we did prior to the era of the Internet, smartphones, and social media. The hardwiring of our brains has not changed— as far as we know, although some experts do suspect that our hardwiring is changing— but in our efforts to adapt to the speeding up of life and the projectile spewing of data splattering onto our brains all the time, we’ve had to develop new, often rather antisocial habits in order to cope. These habits have come together to create something we now call VAST: the variable attention stimulus trait.

Whether you have true ADHD or its environmentally induced cousin, VAST, it’s important to detoxify the label and focus on the inherent positives. To be clear, we don’t want you to deny there is a downside to what you are going through, but we want you also to identify the upside.

Their journey to addressing their brain issues will be different than ours but we can support each other in the meantime.