<p>I am worried that my freshman son will sleep through his final exams. He is very conscientious and he has ADHD. On Friday, he meant to wake up early and do a take home test needed to be handed in at 11. He was exhausted (from sleeping only an hour the night before) and slept until 2:15 pm. He doesn't recall his sonic boom alarm clock shaking/ringing though I'm sure it did. His finals are at 9 a.m. He knows he should go to bed at a reasonable time and get into the habit of waking up early but he also has lots of work. Any suggestions for failsafe waking up on exam day?</p>
<p>Can you call him and tell him to get up?</p>
<p>A good place to start is that he should never plan to do any important work in the morning. If it needs to be handed in at 11 am, then it needs to be done before midnight the night before. This “I’ll wake up and do it” theory needs to stop immediately.</p>
<p>I don’t know about ADHD and not waking up. Has he depended on you to get him out of bed? if so, sadly you did him no service.<br>
Why is he sleeping one hour? They are all busy, but that seems excessive. Was he studying? Or gaming? Because how you help depends IMHO on why he can’t, won’t wake up. I would bend over backwards to help if it was totally work and studying, but i wouldn’t be as gracious if it was for video games. </p>
<p>When was he given take home test, the day before it was due? If not why was he doing it an a few hours before? </p>
<p>Your son needs to learn to plan better, manage his time, make a schedule, and sleep.</p>
<p>Yu aren’t getting the whole story, i think. This isn’t about over sleeping, there is more to it.</p>
<p>The alarm clock needs to not be near his bed. He’ll have to wake up to turn it off. Not completely foolproof, but it’s an idea.</p>
<p>His alarm requires him to get up to shut it off. It is the loudest one we have found.</p>
<p>I have tried calling but it doesn’t wake him up.</p>
<p>He was doing the test in the morning because he had other things to do the day before and he was too tired to think well. Of course, it’s not optimal to do it on the morning of.</p>
<p>He usually woke up by himself at home but he also went to bed much earlier.
The sonic boom was working until he got more tired.</p>
<p>Seahorsesrock: you wrote “Your son needs to learn to plan better, manage his time, make a schedule, and sleep.” Time management and planning are impaired in ADHD e (they are executive function); sleep is also often a problem. He tries his best. He called me when he woke up and it was clearly a just woke up voice and panic. Nothing else to kno other than he is overwhelmed with work and doing his best to juggle it.</p>
<p>Maybe he can enlist the help of another student or his roommate if he has one to help wake him up. My son woke up his roommate for the first several months of the year before he finally gave up - I don’t know how many classes his roommate missed after he stopped waking him up. My son naturally is an early riser and preferred 8 am classes. With your son’s ADHD it may be too much to add “making sure I am up on time” to the mix of everthing else he has to juggle at school. Maybe his RA would know of an “early bird” student that would be sensitive to his plight that you could even hire to help him with this.</p>
<p>I have thought about him asking someone to do this. I think it would have to be his roommate and that would mean his roommate would have to be up early enough.</p>
<p>This is going to be his life, ADHD or not. And he, while it may be tough to accept, is going to have to figure some of this out for himself. He will not have a roommate or mom to call him everytime. If this say, had been a smoke alarm and he slept through it, he could be dead. So, he must find a way to work with his ADHD, compensate for it by looking at his schedule etc. If he was able to do it at home, there is no reason he can’t do it at school. Find his routine, figure out how to have that time to switch to sleep mode. He needs to do this otherwise he won’t be able to hold a job, he could miss interviews, miss a plane, etc. There was no reason to be doing a take home test the day it was due. That was his fault, not the ADHD. I am trying not to sound mean, but this is your sons life and he needs to find the tools that work for him without having to count on others. Woulkd you expect a roommate to wake him up for the next three and a half years?</p>
<p>I agree that he is going to need help to learn to better manage his executive dysfunction if he is to be successful in college/life. Perhaps for next semester he could start working with an Executive Function coach.</p>
<p>In the interim, for the current crisis, my suggestion is that he offer his roommate a nice gift card or dinner out in exchange for finals wakeup service!</p>
<p>I would not ask a roommate to take on this kind of responsibility unless he were a paid employee for this purpose. Passing or failing will hinge on whether S gets up in time for the final. It’s not fair to the roommate and not a safe bet for the S to ask for something so important as a favor.</p>
<p>If S is truly unable to get up on time as a result of ADHD, then I agree that he needs to seek for professional help to support his executive function. I would just say, though, that a lot of non-ADHD kids find themselves way behind on work and sleep at the end of their first semester of college as a result of bad habits and bad choices, despite what they view as good-faith effort. A kid with ADHD is not immune from the same kind of bad habits and bad choices that bedevil kids without disabilities. So it may be difficult to untangle the two.</p>
<p>My D is now a junior in college. She is bright and a good student and chose to go to a selective school that is quite a distance (over 24 hours to drive). She does not have ADHD.</p>
<p>My biggest fear was her ability to wake up in the morning. (She is just like my H).</p>
<p>Fortunately the first time she slept through her alarm was to miss a special weekend trip to someplace she really wanted to go and she had pre-paid for the trip. I say fortunately because it wasn’t for a final or to catch an airplane. She was upset she missed the trip, but it was a “wake-up call.”</p>
<p>She sets 3 alarms in her room in different locations and changes the locations daily. She hasn’t missed anything major since then.</p>
<p>I don’t have any good ideas, milkweed, but I do empathize. My S also has ADHD and serious sleep issues, and uses the Sonic Boom alarm clock. Yet I, too, have gotten the panicked phone call!</p>
<p>ETA: college_query’s D’s solution sounds like a good idea!</p>
<p>Here’s what I needed to do:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>Getting enough sleep. If I stop working at bedtime and get up early, I’ll get more done than if I keep working until whatever it is gets done and then go to sleep, because everything I have to do the next day will suffer as well and I’ll be up even later the next night. To do this, I worked hard on the sleep hygiene stuff, including going to bed at the same time every night and getting up at the same time every morning, but it didn’t really click until one day it dawned on me that stopping the work and going to bed, even if I hadn’t finished the work because I’d been “goofing off,” was less “lazy” than staying up half the night, because it resulted in the work actually getting done. Making myself stay up felt like the right thing to do because it was a punishment for goofing off earlier. But it wasn’t the right thing to do. His doctor may want to have him use something like melatonin or Benadryl to help himself get to sleep at first, while he gets into the habit. I’ve used both.</p></li>
<li><p>Never hitting “snooze.” It’s not that hard, if you’re already hitting the snooze button, to just turn the alarm off and go back to sleep. I don’t know what I was thinking at those times, because I don’t remember doing it, but clearly I did. I needed to get up the first time every time, no matter how much I would rather have stayed in bed. This isn’t that hard a habit to get into if you are usually well-rested, but if you’re running on long-term sleep deprivation it is.</p></li>
<li><p>Multiple alarm clocks, at least one that is battery-operated, and at least one that is on the other side of the room. If I were buying alarm clocks now, I’d get one of the ones ThinkGeek sells where the alarm (or a key piece of it) either runs away or flies away from you and a bed-shaker too.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>With all that, the real key was getting a puppy whose circadian rhythms are even less flexible than my own and who liked to nibble on my toes if I didn’t get up when he wanted me to. Obviously that’s not an option for your son right now. I was well into adulthood and still struggling with getting up in the morning. My point is that this is all just hard for me, and I don’t think it’s ever not going to be. But with the 3 steps I listed above, and with regular reminders to myself that these things are necessary, I could at least manage.</p>
<p>If your son is anything like I was at that age, the lesson he will take from this morning’s disaster is that once he is really tired, perhaps because he has only had 1 hour of sleep during a recent night, if he has anything really important to do in the morning before he is able to make up that sleep debt, he should stay up all night the night before. If you just don’t sleep, you can’t possibly oversleep. This works better when you’re 20 than when you’re 30, but it doesn’t really work very well no matter how young you are. I wish him luck with the rest of his finals, and I hope he has a better system in place at the end of next term than he has right now.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>There is some truth to this. I know that even though my kids got themselves out of bed in high school I always knew what time they went to bed and there were others moving around in the morning…I did have a few momentary panic moments where I wondered if my kids would do something like sleep through an exam. The best advice you can give him is to get to bed at a reasonable hour, remember to set the alarm clock. If he has a cell phone set that alarm, too. If his roommate has an exam early in AM then I think it’s perfectly fine for him to tell his roommate to help make sure his feet hit the floor. My little trick is if I have to get up really early to catch a flight or a earlier than normal morning meeting and I wake up within an hour of the alarm going off…I just get up. I told the kids to do that during exams…get up if they wake up before the alarm goes off and go get breakfast. I can remember saying stuff like “'wake me up” to my roommate during college. I also agree that this is something he has to figure out for himself whatever it takes.</p>
<p>OP - My sympathies. My son is a HS junior and has severe EF/ADHD (inattentive)/sleep issues. We worked with a coach last year, then hit a wall. We work with a psychiatrist and a therapist. We have a sonic boom clock. We have not found a solution. Even when he sleeps, he has wicked vivid dreams and wakes exhausted. We’ve had sleep studies and probably will do more in the summer.</p>
<p>I KNOW it is my kid’s life and he has to learn to cope, but if I were you, I’d pay the roommate to do wake up duty for finals. I would do everything and anything to be sure all the semester’s work and money did not go down the drain.</p>
<p>And, if you ever find something that works, please PM me.</p>
<p>No solutions, but you have my sympathy. Everything that is said about getting adequate sleep and establishing good habits is true, but I also know that some people just sleep hard as rocks.</p>
<p>I am a light sleeper. I have always warned my family not to whisper about me while I’m sleeping because chances are I will hear every word. I wake up easily and from the slightest sound.</p>
<p>However, my poor sister is a rock-hard sleeper, and to make it worse she is married to a rock-hard sleeper. They have to set several alarms and my mom used to call them on the telephone each morning as well.</p>