Young adult educational and vocational outcomes of children diagnosed with ADHD

Abstract Decreased success at work and educational attain-ment by adulthood are of concern for children with ADHD given their widely documented academic difficulties; how-ever there are few studies that have examined this empiri-cally and even fewer that have studied predictors and individual variability of these outcomes. The current study compares young adults with and without a childhood diag-nosis of ADHD on educational and occupational outcomes and the predictors of these outcomes. Participants were from the Pittsburgh ADHD Longitudinal Study (PALS), a pro-spective study with yearly data collection. Significant group differences were found for nearly all variables such that educational and occupational attainment was lower for adults with compared to adults without histories of child-hood ADHD. Despite the mean difference, educational functioning was wide-ranging. High school academic achievement significantly predicted enrollment in post-high school education and academic and disciplinary prob-lems mediated the relationship between childhood ADHD and post-high school education. Interestingly, ADHD diag-nosis and disciplinary problems negatively predicted oc-cupational status while enrollment in post-high school edu-cation was a positive predictor. Job loss was positively predicted by a higher rate of academic problems and diag-nosis of ADHD. This study supports the need for interven-tions that target the child and adolescent predictors of later educational and occupational outcomes in addition to con-tinuing treatment of ADHD in young adulthood targeting developmentally appropriate milestones, such as completing post-high school education and gaining and maintaining stable employment