The role of inattention and hyperactivity/impulsivity in the fine motor coordination in children with ADHD.
Inattention, not hyperactivity, drives fine-motor errors in ADHD, so write motor goals into behavior plans.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Fenollar-Cortés et al. (2017) watched 8- to young learners with ADHD copy a tricky pegboard pattern. They counted every missed peg and wobble.
The team also gave parents a short rating scale. They wanted to know if hyperactivity or inattention better predicted the errors.
What they found
Kids with ADHD made twice as many fine-motor errors as their typical classmates.
Only the inattention score predicted the mistakes. Hyperactivity added no extra power.
How this fits with other research
Kopp et al. (2010) saw the same clumsiness in preschool and school-age girls with ADHD or ASD. They added that these girls also struggle with daily tasks like buttoning shirts.
Bart et al. (2010) gave one dose of methylphenidate to kids with both ADHD and developmental coordination disorder. Motor scores rose, but only one in three kids improved enough to matter.
Chueh et al. (2025) seems to disagree. They found a small group of "high-motor" ADHD kids whose brain-based inhibitory control looked almost typical. The gap closes when you split ADHD by motor skill, not by the whole label.
Why it matters
Stop blaming hyperactivity for sloppy handwriting. Screen inattention first, then add fine-motor goals to the BIP. Pair seated work with brief motor warm-ups or grip-strength tasks. If the child already takes stimulant medication, schedule fine-motor practice about 90 minutes after the dose when the drug peaks.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
OBJECTIVE: Deficits in fine motor coordination have been suggested to be associated with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). However, despite the negative impact of poor fine motor skills on academic achievement, researchers have paid little attention to this problem. The aim of this study was to explore the relationship between ADHD dimensions and fine motor performance. METHOD: Participants were 43 children with a diagnosis of ADHD aged between 7 and 14 years (M=9.61; 81% male) and 42 typically developing (TP) children in the same age range (M=10.76; 75.2% male). RESULTS: Children with ADHD performed worse than TP on all tasks (δFine_motor_tasks, -0.19 to -0.44). After controlling for age and ADHD-HY (hyperactivity/impulsivity), higher scores on ADHD-IN (inattentiveness) predicted a larger number of mistakes among all psychomotricity tasks and conditions (β 0.39-0.58, ps<0.05). CONCLUSION: The ADHD group showed poorer fine motor performance than controls across all fine motor coordination tasks. However, lower performance (more mistakes), was related to the inattention dimension but not to the hyperactivity/impulsivity dimensions. Authors recommend including training and enhancement of the fine motor skills for more comprehensive ADHD treatment.
Research in developmental disabilities, 2017 · doi:10.1016/j.ridd.2017.08.003