ADD Accommodations W/O Guardrails DOA

We’re giving ADHD art students extra time on tests, but leaving them alone in a cage with the algorithm that breaks their focus. Maybe we need to stop treating phone restrictions as punishment, and start treating them more like critical studio safety gear.

I thought about this while rucking my neighborhood with a thirty pound backpack, no headphones, no music or podcast, just giving myself 60 mins of space for my distractible brain to be bored.

I was diagnosed with ADHD later than most. My scores startled the Doc. On paper I should’ve struggled to hold a job, maintain relationships, or focus long enough to build anything resembling a career. I survived because I grew up before phones turned into slot machines, and I built a life sans distractions. No gaming console in my apartment. No TV. My fear of unemployment paired with hard limits shaped a relentless creative lifestyle.

I know what might’ve happened if I’d grown up with broadband, infinite dopamine hits filling every second. I would’ve tanked.

ADHD and anxiety rates are climbing. Accommodation requests at colleges are spiking. Gen-Z kids aren’t weaker or lazier than Gen-X punks. The environment is targeting them more aggressively.

The Feed Fights Back

ADHD brains crave quick rewards and struggle with delayed gratification. I’ll take that second cupcake now, please. Social media grabs and exploits those traits. Studies show a two way loop. Heavy digital use predicts later ADHD-like symptoms, and ADHD traits predict heavier attachment to algorithmic antagonism.

For many students, this is a silent war. While they ask for more time on tests, their pre-frontal cortex can’t get through ten minutes of deep work without their phone preventing progress.

For creative students the stakes are 100x. Attention fuels every scene, sketch, sequence, melody, or draft. Without it, talent will never get enough page time on to develop a body of work.

Accommodation Trap

If a student seeks formal accommodation for attention impairments in school, and the research shows social media worsens the very symptoms the accommodation is meant to support, what if schools pair support with structured guardrails on those distraction platforms during academic hours?

This isn’t about punishment. It’ empowerment.

Colleges may hesitate because they’re terrified of treating adults like children. But art school isn’t a traditional institution. It’s closer to a conservatory or a trade apprenticeship. In a welding class, you wear a mask. In a figure drawing class, you lock the phone. It’s not a school rule. It’s studio discipline. Each space has norms that protect the work and the student.

An accommodation says, “You’re facing a substantial barrier, so we’ll change part of the environment to support you.” But if the same student spends hours each day inside digital ecosystems that feed the impairment, the accommodation won’t deliver its promise.

Guardrails could be simple. App blocking during lectures. Phone lockers inside certain studios. Not framed as baby-blockers carried over from secondary school, but borrowed from high risk jobs where attention lapses trigger catastrophes.

In this case it’s not a nuke meltdown, it’s academic failure, creative burnout, or inability to acquire and forge career skills.

Guardrails Do Exist

Schools are banning phones because parents and teachers can see the attention crash in real time. Students focus better when the feed is unreachable. Behavior problems drop along with screen time. Schools install guardrails to benefit every kid in class.

Colleges aren’t there yet, even as their neuro-divergent accommodation numbers spike. They treat phones as personal freedom instead of an environmental hazard. But the pattern in the younger grades offers hope. Once an entire system (Or Australia) admits that phones are breaking brains, the question stops being whether to intervene. It becomes how far the intervention should go.

Workplaces are already there. Companies with safety or performance standards place limits on device use. Some realize that if an employee requests an accommodation because attention lapses affect productivity, HR has a stake in addressing tools that worsen those lapses. Not as penalty. As shared attempt to fuel employee success.

Viewed via that lens, accommodations and guardrails are simpatico.

Friction Starts

Any rule that restricts behavior tied to a diagnosis will raise alarms. Students have rights. Accommodations remove barriers, they don’t impose conditions. Mandatory limits will feel like punishment wrapped in policy. Would this drive students away from diagnosis, or push them to hide their struggles? Enforcement creates new problems. Unequal treatment creates new liabilities.

So schools retreat, promoting voluntary tools. Study skills workshops. (I failed those along with Algebra.) Coaching in critical thinking. Digital hygiene awareness. Optional blockers. Clinician guided plans. These feel achievable on paper, avoiding conflict and lawsuits, but place the burden back on the student’s willpower. Exactly what the diagnosis says they’re lacking.

If the intel indicates the algorithm is a super stimulus for ADHD brains, and the student is asking for help because their attention collapses under pressure, can we really call it accommodation if we require them to battle their algorithmic antagonist alone?

The Cost To Creative Life

A generation of artists is fighting for their own focus before they can fight for their own ideas. Parents, teachers, and mentors often underestimate how intense the digital pull is on a brain weird-wired like mine. I was lucky. I’m grateful my environment never attacked me with TikTok intensity.

If we’re accepting accommodations for ADHD students and employees, then we need to go all in with our support. Creating a safe space to learn the skills that will make a creative career possible. The ability to sit in a chair long enough to draft and rewrite a screenplay. The ability to watch a twenty minute rough cut without doomscrolling Instagram. The ability to keep drawing gesture after gesture until the figure finally comes to life on the page. To block a shot, rehearse it, and stay fully present through the myriad mistakes that will teach you how to fix it.

The fundamental fortitude to hang in there through all the dips and drifts intrinsic to any creative cycle.

If we keep offering accommodations that lower some of the barriers that hold-back diverse brain, without raising guardrails to keep them on track, the 10,000 hours young creators need to develop their skills will disappear. Not because they lack talent, but because the world won’t leave them alone long enough to try.