If you’re the parent telling yourself “we’ll just wait until they’re more mature” about your ADHD teen and the driver’s seat, a new study wants a word. The Examination of Factors Contributing to Delays in Obtaining a Driver’s License for Youth With Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder, published July 25, 2026 in the Journal of Attention Disorders, confirms what a lot of families already do instinctively: teens with ADHD get licensed later than their peers. What it doesn’t confirm is the part parents are actually banking on. Waiting longer showed no evidence of producing a safer driver once that kid was finally on the road.

That’s the whole post, honestly. But the details matter, because “wait it out” is one of the most common pieces of driving advice ADHD parents get — from other parents, from message boards, sometimes from clinicians — and this study is a direct data point against treating delay itself as the intervention.

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TL;DR: What the New Driving Study Found

Study	J. Attention Disorders, July 25 2026 — Jusko, Bubnik-Harrison, Albino, Hawk, Coxe, Schatz, K. Hulme, Vujnovic, K.F. Hulme, Pelham, Fabiano
Sample	172 adolescents with ADHD, drawn from an NIH-funded randomized trial (the STEER study)
Headline finding	Youth with ADHD are more likely than same-age peers to delay getting a driver’s license
The catch	That delay showed no evidence of improved driving outcomes once they were licensed
What actually predicted the delay	Closer parental monitoring at baseline — not the teen’s cognitive functioning or family conflict
Publicized by	University at Buffalo, Aug. 24 2026, via co-author Kevin F. Hulme
Still circulating	Cited in CHADD’s Aug. 27 2026 weekly ADHD news roundup

The thesis: Delay isn’t the intervention. Whatever’s actually happening during the delay — or not happening — is the part that matters.

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What the Study Actually Looked At

The research team — Morgan L. Jusko, Michelle G. Bubnik-Harrison, Nicholas Albino, Larry W. Hawk, Stefany Coxe, Nicole K. Schatz, Karen L. Hulme, Rebecca K. Vujnovic, Kevin F. Hulme, William E. Pelham, and Gregory A. Fabiano — pulled data from 172 adolescents with ADHD who’d been enrolled in a larger randomized clinical trial testing driving interventions. They tracked who had gotten licensed by a 12-month follow-up point, then ran logistic regression to figure out what actually predicted licensure status: the teen’s cognitive functioning, how negative or conflict-heavy the parenting relationship was, and how closely parents were monitoring their kid day to day.

Two things came out clean. First, confirming the pattern researchers already suspected: ADHD teens delay licensure more than their peers. Second, and this is the part that upends the usual parenting logic: teens under closer baseline parental monitoring were the ones less likely to be licensed at the one-year mark. Weaker monitoring predicted faster licensure. Cognitive functioning and negative parenting, on their own, didn’t move the needle either way.

Read that again, because it’s not what most parents assume is happening. It’s not that the more capable kids get licensed sooner and the more impaired kids get held back naturally. It’s that the parents paying closer attention are the ones keeping the process slower — which means the delay a lot of families experience isn’t really about the teen’s readiness at all. It’s downstream of parental caution.

Does Waiting Longer Make an ADHD Teen a Safer Driver?

Short answer: no, not on its own. Here’s what the evidence actually says, in order:

1. ADHD teens already get licensed later than their peers, on average — this study confirms that pattern rather than discovering it fresh.
2. The delay itself showed no evidence of improving driving outcomes once teens were on the road, according to the new Journal of Attention Disorders findings.
3. Prior research backs this up from a different angle. A Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia study of nearly 15,000 adolescents found ADHD drivers had elevated crash risk — 62% higher in the first month after licensure, 37% higher over the first four years — regardless of the age at which they were licensed.
4. What does move the number is training, not time. A 2022 driver-attention trial published in the New England Journal of Medicine found teens who went through a structured attention-training program had roughly 40% fewer crashes and near-crashes than teens who got conventional driver’s ed. Nobody made them wait longer. They made them practice differently.

Put those together and the picture is consistent across three separate research groups: age at licensure isn’t the lever. Skill-building is.

Why “Wait Until They’re More Mature” Doesn’t Hold Up

The instinct makes sense on paper. ADHD involves real, measurable delays in executive function development — working memory, impulse control, sustained attention, the stuff that driving leans on hardest. So waiting a year or two for the brain to catch up feels like it should help.

The problem is that ADHD-related executive function gaps aren’t a maturity lag that quietly resolves if you just give it more calendar time. They’re a different developmental trajectory, not a slower version of the typical one. We’ve covered this distinction before in the context of diagnosis — the same logic applies here. A 17-year-old with ADHD isn’t a 16-year-old with ADHD who simply needed twelve more months. The gap in sustained attention and impulse control doesn’t close on autopilot. It closes, if it closes, with practice, structure, and specific skill training — the FOCAL+ trial’s whole point.

So when a family delays licensure without changing anything else about how the teen is preparing to drive, they’re not accommodating ADHD. They’re postponing the same unaddressed skill gap to a later date.

What Actually Predicted the Delay (And It Wasn’t the Teen)

This is the finding that deserves more attention than it’s gotten. The study found closer parental monitoring at baseline predicted a slower path to licensure — not the teen’s own cognitive profile. That reframes the entire “when is my kid ready” conversation.

It suggests a lot of ADHD licensure delays are really parent-driven caution, which is reasonable and understandable. Nobody wants to hand a 16-year-old with attention regulation challenges a car and a set of keys before they feel ready. But caution without a corresponding plan is just delay. If the twelve extra months aren’t being spent on graduated practice, supervised hours in varied conditions, or structured skills training, they’re not doing the work parents hope they’re doing.

If your own executive function is part of what’s making this hard to coordinate — tracking practice hours, scheduling supervised drives, staying on top of a state’s graduated licensing requirements — that’s a real and common problem for ADHD parents specifically. Our guide to family systems for ADHD parents covers the kind of scaffolding that keeps a multi-month process like this from quietly stalling out.

The Research Trail Behind This Finding

This isn’t a standalone study. It comes out of the same University at Buffalo research pipeline that’s been studying ADHD teen drivers for close to two decades, using the Motion Simulation Laboratory to run supervised practice and behavioral coaching under the STEER (Supporting a Teen’s Effective Entry to the Roadway) program. Kevin F. Hulme, program manager at UB’s Stephen Still Institute for Sustainable Transportation and Logistics, is a co-author on both the new paper and earlier work out of the same lab, and it was Hulme who publicized the new findings through UB on August 24, 2026.

It’s still making the rounds. CHADD’s weekly ADHD news roundup on August 27, 2026 was still citing it three days after UB’s announcement, which is a decent signal that clinicians and advocacy groups think this one is worth families actually reading, not just skimming a headline about.

What This Means for Your Family’s Timeline

None of this means push your ADHD teen into a car before they’re ready. It means stop treating the calendar as the plan.

• Set a skills target, not a birthday target. Instead of “we’ll revisit this at 17,” define what needs to be true before licensure — a set number of supervised hours in rain, at night, on highways — and track progress toward that, whatever age it happens.
• If you’re delaying, use the time. Extra months only help if they’re spent on structured practice. A longer learner’s permit phase with genuinely varied, supervised driving conditions is doing something. A longer permit phase where the car mostly sits in the driveway is not.
• Consider training over waiting. Programs modeled on attention and glance-training (the approach behind the NEJM trial) address the actual mechanism — not just the age on the license.
• If your teen already has a license, don’t relax the monitoring. The CHOP data on elevated crash risk in year one applies regardless of how old your kid was when they got that license. Our breakdown of ADHD driving safety tools covers the phone-locking apps, feedback tools, and pre-drive checklists worth pairing with that first year, however old your teen was when it started.

What This Study Doesn’t Prove

172 teens from one clinical trial cohort is a real sample, not a massive one, and it’s drawn from families who were already enrolled in a driving-focused research study — which likely skews toward parents who were paying close attention to begin with. This isn’t a nationally representative claim about every ADHD teen driver in the country.

It’s also correlational on the licensure-timing side. The study shows parental monitoring predicted delay; it doesn’t prove that monitoring alone is what’s protective, or that increasing monitoring for an already-licensed teen would change their crash risk. And “no evidence of improved driving outcomes” from delay is a statement about this sample and this analysis — it’s not the same as proof that delay is actively harmful. It’s proof that delay, by itself, isn’t doing the protective work parents often assume it is.

Our Take

We’ve written before about the trap of waiting for ADHD to “settle down” before making a decision — it shows up in diagnosis timing, in long-term outcome data, and now, apparently, in driving. The pattern is consistent: ADHD executive function differences aren’t a maturity clock that resolves with more calendar time. They’re a different starting point that needs a different kind of preparation.

If your family has been quietly pushing the license conversation down the road because it feels safer, that instinct isn’t wrong to have. It’s just incomplete. The extra time only counts for something if it’s spent building the specific skills — sustained attention behind the wheel, structured practice in varied conditions, a real graduated plan — that this study, and the ones before it, say actually reduce risk. Waiting alone was never the intervention. It just felt like one.

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This post describes findings from a peer-reviewed study and related driving-safety research. Not medical or legal advice. Talk to your teen’s clinician and your state’s graduated licensing office before making decisions about driving readiness.