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Do you have advice for him to be able to go through his teenage years?
Martial arts.
Painting. Crafts. Working on cars, bicycles, motorcycles, skateboarding.
These all have something in common: each has a goal, but these are individual pursuits. They require and reward focus, and succumbing to distractions will be obvious because progress will suffer.
Graphics programming with vectors, matrices, shaders, procedural generation, physics simulation. I always hated math before finding that it is able to create worlds.
ADHD and ADD are defense mechanisms the mind has. His brain is basically saying that what he is learning in school is a complete waste of his time. Even though we all do it, school is a really weird behavior! No animals do it and we aren’t designed for it.
I don’t believe that school is worth it for many people. They become business leaders etc.
Take him out of school and ask yourself what you would want if you were him. Then do it.
That’s my advice for anyone wondering what to do with adhd.
https://youtu.be/xkXpcs_an80?si=BvDuIHScLWNNA43r
Also - https://www.drugs.com/medical-answers/ritalin-adderall-diffe...
I have immediately had access to both medication as well as ADHD focussed psychotherapy.
ADHD is the best treatable neurological condition of all with medication and if you can have access to where you live, it's the first route I'd try to access.
Once you have access to meds, nobody can require you to take them as prescribed to keep access, but in my experience, having access is invaluable.
I do not take meds extremely regularly, albeit my daily life as a software developer is much less rigid than it was during my school years.
I won't be needing meds on days where I know for example I have few or no meetings and can uninterruptedly work on a task I enjoy.
And I don't stress on days which I know are fuller or which require more work which I'd typically find rather boring.
That brings me to the second most important point: Finishing school, getting a degree etc. are for me personally very important still.
What I really wish I'd understood earlier is that I'd have rid myself on societal definitions of "success" and just focussed on my strengths.
For me and others I've met with ADHD, reinforcing strengths through receiving motivating rewards is THE system that works.
If it is enjoyable, ADHDers excel at given tasks far beyond what I've seen other people do. We're maximizers for that positive neurotransmitter reward.
Trying to make something unfun fun with (the threat of) discipline just leads to minimizing effort for task achieval.
I'm a software dev.. Been so for > 30 years, and I can tell you that ADD is a super power. ADD is not so much that you cannot pay attention. It's that you pay deep attention to the "wrong" things.
I bet if you sit your nephew in front of a video game they disappear into it. This getting into the zone like flipping a switch is an amazing skill to have when programming. It's a nirvana like state, programmers dream of.
Your nephew will sit in class and not hear a word his teacher says, because a bird outside has him in the zone.
Get this kid into a coding boot camp.