One of my kids has pretty severe ADHD. When he was younger, it showed up a lot in the form of hyperactivity and impulse control. The challenges have evolved as he’s gotten older. Today, I’m talking about my experience of parenting a kid with ADHD and sharing what I’ve learned along the way.

You’ll Learn:

• Why ADHD is about way more than behaviors
• What it’s like to experience our modern world with an ADHD brain
• How societal expectations for order can clash with the spontaneous and creative nature of those with ADHD.
• What ADHD brains need and how to give it to your kid

I’m not an expert on ADHD. I’m a parent who’s been there, and I’ve helped lots of other parents navigate life with a neurodivergent kid, too. Listen in to learn strategies you can use to help your kid and work with their unique brain.

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Rethinking ADHD

My goal is to help you understand ADHD more, because the more you understand, the more you can help your child understand. The more you understand what's going on for them, the more compassion you'll have and then the less critical you will be. 

When someone is neurotypical, it simply means that their brain is developing in a typical way, they’re hitting common milestones, etc. With a neurodivergent brain, a child will hit milestones at a different pace, and different challenges will come up. Their development is diverging from the typical path.

It's important that you don't compare your child's development with their peers who are neurotypical. Instead, you want to compare your child's development to themselves - their past self to their present self and their future self. 

The sooner you're able to recognize that they're on their own timetable, the less frustrated you'll be when you see some of the traits and behaviors that come up with ADHD.

The ADHD Experience

The main three features of ADHD are attention deficit, impulse control issues and hyperactivity. 

Imagine being in a really crowded room, and everyone around you is talking all at once. No one's talking to you, but you're hearing everybody talking. Then, somebody suddenly asks you what the person next to you just said. You would have no idea, because you weren't listening to that one person. You were listening to the entire room speak. 

When there’s a lot of stimulation, noise or activity, an ADHD brain can’t figure out what it’s supposed to be paying attention to. This is the “attention deficit” piece. Overstimulation is very overwhelming for someone with ADHD. 

Attention deficit can also look like someone putting their attention on the “wrong” thing. And it’s difficult for an ADHD brain to change direction once it gets going. It’s like a train stuck rolling down a track, but it’s not the track that we want it to be on. We want them to slow down or change direction, but the braking system is very difficult to activate. 

Impulse control is also common with ADHD. These kids might have more trouble with delaying gratification, procrastinating, understanding how time works or creating a plan or sequence of events.

Hyperactivity can also be thought of as hyper-arousal. 

In daily life, you might notice behaviors like:

• Missing details or making careless mistakes
• Not staying on task
• Seeming to not hear when spoken to
• Trouble organizing tasks or creating order
• Losing things easily
• Being easily distracted or forgetful in daily activities
• Restlessness, getting out of their seat, always on the go
• Talking excessively, interrupting or blurting out answers in school
• Trouble waiting to take turns
• Avoiding tasks that take a lot of mental effort

All of these behaviors are common, to some degree, in young kids. When we see traits that are atypical for their age (i.e. most other kids their age have outgrown them), that’s when we think something else might be going on.

Encouraging Positive Self-Concept

A lot of kids who grow up with ADHD end up with a negative self concept. They might be labeled as lazy, stupid, a troublemaker or problem child. They’re told that they aren’t reaching their full potential or that they’re too much. The child then often feels isolated, misunderstood, broken or like they just plain suck. They go into adulthood with a collection of negative thoughts about themselves. 

I don’t want your kid to spend their 20s and 30s healing from that (and I know you don’t either). Instead, we want to give them the awareness, positive mindset, tools and coping skills they need to grow into emotionally healthy adults.

The way Brené Brown explains the difference between shame and guilt is a helpful example here. Guilt is recognizing that you did something wrong. It’s external. Shame is when you internalize that and make it about who you are. It is internal.

It’s the difference between, “I did something wrong,” and “I am wrong.”

The same concept can be applied to the ADHD brain. We want to help our kids understand that their brain is driving their behavior, but ADHD is not who they are. We separate identity from behavior.

In my opinion, ADHD brains are actually pretty cool if we can accept the way they are, the way they think and what they need. Because they aren’t focused on time, they have a lot more spontaneity, creativity and flow available to them. Of course, this freedom can become a challenge in a society that often demands order.

Cultivating Understanding and Compassion

As the mom of a kid with ADHD, your role is to be the warmly supportive adult that your child needs in order to learn how to regulate their emotions, their attention and their energy. Work with the ADHD brain instead of judging, criticizing or fighting against it. 

Sometimes, your kid needs to “borrow” your nervous system in order to calm themselves and your prefrontal cortex to think things through, process their feelings and communicate their thoughts. 

This is true for all kids. But if you’re raising a kid with ADHD, they’re going to need to borrow those skills from you for a longer period of time. You are the one who creates order out of the chaos that they’re experiencing. 

There are a couple of phrases that have been really helpful for me to understand what’s happening with my ADHD kid.

Boredom is kryptonite. Unless there's high interest in the topic or activity, the ADHD brain has a lot of trouble creating motivation to pay attention. When they’re bored, their brain is so hungry for something more exciting to think about that it starts to wander and play on its own. They tune out from whatever you’re saying. It’s not intentional, but you can use this as a signal that they’re restless and bored.

They lack a template for order. Some brains (like mine) are wired for order. Some (like my son’s) are wired for disorder. When you understand that your kid is having trouble creating a sequence of steps or a process, you can come alongside them and help create order from the chaos in their brain. 

ADHD is like having a racecar for a brain with bicycle brakes. Their brain is moving at 200 miles an hour, and the brakes are not very strong. When you're trying to shift them from one activity to another or get their brain to focus on something else, you are probably going to need to work extra hard to really grab their attention. Creating a little game, challenge or short-term distraction can help motivate them.

ADHD brains only experience 2 times - NOW or NOT NOW. This is often called time blindness or time illiteracy. If you tell a kid with ADHD that you’re leaving in 2 minutes, it falls into the category of “not now”. In their mind, they have infinite time. When something is in the “now” category, it becomes urgent for them. They can hyperfocus and get a lot done at one time, as long as there is motivation and/or something that they’re interested in. 

This now/not now way of thinking also means that there’s no future, so it’s really hard for an ADHD brain to plan for the future and stay motivated toward a long-term goal. You can help by breaking down their long term goal into smaller steps and shorter term goals. 

Strategies for Parenting an ADHD Kid

Once you wrap your mind around what’s going on for your child, what do you DO?

Give a small constructive task to help your child shift between hyperfocus, inattention and active attention. This easy dopamine hit from completing a task helps toggle their prefrontal cortex. This might look like saying, “Lincoln, you can get in the car once you have your shoes on, and it’s time to put your shoes on now.” 

Work at creating sequences, routines, habits and patterns. Split the process into smaller steps, create urgency (put the task in the “now” category) and support them with the sequencing of events. You won’t have to walk them through these routines forever, but it will take some time for their brain to create that pathway.

Find a support system. If you're raising a kid with neurodivergence, you might be talking to another mom about your kid and realize that your experience is vastly different. What you're dealing with is very different from what they're dealing with because your child is delayed. 

The Calm Mama Club has plenty of moms who are raising kids with ADHD or other neurodivergences and can relate to what you’re going through. And as your coach, I’ve been through it myself. I've raised a kid with ADHD, and I'm happy to share my experience with you.

When you think about your ADHD kid, I want you to remember that their brain just works differently. They need your support, and they're going to need it longer than you think is necessary or typical. If you make that shift and rethink ADHD in that way, I promise you'll have an easier time in your relationship with your kid. 

They will feel closer to you, you will get more compliance and they will feel better about themselves long term.

Resources:

• ADHD 2.0: New Science and Essential Strategies for Thriving with Distraction - from Childhood Through Adulthood by Edward Hallowell and John Ratey
• Scattered Minds: The Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder by Gabor Maté
• ADHD Is Awesome: A Guide to (Mostly) Thriving with ADHD by Penn and Kim Holderness
• Episode 90: Understanding ADHD with Lainie Donnell

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Welcome back to become a calm mama. I am your host. I'm

Darlyn Childress. I am a life and parenting coach and the host of

this podcast. And today, I'm gonna talk about rethinking ADHD.

I did an episode a while back called Understanding

ADHD with Lainie Donnell, and that was she's an educational

therapist, and that was a really great episode. And a lot of you have told

me how important that episode was in helping you understand a

little bit more about the dynamics of ADHD. And I wanted to do

another episode where I'm just talking to you and sharing with you

about what I understand about ADHD and especially

understanding how to raise someone who has ADHD.

So one of my kids has, you know, pretty severe ADHD.

Definitely was a big issue when he was littler in terms of,

you know, hyperactivity and impulse control and those kinds of things. And

now as he's gotten older, it's a little bit more around understanding

time blindness, which I'm gonna get into and in in attention

and motivation and all of these things. So I'm speaking to you.

I'm not an expert on ADHD, but as a parenting

coach, a lot of the people that I work with have kids

who have ADHD or the parent has ADHD.

It's funny because I'm gonna, like, get ahead of myself here. But with

ADHD, a lot of times, the child

needs to borrow our executive function,

our thinking brain, and they need to borrow our

nervous system in order to calm themselves. And what

I find sometimes as a coach is some of you hire me because you

wanna borrow my nervous system because you're highly aroused and

activated and reactive as a parent, and you want tools to

calm your stress response. Yeah. And then

some of you are, like, I just need to know, like, strategies and how

to think about parenting and what to do. And in that way, you're borrowing

my prefrontal cortex. Right? My thinking brain. So

all of our children, when they're born, they do not

have advanced or mature prefrontal cortex and

their nervous system is also highly reactive and

difficult to regulate. And so your children are always borrowing

your nervous system and they're borrowing your prefrontal cortex. They're borrowing

your ability to manage your feelings and they're borrowing your thinking.

Now, that's true for all of our kids, whether they have

ADHD or not. The difference if you're raising

a kid with ADHD is that they are going to need to

borrow those skills from you for a

longer period of time because of the way their brain is wired,

those neurons and the neural pathways that

can be developed, that will be developed, they are harder for

them to access. And they need support and they need

help. A kid who has ADHD as a as a

little kid isn't gonna use a phone or, like, a

calendar system or some sort of alarm system. Right? They're

not going to be, cued by technology.

But then if you have an adult who has ADHD and they learn all

these strategies to, like, cue them or their partner is willing to cue

them and support them and give them, hey, remember, you gotta get going on

this project because it's due tomorrow and, you know, how what's your process?

And prompting them with those questions. People

with ADHD need that support, and adults who

have successfully learned how to manage their ADHD

bring those supports into their life. They build their life in a

way that supports them. When they are

children and young adult and adolescents, they're gonna be

borrowing you. You're the one who really

creates order out of the chaos that's going on for them.

And that can be difficult because if you're raising a

kid with neurodivergence, you might be talking

to another mom about your kids and your

experience is vastly different. What they're dealing with

or what you're dealing with is very different from what they're dealing with

because your child is delayed. They are neurodivergent.

They are diverging from typical. So we have neurotypical

neurodivergent. We have a typical pathway, what a

typical brain would go through, and then we have a divergent pathway.

So if you're raising a kid who's neurodivergent, they're gonna go through milestones

at a different pace. You're gonna have challenges that look differently.

So it's important that you don't compare your

child's development with their peers who are neurotypical.

You wanna be really comparing your child's development to

themselves, their past self to their present self

and their future self. Where are they going creating that positive vision

about what they're going to learn how to do and

trusting that they're gonna figure it out? So that's one of the

first things I wanted to talk about with this topic of rethinking

ADHD is that really we want to

recognize that all children borrow our nervous system and borrow

our prefrontal cortex. They borrow our thinking and

feeling brains, and we are helping them learn how to think and

learn how to feel. Right? They know how to feel, but how to process that

feeling. Right? They know how to think, but how to communicate what they're thinking. So

all kids do that, and then neurodivergent kids, particularly kids with

ADHD, borrow those systems longer.

That is normal for them. And the more the

sooner you're able to recognize that they're on their own

timetable, they're on their own path, the less frustrated you'll

be when you see some of the traits and behaviors that come up with

ADHD, which I'll get into in a few minutes. Now why is it

important to rethink ADHD? Why is it important for me to come on

this podcast and talk about this topic with you? And the

reason it's important is because a lot

of kids who grow up with ADHD

end up with a negative self-concept. They end up with

a collection of thoughts about themselves that are negative.

My vision for all of you, right, is to heal the next generation

in advance. I want your kids to not spend their twenties

thirties healing from childhood trauma.

Instead, I want them to have all the tools and coping

skills and awareness and all of that positive mindset and all

those things that they take with them into their twenties.

They take them with them into their thirties. So they're, like, emotionally

healthy from the beginning. That's my goal. Okay? And

so when I think about ADHD and I think about my own kid and his

own struggles, like, with his self esteem,

I'm not gonna get into his details or anything. But in

general, it is easy for a kid with ADHD

to grow up thinking negatively about themselves.

Here are some of the labels that kids with ADHD

tend to give themselves because these labels have

been reinforced. So for example, you're a troublemaker.

You're my problem child. You're lazy. You're stupid.

You don't try hard enough. You don't reach your potential,

which essentially means you're wasting your potential. You're

wasting, right? You're a disappointment. You're too

much like, quote unquote, you're too much like you're intense, you're a lot.

That leads the child to feel to grow up

feeling isolated, misunderstood, thinking

they suck, and feeling broken. That's the

last thing I want for your kids. Because I

actually am gonna make a case for ADHD brains that are is pretty they're

pretty cool, actually, if we accept the way they are

and the way they think and what they need, and we love their brain,

then what they can offer is really, really amazing.

Now, when we talk about self-concept,

we there's these two things. Brene Brown kind of explained this

really well. She said the difference between shame and guilt is

this. So shame is believing that something

is wrong with you. I'm a screw up.

I'm lazy. I'm a jerk.

I'm selfish. I'm whatever, right? I'm a

troublemaker. That's shame. Shame is when you create an

identity around a behavior, When you create an

identity around something that you've done.

Guilt is when you are able to say I did

something wrong and you externalize it. So

shame is I'm a screw up. Guilt is I screwed up.

Guilt is, I've made a mistake. Shame is I am

a mistake. Guilt is I've done something wrong. Shame is

something's wrong with me. So one is internalized at

your core. There's something wrong with you. And then one is externalized

that you've done something on the outside of you. At your core, you are

good and lovable and worthy and perfect and you showed up in a

way that caused a problem. So we wanna help

our ADHD kids understand their brain

is what is driving their behavior and how they

think and and how or how they don't think. Right?

So we wanna help them understand, like, this is not you. This is

ADHD showing up for you. And we wanna set

teach them to separate their behavior from their personality

or their character. That means that you as a parent

really have to be able to separate their

identity from their behavior. So

that's the second rethinking ADHD that I'm offering to

you is that your kid is not their behavior. This

is true across the board for any time your children are behaving.

They are never their behavior. Their behavior is always

an expression of their emotions or their unmet emotional

needs or they're trying to cope with a negative circumstance,

or they're trying to change a circumstance so that they feel better. So

your children's behavior are always strategies.

And with ADHD, it's not necessarily sometimes a

strategy. It's just like the way that their brain is working at that time, and

they need support and help. So my goal

is to help you understand ADHD more

because the more you understand, the more you can help your child understand.

The more you understand what's going on for them, the more compassion you'll have and

then the less critical you will be. So that's

why I really wanted to talk about this today. Now I've gotta warn you, I

have 5 pages of notes. And so I I don't think I'm

gonna get through everything that I have learned about ADHD.

So I'm gonna right now let you know what books I'm primarily using

to source this conversation today. The first is

called ADHD 2.0. It's by the people

who wrote driven to distraction, Edward Hallowell and John

Rady. And, that book has really been

helpful for me. I've also taken in a lot of consideration

of Gabor Mate's book, Scattered Minds, and

that's the origins and healing of attention deficit disorder.

I found, some good guidance in there. And then I'm

also referencing a little bit of the book ADHD

is awesome by Penn and Kim Holderness. They're the

ones from the Holderness families that always do those funny parody videos

that you see on Instagram or Facebook or wherever. And so

Penn has ADHD, and he wrote this book. And I think there's a lot of

beautiful tips and strategies in his

book that are really easy to read and digest. So,

like I said, you know, altogether, there's, like, 700 pages of text

here. I'm gonna try to summarize as much as I can to be helpful to

you. Alright. So let me give you just

a couple of examples of what it's like to have ADHD. If you have

ADHD, you might hear this and be like, oh, yeah, that resonates.

So that feels true. So if you're a little kid,

ADHD is like this. Like, imagine being in a really crowded room,

like, you know, a conference or a

concert or something like that. It's just like a really crowded room,

and everyone around you is talking all at once. Right?

There's just a lot of noise. No one's talking to you, but you're just

hearing everybody talking. And then somebody

suddenly asks you, what did that person next to you just

say? You would have no idea because you have

you weren't listening to that one person. You were listening to the entire room

speak. And that's sort of what it's like to have ADHD.

Lot of stimulation, a lot of noise, a lot of things happening, and then

you're asked to to say what is one thing

that's come happening in this room. ADHD can't figure

out what they're supposed to be paying attention to.

Another example would be you're stuck in the middle of

heavy traffic at an intersection and your

engine of your car has stalled and you're trying your best to get

moving, but then everyone is yelling and honking at you, but no

one's offering to help. So for ADHD, they're

they're the kid or the person who's in the traffic jam

and their car is stopped and everyone is looking at them like, what are you

doing? Come on. Let's get going. And they're just trying to get

get back on, you know, get back to it. They they're stalled.

So that overstimulation is

very overwhelming for someone with ADHD. And then

when they're put on the spot to answer what's

happening right now, describe what you just heard, that's very overwhelming.

Or if their engine is stuck and they

gotta get it going, it can be very challenging.

So another example was, like, I heard was,

the ADHD is like having a race car

that you're driving. The engine is a race car engine, but you

only have bicycle brakes. So once it gets going in

one direction, it's very hard to stop and turn to another

direction. It's like one track mind,

but not always the track that we want it to be on. And then when

we want the track to shift and want them to get to slow down

or turn or be the brakes the braking system is

very, very difficult to get to activate.

It's like stopping a train with, you know, your

arms. Like, that would be impossible. Right? So

someone with ADHD, they they don't have

an illness. It's like an impairment. Right? It's a disorder

in terms of thinking of the word disorder not

ordered. So someone with ADHD,

they don't have a lot of order in their life. They lack a sense of

organization. They're not really able to, like,

consciously plan a sequence of activities. It's

difficult for them to know where things are, know what they've done, what still

needs to be done. It's a lack of order, which I think is a

really cool way to think about it, is that's the executive function

piece. Right? When I when I decide

that I'm going to, get ready for bed, say,

I have a whole system and routine that I go through.

But when I first created that system and routine, it was

innate to me. I was like, well, I'm gonna put on my pajamas and then

I'm gonna go in my bathroom and brush my teeth and wash my face, put

on my moisturizer, turn off the lights, get in bed. So there was

like a sequence of events. For some of the ADHD, it's very

difficult for them to create the original sequence of events.

It's trying to find order within chaos. It's very difficult.

So they need help defining that order and then keeping

themselves on the track when they are

supposed to be on that track. So it's it's a very big

challenge for them. Their attention is

disordered. Their life is disordered.

Their energy is disordered. It's focused in in the

places that maybe it's not necessary at the time.

I actually think that ADHD can be a really fun and interesting

type of, impairment. Because the

people with ADHD, they're not focused on time. They're not

focused on, you know, order

and they have a lot more spontaneity and creativity and

flow available to them and less

restrictive in terms of, like, what they should be doing. So there's a

lot of There could be a lot of freedom in it, but it's just challenging

when we live in a society that sort of demands order.

So I want you to think of it as an impairment and I want

you to think of it as disordered attention and

disordered life. Now, when you

look at how it's diagnosed, the attention deficit

disorder, We have the word attention deficit right in there.

So it's it is a deficit of attention,

but it's more like a difficulty in figuring out what to pay

attention to. So someone with ADHD,

they might have an attention deficit to something you want them to pay

attention to because their attention is being paid

somewhere else. So that's it's a

deficit in terms of where we want them to be focused.

So we think of it as poor attention skills,

inattention. But really it can also be

high attention, but just not where we want them to have

focus. They also have impulse

control issues. So someone with ADHD has difficulty

delaying gratification, difficulty with

procrastination, with understanding how time works

and getting to, like, I have to do these 5 things before I can

do this thing, making the sequence of things, they just kinda

go to the the 5th thing. Like, they're just like, oh, I just gonna get

there and rush and and don't always go through all the steps.

And then hyperactivity, which you can also think of as hyper

aroused. So these are the 3 major

features of ADD. Now, what does that

actually look like in regular life? It's

missing details, making careless mistakes, not

staying on task, doesn't seem to hear when spoken

to. Remember, they're not able to pick out what they should

be paying attention to. So it's all sounds like noise to them.

Trouble organizing tasks, creating order, creating

organization, avoiding tasks that require a

lot of mental effort because it takes so much extra effort

to stay attendant, to to pay attention to something that they

don't care about that they can't really overcome. They

can, but it's hard for them to overcome the boredom obstacle. And

so instead of overcoming it, they just avoid it.

Avoiding is a huge, huge strategy that ADHDers

use. Like, I don't have homework. I already did it. It's not

important. My test isn't today. They avoid it

because the mental requirement to pay attention is

so fatiguing. They'd rather just skip it.

And then they feel bad later and it actually can create a lot of

anxiety. So they avoid those tasks that

require sustained mental effort. They lose things easily.

They're easily distracted, and they're often forgetful

in daily activities. It's like if

you were to say to someone with ADHD, go get ready for bed,

And then while they're walking like a little kid, they're walking to the bathroom,

they notice a Lego guy on the floor. And then they pick up the little

Lego guy or, you know, a barrette or something like that.

And then they're in the bathroom and all of a sudden they're playing with it.

And they they're, like, fixing their hair or they're

putting the guy and, like, washing him in the sink and creating a whole world

for the little Lego guy. And you walk in and you're like, what are you

doing? You're supposed to be they don't know what they're supposed to be

doing. So in that moment, they actually need your executive

functioning skills. They need to borrow your

thinking brain, but it's so, so frustrating, right, as a

parent to let them borrow that.

And we're so frustrated. That frustration

is what they hear and feel instead of

So if we can drop the frustration and just say, Hey,

you can play Lego guy tomorrow as long as you get to bed tonight. Let's

go. Right? You can delay that little gratification, that little

motivation for tomorrow or later today. You know what? If you get your pajamas

on and you get your teeth brushed before the timer goes off, then you'll have

time to play Lego guy for a few minutes. So you can create

small little dopamine event incentives in that moment.

So that's inattention, also hyperactivity. If you see a kid

fidgeting, tapping, squirming, getting up without

permission because they're just not paying attention to, like, what's happening

around them. They're just like, oh, that clock is wrong. And then they'll get

up and go fix the clock. Like, you know, or like, oh, that window is

open. I should close it. That that's just the only thing they're thinking about.

They you know, our older kids can be extremely

restless or or younger ones. They run about, they climb, they're

unable to play or rest quietly. They're always on the go.

They never stop. They talk excessively, blurt out

the answer, trouble waiting to take turns, interrupting and

retreating on others. Now, it's an important time to

pause and say that all of these traits are common of children.

Okay? It's when we

see these traits that are

atypical for their age, like most kids have grown out of those

behaviors and they're still doing them, or that these

behaviors, even with correction, are present for at least 6

months. But we don't wanna diagnose like a 3 year old because

a lot of these behaviors are pretty typical of 3. So

a lot of diagnosis of ADHD happens around 6 or 7

years old. That's when kids have often moved.

They have more control over their executive function. They have more control

over their nervous system. They're able to self regulate more and

you see a neurodivergence right around that point. There are a

couple of phrases that I have found that have been really helpful for

me to understand what's happening with my ADHD

kid and other people in my life. So one

is the phrase boredom is kryptonite. This

has to do with the poor attention skills. Unless there's a

high interest in the topic or the activity,

the ADHD brain has a lot of trouble creating

motivation to pay attention. And so if they are

bored, it's not that they willfully stop paying

attention. It's that their brain just is so

hungry for something new to think about, for

something exciting that it just starts to

wander and play in its own into the brain to find

something a little more interesting to either think about, pay attention

to, or do. So listening can be very

boring. They they have this, you know,

tuning out this absence of mind. And when

they decide something is uninteresting, it's not decide. When something is

uninteresting to them, they check out. Their brain

checks out. It's not intentional. It's not willful.

Now, if you're in a relationship with someone who has ADHD and you're

talking about something that you think is interesting and they are not interested in

it, they might tune you out. Or if you're a little

kid and you're in your own brain, you know, you're in your ADHD

brain, and you're playing and having a good time, and you're playing your own game,

and it's very exciting to you, you might not be socially aware of what the

other kids are playing. You might not be able to take your turn or

wait. So it does create social problems. We want people to

listen to us. We want people to play with us. We want there to be

a give and take in in play. And that can be hard for

ADHD. And it's not because they're mean or selfish

or not a good friend. So don't ever want you to be critical or judge

your ADHD kids. Just notice that that probably means that

they are restless and bored. Another part of poor

attention skills is, like I said, that this phrase they

lack a template for order. That's really helpful for me. So

boredom is kryptonite and that the ADHD mind

lacks a template for order. When I understand

that my son has trouble creating

a sequence of steps or a

process, then my brain is so focused on

process. It's so sequential and so step based

as all my programs are. You can tell by my teaching

is is that that's just how I'm wired. Like, I'm almost

wired for order, while some brains are not are they're wired

for disorder. And if you recognize that you can come

alongside your ADHD child and help

create order from the chaos in their brain. So

ADHD mind lacks a template for order. They need

you to bring it. Now, if you have ADHD or you're not very ordered,

then you might wanna sit with your ADHD brain

child and create order together. And I bet it will be

very fun and creative. You'll take lots of breaks. It'll be interesting.

You'll come up with fun games. Like, let your brain

guide. How would you want to approach learning this and

help your ADHD kid approach learning it too? So that's

fun. Either way, you can support your children. The

other two phrases that have been really helpful for me in understanding

ADHD is the one I've already said is like a race

car for a brain with bicycle brakes.

Just their brain is moving 200 miles an hour

and they're the brakes of, like, a bicycle is, like,

not very strong. And so when you're trying

to shift them from one activity to another, get their

brain to focus from something to something else, you

are probably going to need to work extra hard to really

grab their attention. You can do that by creating a

little game, a little challenge, a little motivation, a little

short term distraction, so that they're more motivated.

This 4th phrase has been really helpful for me is that

your ADHD brains, I might have to slow this

down, so you really hear me. ADHD brains only

experience 2 times.

Everything in their brain is either now or

not now. So this is often called time

blindness or time illiterate. If you tell an

ADHD kid that you're gonna leave for something in

2 minutes, They don't

they're like: Great. Like, 2 minutes is infinite to them. They don't

hear 2 minutes. They hear now or not now.

And then the now is

what creates urgency.

So I think about it as like emerging urgency.

An emergency for ADHD is when

things become urgent, and they can get a lot done at

one time. They can be super fast because of that ability.

Once they're motivated and they're paying attention, their full attention is

on doing whatever it is they've gotta do. So they can hyperfocus when they

have to. And they often only hyperfocus if it's

motivation that there's something that they want to be interested in.

If they're not bored, they can hyperfocus or they

can hyperfocus when they

have now. Like, if it's now, then they can create

urgency. So emergencies create hyperfocus and high

interest creates hyperfocus. They can get a lot done

in a in a short amount of time. But if you think about now

or not now, that means there's no future.

So it's very hard for an ADHD brain to plan for the

future and to stay motivated in a long term goal.

So, like, graduating from high school, that's a really long term goal

when you're 9th grade or or going to college. That's a really long term

goal. So we wanna create more short

term goals. So thinking about some

strategies, I wanted you I wanted to offer you some strategies.

So your child is not able, like we've

said, to shift attention very easily. And so

what we wanna do is help them if they're stuck in

1, either hyperfocus or inattention.

We want to help them switch out of

that, you know, passive attention into active

attention or out of active attention into passive attention. We wanna

help toggle them from their

prefrontal, like, in their prefrontal cortex. So how do you do that?

You give them a small constructive task that

they should do right now. So like an easy dopamine or easy

oxytocin hit. So you can say,

you know, that's why I love, like, the limit setting formula is so

helpful for ADHD brains, especially short term. Like,

Lincoln, you can get in the car once you have your shoes on

and it's time to put your shoes on now. And then he's like, What? Okay.

And then he puts his shoes on and he gets in the car and he's

super fast at it. And that is why you

wanna use that limit setting. Like, if you have another kid that

doesn't have ADHD, you could do a little bit more long term. Like,

hey, as long as we're ready for school 5 days in a row, I'm happy

to take you on Saturday to the park and play or

whatever. But with ADHD, it's a little easy to be a

little bit more close together and you want to break

those those limits down into smaller

fragments. So once you have your teeth brushed, you can wash your

hands. Once your hands are washed, you can go potty. But you

are teaching them, like, you're staying close with ADHD.

You're right there like, okay, you've brushed your teeth. Now you're welcome

to go potty after you have put your pajamas on or whatever the

order is. So with when they're little, you're trying to bring

that prefrontal cortex. You have to work at creating the sequences

and those routines and those habits and those patterns that requires

a lot of intentional parenting. And that's a challenge when you have

an ADHD kid because you feel like they should know this

already. And they don't. They can't.

They're disordered. Their brain does not have a template for order.

There's boredom is kryptonite. There's only now or not

now. And that means that you have to create a little

bit of that motivation. You have to create urgency,

and you have to support them with the sequencing of of

events. Now, do you have to do this forever? Nope.

You just have to teach the brain the sequence

without waiting for them to learn it themselves. So

I didn't have to teach Lincoln how to get ready for school for the for

5 straight years. Just focused on creating that neural

pathway and that sequencing until it was embedded. But it took

6 months or something like that to get him into the morning

routine. Took a long time to get him into the bedtime routine

to sequentially embed that neural pathway. I couldn't

just teach it one time. I did it over and over and over

again. And now he has that neural pathway.

One thing I didn't teach him, which I regret, is I

didn't teach him how to create a neural pathway for getting ready to do

schoolwork. I just didn't really like, they didn't

have a lot of schoolwork in elementary school, And so I didn't have a a

way to model that for him at home. And so we didn't really

create a lot of pathways. In middle school, it was

challenging. I I I was doing it as much as I could and then the

pandemic and it kind of all fell apart. So he had to create a

neural pathway to getting schoolwork done really late high

school and all in college and he's doing it. He has a whole

system now and he has a routine and then he's used to it and that

he knows what he needs in order to create that

environment that is just the right stimulation, just the right

motivation, just the right amount of breaks, all of that.

So I want you to realize that you wanna work with that

ADHD brain instead of fighting against

it, instead of judging it and criticizing it. You want

to understand the main strategy here is that you

are the warmly supportive adult that your child

needs in order to learn how to regulate

their emotions, regulate their attention,

regulate their, their,

energy. All of those struggles for your

ADHD kids, it's gonna take them longer to learn

it, but it's not impossible. And you're teaching them how

to cue themselves and how to create order.

And they might, you know, even in high school, if they understand their

brain enough, be like, I don't really have a good system for this.

Can we talk about it? That's an amazing amount of awareness. Like, I

keep losing my keys or I keep, you know, speeding or

I keep, running out of money or I

keep, you know, my laundry is not done and I keep not having

clean clothes. Like, once they feel frustrated by

those behaviors, if they feel that you're supportive and you're not

gonna criticize them and judge them and say, I've already told you this a 100

times. Instead, they can come and say, hey. I

need some help. Let's help me create a system here.

That's, like, my favorite question in the world, by the way. If anyone ever asks

me, help me create a system here. I'm like, yes, please.

So when you think about your ADHD kid,

I want you to remember that their brain works different and

that they need your support, and they're gonna need it longer

than you think is necessary, the longer than what is typical.

And if you make that shift and you rethink ADHD in that

way, I promise you'll have an easier time in your relationship with

your kid. They will be more compliant because they they

actually do wanna be compliant. They are motivated

to please. They just have a disorder

disorder brain and they need your help. So if you approach them this

way, they they will feel closer, you will get more compliance,

and they will feel better about themselves long term.

So don't give up, don't give in,

and don't get frustrated. And if you do get frustrated, come to the

Com Mama Club. I feel like almost everybody has kids with ADHD in the

club. Maybe not. That's not true. But it

does feel like we're all kind of in the same boat working with

kids with neurodivergence or ourselves. We're neurodivergent

and, you know, we want support. So I encourage you the calm mama club. It's

$30 a month. You get weekly coaching with me. We have specialty

groups for, parenting kids, teens.

There's a full online course. There's the workbook, the handbooks, and

you also have access to get getting coached with me. So that's really cool.

$30 a month. CallMama Club. We're gonna link the books to

the show notes. We're gonna link the CommMama Club. Obviously, I

always encourage you to book a consult a consultation with me.

And also just know, like, I've been

through it. I've raised a kid with ADHD,

and I'm happy to share my experience with you. So if you are

curious, reach out and we can talk more about it. Alright, mama.

It's a little longer episode, but I had a lot to say on this

topic. I hope you're having a great week, and I will

talk to you next time.