ADHD 101 - Why Kids With ADHD Need Different Parenting Strategies

hi i'm aaron qi and felder gonzalez i'm a psychologist with the pro clinic at Seattle Children's Hospital outpatient psychiatry and I'm going to talk about why children with ADHD need different parenting strategies than other kids you may be saying I'm doing all the same things that other parents are doing I use the same types of ways of rewarding my child and using consequences and my child's just not responding the same way and you're right they aren't going to respond the same way because their brain is processing information differently than other children so you're in the five to ten percent of kids who really need a different strategy in order to be able to take that information and use it to change their behavior so you may already be providing great parenting for your child but when you have a child with ADHD it's a lot harder and really super parenting is what's required you really need strategies that are kind of above and beyond what other parents are having to provide so there are three core difficulties related to ADHD that help us think about how to change our parenting style for a particular tryout the first difficulty is trouble with self-regulation and self-regulation refers to internally keeping track of what you're doing keeping track of yourself planning ahead shifting from one task to the next and and having that motivation come from within rather than from what's going on around you this is how we get ourselves through a routine or a task during the day kids with ADHD are gonna have about a 30% lag in their ability to self-regulate it's gonna look like a lack of maturity to a large degree so they may get off-track get distracted really easily when they're trying to do a routine even though they know how to redo the routine the second core difficulty that we think about is the inconsistency in behavior so just as I was saying a child with ADHD may be extremely bright and in fact we see lots of kids at a extremely high level of IQ who have ADHD so they know what to do they know how to do the task but they're not consistent in doing it so one day your child may be able to get themselves dressed and downstairs and ready with a backpack ready to go and the next day all bets are off they need help every step of the way and it seems like they can hardly remember what the different pieces are of their routine this is one of the most frustrating things about parenting a child with ADHD it often looks like they're just not trying or they're on purpose just not doing their routine but really the cause of this inconsistency is that kids with ADHD are so vulnerable to input from their environment because they're not internally self-regulating as well they're relying on cues around them for their regulation and that means anything that's different in the environment from date from one day to the next is going to cause them to react in a totally different way or some internal factors maybe off from one day to the next you know how much sleep they got builds up frustration about something there could be lots of factors that just lead them to have an even harder time self-regulating so they may know what to do but it's executing and doing that task that's one of the the key difficulties with ADHD the third piece is that kids with ADHD respond to consequences and rewards differently than other kids you may have felt like you were noticing that for a long time with your child and you're absolutely right so often the first time you try a new incentive or a new consequence it has a pretty big impact so if you're gonna offer a reward for your child for finishing homework the first time you offer it they may be really excited and really motivated and focus great on their homework but then when you try to use the same reward later it loses its value really quickly kids seem to get bored with it and just don't care about it as much same thing with consequences it may feel like sometimes what our consequence you choose anything you take away it may phase your child for a moment but then it seems like they forgot about it all together and that really comes back to how dopamine is processed in the brain and the fact that kids are not getting as consistent of that sense of reward that reward chemical from things so they get may get a burst of it initially but then they're not getting as much overtime and that's why they don't seem to care as much about that reward or consequence so what do these three core difficulties mean for parenting the first thing that we need to keep in mind for parenting a child with ADHD is anticipating because your child is not very good at projecting themselves forward in time and thinking about what's gonna happen next and what's gonna happen if I do X we as the adults have to think ahead so think about which situations are gonna be really tough for your child and are gonna require more support what are triggers of certain behaviors what are tasks during the day what's the piece of the morning routine that your child always gets distracted during and we are gonna try to set up more structure and things like clear instructions and more rewards and even consequences in advance so that we're not having to try to clean up a mess after things have fallen apart the second thing that we want to keep in mind for parenting a child with ADHD is that your child is going to need a lot more feedback than other kids will in order to regulate their engine so as I mentioned they're relying on their environment to self-regulate and you can be that piece of the environment that gives them accurate input and we really want to see a lot more positive input praise positive attention than correction and negative attention so we want to praise jump in give lots of attention when you see anything positive happening so instead of waiting until your child has completed all the steps of their morning routine we want to jump in with giving attention and praise just for getting started just for getting out of bed starting to get dressed let them know that they're on the right track so they can keep themselves going they are going to need more correction than other kids two more reminders and redirection as well but we want to think about how to do that in a way that doesn't become overly negative and make them feel defeated and like they're not doing a good job the third implication is that we need to build in more powerful rewards incentives and consequences for your child so natural consequences often aren't going to have the effect that we hope they will you know for example if your child always forgets to put on socks and you think to yourself well the natural consequence is when they're out at recess they'll notice their feet are cold that's too far in time really for it to change your child's behavior we need to put rewards incentives consequences in place that happen at the point of the behavior so that are really connected to when your child is doing a task and are things that your child cares about right so for each child we're gonna think about what is his or her currency what motivates and excites them what gets that dopamine flowing and can we put in some of those more exciting things those rewards during the boring parts of the day one example would be bedtime it's really hard often for kids with ADHD to get into bed because there's nothing fun that happens once you get in bed right the day the reward of the day is done so of course they're gonna stall on getting pajamas on getting teeth brush getting into bed but if we can put a special routine that's exciting for them into place once they're in bed having that special story time in bed with parent that might be exciting enough to help them get through some of the routines we got to make it really clear we got to remind them of it in a way that's that's powerful and meaningful to them

Channel: Seattle Children's

Views: 383,342

Keywords: ADHD, kids and ADHD, Erin Gonzalez, parenting strategies for ADHD, Seattle Children's

Id: ktb520seHYk

Length: 8min 46sec (526 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 18 2020