345- 6 Principles for Raising a Child with ADHD

Olen Shannon Maldonado, käsintehtyjä artesaanitua teitä myyvän jauji-lahjakaupan perustaja. Valit sinu Shopify, koska alustoja testa testa-tessani totesin sen ehdottomasti yhdeksi helpokäyttöisimmistä alustoista. Minulla oli tärkeää pohtia kehittymistämme tulevaisuudessa. Kaikki myyntiin tarvittavat työkaluut, kuten varaston suunnittelu ovat kätävästi dashboardissä. Aloita ilmainen kokeilu Shopify-piste komsi-vustolla. Välisin, etenkin kokeiluhteet tärkeää, että johon kokeiluhteet tärkeää. Välisin, etenkin kokeiluhteet tärkeää. Aloitamme, etenkin kokeiluhteet tärkeää, etenkin kokeiluhteet tärkeää. Tämä on tosi, että oletamme johon kokeiluhteet tärkeää. Tämä on tärkeää, että oletamme johon kokeiluhteet tärkeää, että oletamme johon kokeiluhteet tärkeää. atoitossa esc班ными on valmiisalaisempia. Homman profession program erilaiset on 8886. On koko aina suurempia, jossa on koko 1-1 on 1 kylta. Kuten koko on koko 1-1 on valmiisalaisempia. Kuponkoon koko aina edd maga 0-1-1 on valmiisalaisempia. Homman profession program erilaiset on valmiisalaisempia. Kuten koko aina edd maga 0-1 on valmiisalaisempia. in psychological development. We see that there is a lot more underneath the hood, so to speak, than is represented by these mainstream views of ADHD. And I represent that somewhat humorously here with this slide. Here is an early adolescent asking his parents, "How am I supposed to think about consequences before they happen?" That's a very good question, by the way, because only humans are able to anticipate a future more than a few seconds out in time. How do we do that? When does that develop? How are we able to look ahead, think ahead, use our hindsight and our foresight to understand that there are consequences for the things we're about to do, and then to adjust our behavior accordingly? That's actually a very miraculous mental ability that we possess. And ADHD is grossly disrupting that capacity to look ahead, think about the future, anticipate it, govern our behavior relative to it, among other problems. So you can see that calling this an attention disorder hardly does justice to this problem. Better that you call it an attention to the future disorder, and that cuts a little bit closer to the truth than just inattentiveness. So ADHD then is a disorder of the brain's executive system, because it is the executive functions of the brain that act together to give us our capacity to stop, to look at what we're doing, to look ahead in time as to what is likely to happen if we keep acting that way, and then to readjust our behavior accordingly, all the while controlling our emotions as best we can, so as to reach that long-term outcome, and engaging in self-motivation, if necessary, in order to get to that outcome, all of those executive functions I've just mentioned give us in a general sense self-regulation. The ability to control our own behavior, which becomes progressively better developed as we grow up, takes about 30 years for humans to reach their full self-regulation abilities, and it requires seven executive abilities to do that. So self-regulation or self-control is any action that we direct at ourselves, not at the environment around us, not at other people. It's what we do to us. Why are we doing that? To change our behavior from what we automatically would have done without thinking? So we're trying to change ourselves. Why would you want to change what you're doing to make a certain future consequence more likely or less likely to occur if it happens to be harmful? But if it happens to be helpful, if it's a longer-term larger reward, we're trying to make that more likely to occur. So again, an action we take to ourselves that's going to alter our behavior, and by doing so, make a certain kind of future event a consequence more likely to occur. An ADHD is disrupting this process. Now, people use seven different kinds of actions to themselves to control themselves. And we call them the brain's executive functions. They're called executive, because we're using them to manage ourselves. You're like an executive of a company, manages the company, just like an orchestra leader has to manage all the parts of the orchestra. The brain's executive system has to manage the rest of the brain in order to be able to accomplish these goals and to improve our future welfare. And those seven executive functions are all being disrupted by ADHD to varying degrees. Now, the first of them, as you see here, is stealth awareness. What I call the mind's mirror. Just as in looking at a mirror or reflection in a pond shows us what we look like, attending to our own behavior shows us what we're doing. We become conscious of it, unlike other animals that respond relatively unconsciously. And then by monitoring our behavior, when we see that things are going wrong, we can stop ourselves. We call this self-restraint, inhibition, the mind's brakes. So I'm monitoring myself. And if I don't like what I'm doing, and it's not getting to my goals the way I thought, I can stop it and flexibly shift to something better. In addition to that, I can also see to myself in my head using visual images and other sensory representations, I am able to create movies of the mind. What I call the mind's eye. Why do you want to do that? Because that's where hindsight comes from. Looking back, using images of our past that are relevant to where we are right now, and trying to ring out of them, what we can expect, what is likely to happen. Looking back to look ahead, that's foresight, in order to better respond to this situation. So those are the first four executive abilities. Self-awareness combined with self-restraint, coupled with images of our past that allow us to guess the future, and coupled with verbal abilities as well. We talk to ourselves, we don't just imagine things in our mind. We can talk about them. And children start to do this between three and five years of age, but it doesn't become a voice in the mind until they're about eight to ten years of age. Until then, they talk out loud to themselves, but gradually that voice becomes private. Now, we then use these first four executive abilities to create the fifth one, which is emotional self-control. We no longer respond on impulse with our emotions to everything that happens to us. We have the capacity to inhibit strong emotion, to moderate it if necessary, to count to ten, and go to our happy place as your mother used to teach you, in order to quell strong emotions, moderate them so they're more acceptable to other people, and more consistent with the goals we're trying to accomplish. And I call this the mind's heart, because of course, the emotions that we have are truly our heart. And then, if we can control emotion, we get self-motivation, because emotions are motivating by feeling things, and what we feel about things, it helps to motivate us. When we think of a future reward, that can create automatic motivation in ourselves. When we think about a future harm, that may suppress something we were about to do, but now we won't do it, because we thought about those consequences. So we have self-motivation. We don't need other people giving us M&Ms and food and treats and tokens and other things. As we get older, we do that to ourselves by using visual images about the future, by giving ourselves pep talks in our mind, using our mind's voice, we create self-motivation. And I call that the mind's fuel tank, because that's what drives future directed behavior, on task, goal directed behavior. Finally, the last executive ability to develop is mental play, and we use mental play for problem solving and for planning. How do we do this? It starts out as manual play in young childhood. Children touching things, taking them apart, recombining them to see what happens. But eventually, that mental or that manual play becomes mental play. We don't have to touch the environment anymore, because we can visualize it in our mind, and we can take those images apart and recombine them and play with them. Much like when my wife used to ask me to rearrange living room furniture, which I won't do anymore, right? We stand in the doorway of the living room, and we visualize various rearrangements of the environment. And only when we get to something she likes, well, I then start to move the furniture around. So mental play is the source of our planning and problem solving. So those are your seven executive abilities. And guess what? ADHD delays all of them by about 25 to 40 percent. On average, about a 30 percent lag in executive functioning. I call that your child's executive age, and I will come back to that critical point in a moment. But let's understand that our executive ability, just like ADHD, falls along a dimension, a continuum of normal behavior. Just like intelligence, shows a bell-shaped curve, where most people are within the average range and intelligence, as you see here in the middle of my graph, but some people are gifted in intelligence? Similarly, most people are within the average range in their self-control. Their executive abilities, but some people are quite gifted at self-regulation. And those people are highly productive and accomplished people. Some people are below average. They're not quite yet ADHD. They're not that severe. But they're going to struggle to show the degree of self-control other people do. But finally, when you look at the lower left hand tail of this distribution, you get to the bottom five to 7% of the population. And that is where ADHD begins. As I said, when the degree of your symptoms starts to produce adverse consequences, harm, that is when we diagnose you. But it is a little arbitrary. And that's why we usually say the prevalence of ADHD is somewhere around five to eight percent of children, depending on severity and impairment and resources and so on. So let's understand that not all ADHD children are the same. But they represent the very lower end of this continuum of self-control of executive functioning in the population. But there are degrees of ADHD from borderline to mild to moderate to quite severe. And not all of them are the same. So ADHD is very much like the autism spectrum. It has its own spectrum. And part of that spectrum is normal behavior in other people. So you might say that everybody has a little ADHD. That's no big deal. We're all occasionally inattentive, distractible, forgetful. But not like this, not to this severity, to this degree, for at least six months, starting in childhood or adolescence that leads to harm. That is a disorder and not typical behavior. So rule number one, please understand ADHD as a self-regulation disorder that arises from disruption in all seven executive functions. Self-awareness, inhibition, visual imagery, and working memory, and the mind's voice, and emotion regulation, and self-motivation, and even planning and problem solving. They're all to varying degrees being disrupted by this disorder. And now you understand what is going wrong in your child. It is far more than just being inattentive and restless. By understanding that, it helps us to understand why ADHD is among the most impairing disorders. We treat in outpatient clinics, rivaled or exceeded only by autism spectrum disorder, and possibly bipolar disorder. Certainly, it gets a freaky, but that's not an outpatient disorder. Many of those people wind up in inpatient clinics, but the point is this, it's a very impairing disorder. And we can understand that because we need self-regulation for just about every aspect of life that we have to engage in. And the older we get, the more self-control we need. And therefore, the older you get with ADHD, the more impaired you become, because more domains of impairment become available to you. Five-year-olds don't drive. They don't have sex. They don't manage money. They don't have careers. They don't have children, and they're not married. So those domains of impairment are not available to them. But as you grow up and enter these new domains, there's a chance that ADHD, if it's not treated, will interfere with them. And now you understand why you are so concerned about your child, even if your pediatrician or other people are not. They look at ADHD as an attention problem. You know better than that. It's a much more serious difficulty than just in attention. Principle number two, then, by understanding ADHD and that it's neurodevelopmental, it's largely genetic and biological in its causes. We get to principle number two. You are not going to engineer ADHD out of your child. You are a shepherd to a disabled youngster. You are not an architect who gets to re-engineer your child, to be whatever you wanted them to be when you thought about who they might be when you were pregnant. Well, I'm sorry you didn't get that child. And if you struggle with that, please Google Welcome to Holland. You will see different variations for Down syndrome, others for autism spectrum, others for severe mental retardation, and there's some for ADHD, but they all make the same point. We didn't wind up with the children we thought we were going to get. And we can't change that fact. So it's we who have to change, not our children. We got who we got. And I hope that you love the one you're with to quote the famous Stephen Stills record from the 1960s. So you're a shepherd, not an engineer. You get to raise these disabled children and hopefully improve their welfare and their outcome. But you're not going to turn a sheep into a dog or a cat. And you had better realize that very quickly. Because if you don't, you are the source of a lot of the conflict you are having with this child. Because you are expecting the impossible. It is as if you expected a child with dyslexia to read at grade level or an intellectually disabled child to act and learn just like everybody else. You have become the problem. So once you get it, that you have a neurodevelopment disabled youngster under your care to raise, and it's your responsibility to do this, you will start to adopt the shepherd mindset. The shepherd mindset basically says that your children are a unique combination of your family's genetic aptitude, strengths, weaknesses and disorders. In addition to that, they're also a product of the unique environment around them, especially the environment outside the home and not just the one inside the home. They are also, to some extent, a product of the toxins they've been exposed to during pregnancy and of any genetic mutations that may have occurred in your own eggs and sperm before you had this child. That's right. One in 10 ADHD children and one in four children with autism is the result of new mutations occurring in our genes that we as parents don't have, but we gave them to our children through our gametes, our reproductive organs. The longer you wait to have children, the more mutations you have, and the genes for ADHD and autism are the most susceptible to mutation. So if you want to know why we've seen a slight increase in these disorders over the last 30 to 40 years, it's because people are waiting to have children. But that is not the primary cause. The chief cause of ADHD is largely inheritance. These traits run in family, so do these disorders. And also, it can be the product in about a third of all ADHD cases of injury or maldevelopment of the brain during pregnancy. In about 5 to 10% of cases, this can occur after birth as in lead poisoning, brain trauma, and other diseases and disorders. So your child is a unique combination of all of these influences, none of which were determined by you. So understand then, you got the child, you got, you have a very unique child with lots of interesting qualities and aptitudes and strengths and weaknesses. But that is not something you are going to influence. So you don't get to design your children, but you do get to influence their outcomes in several different ways. But not in the ways you thought. You thought you were an engineer that by doing all the little micromanaging and helicoptering and baby Einstein toys and crib toys and all these other developmental things, you could turn your child into something they weren't. Well, good luck. We have no evidence to show that that happens. Instead, you're not as important as you think you are in the ways you think you're important, but you're very important in ways that you hadn't thought about. A shepherd's role, not that of a sculpture, engineer or architect. Shepherds are incredibly important. They determine the safety of the sheep they're raising. They determine the adequacy of the pastures and of the nutrition and of the protection from in the world. the environment, and they protect their sheep from being bullied by other sheep and victimized by predators and being abused by bad shepherds and other people who pass by the pasture. These are incredibly important roles, and yes, we're responsible for their nutrition. And in the case of ADHD, reducing their propensity for obesity because they are drawn to sugar-containing foods thanks to their impulsivity, their diss inhibition, and their lack of self-control. So our job is not to micromanage and redesign our children to be what we want them to be. Stop it. Your job is as a shepherd who engages in all of these major responsibilities to raise the healthiest sheep you can get and to protect and nurture them, provide them with high quality, safe, nurturing, nutritional, supportive, and stimulating environments, and you will have done your job right. What does that mean? You have more to do with how your children will turn out by adulthood, by where you chose to buy a home or rent an apartment, then you will ever have by what you do inside that house, short of child abuse or malnutrition, of course, and most of us don't do those things. So you need to look outside the home to understand where your influence lies in the schools that are based upon the choice you made where to live in the teachers, in the peer group, in the community resources, in the other adults, in the neighborhood. It's all based on that decision. Take it seriously. Look for very good, pro-social, stimulating environments, and then create the environments through nutrition, protection, and nourishment, and you will have done your job accordingly. We are going to find environments that encourage good peer groups, strong schools, great external resources within our community where we can find them to promote our children's unusual and often non-traditional talents, a point I will come back to, but work on finding great pastures. And then within your home, develop very good home routines that are predictable and based on your rules. This is very important to ADHD children. Chaos is death for these children when it comes to their functioning. So we need predictable school morning hours, predictable meal times, predictable homework hours, predictable bed times so that children, especially children with ADHD who are not self-regulated and prone to chaos have a greater external structure to help manage their often chaotic behavior. So those are the choices that you make. And then in raising your child, manage them through these 12 principles. And if you need more advice, look at books like My Book, Your Defiant Child, and Others for how best to manage disruptive behavior. And then sit back, open a bottle of wine, watch the show, and enjoy the children you got for the unique people they are. Stop trying to turn them in to who you wanted them to be. The rest is out of your control. That leads naturally to our third principle. What can I do to help my child succeed? Well, I've already talked about two things to do. Understand the real nature of this disorder and adjust your expectations accordingly to your child's executive age. Number two, as I said, make sure you view your role correctly as that of an important shepherd to a sheep, a disabled sheep at that, but not as an architect or engineer. And now focus on these four keys to success. The support and loved ones of children with ADHD has been shown to be crucial to all the success stories we see on the internet. Just Google ADHD success stories. You will see 10 to hundreds of them. You will see some own piles, Michael Phelps, Adam Levine, Ty Pennington, Bava Watson, and many, many other people like, you know, like Justin Timberlake and great chefs and so on. Many successful people were able to succeed in spite of their ADHD. Not because of it. This is no gift. Nobody with ADHD would vote to keep this disorder. But there are many hundreds of talents and aptitudes that we all have that have nothing to do with our ADHD that we can capitalize on. But the first thing that requires is loved ones who accept us for who we are and who can help us identify these aptitudes and strengths and then support us in pursuing them. So not only do we find ways to treat ADHD, get it properly diagnosed, get on medication if necessary, find accommodations in school and elsewhere to help our children. Take advantage of the extra school services. But in addition to that, look very closely as your child develops that what is unique to them? Not what you want, what you got. So for instance, you may want a child who is a incredibly strong successful student. But maybe you didn't get that. Maybe you got somebody who's going to be better as an entrepreneur. Somebody who's going to be better as an athlete, a musician, a stand-up comedian, a door-door-door salesperson. Have you thought of those things? Those are equally as valued professions as the traditional pathways of, oh, let's all become doctors and lawyers and executives and so on. We got plenty of those people. Just look at Congress if you want to see where the lawyers are. Instead, what's unique about my child? What do they love to do? What are they good at? Right? So let's identify them because they're often not traditional. So don't overlook the things you see on this slide. Then second, can we promote that? Can we help them practice that? Enjoy that so that they put in more hours to develop and turn these aptitudes into real skills and strengths. And then let's look outside the home. For what are the resources in our community? A good example. Michael Phelps' mother, a vice principal when he was growing up, knew that he was a good swimmer because he'd been swimming with two of his sisters who were also Olympic swimmers and a father who used to be a professional football player. Do you think that this family had gifted athletic genes? Of course, right. And she watched Michael Swimman. She knew he could be as good or better than his sisters. So she kept him in the pool whenever he was not in school. And she regulated his schedule in 15 minute blocks of time. But you know what else she did? She looked outside the home in Baltimore, Maryland and found the Baltimore Athletic Club, which had one of the best swim coaches in the U.S. And she got Michael in there. And when that swim coach left to move to the Midwest, Michael followed him as a young man to continue his training and be an assistant to him. So do you see what they did? They provided structure, encouragement, love, the port, compassion. They identified these non-traditional aptitudes and then they went looking for the resources out there that could build those into a successful pathway in life. And then you back them up. You become their safety nets. You try to keep them out of trouble. Help them when they get into trouble. Steer them correctly. And you are in their corner all the time. A hundred percent unconditional support. You look at every success story like Adam Levine, like Richard Branson, like Ty Pennington, and especially Michael Phelps, they always give credit to their parents for their success as well as other family members and close friends. In addition, of course, to the fact that they got diagnosed early and they got treated properly. So those are the keys to success. Diagnosis and treatment, recognizing talents and aptitudes, developing them further, finding resources, and then the unconditional support and compassion of our loved ones. Now, the fourth principle is also very important because we don't hear about this in awful lot in trade books on the internet, in YouTube. All we hear all about inattention, which leads people to think that all you need is an extra cup of Starbucks and a good night's sleep. Well, that isn't going to cut it because what you really have, as I said at the beginning, is inattention to the future. Your child has no sense of time. Thanks to the disruption in the timing circuits of the brain that are unique to ADHD among all other disorders. Your child cannot sense, cannot cope with, cannot adjust to, and basically deal with this concept of time. And I represent that in the two clocks that you see here. What do we do? Because we don't understand this. We give children with ADHD, time intervals, limits, deadlines, and so on. What are you out of your mind? You're giving a deadline to somebody with no sense of time. Lots of luck with that, right? Because they're not going to be able to cope with that. They are clueless when it comes to what does time feel like? How much do I have? What's left? When do I need to prepare all of this anticipatory behavior we get from a sense of time? They don't have it, right? So if you wanted to say it was somebody with ADHD real quick, give them a time limit or a deadline, game over. So we have to understand what we see in this dentist, the menist cartoon. For somebody with ADHD and dentist is a consummate ADHD child. It's always now. They live right now. This is it. This is where they are. This is where their mind is. It's not yesterday and it sure is heck isn't tomorrow. They're not looking back. They're not looking ahead. They live here. So if you want to look at it that way, children with ADHD are overly attentive to the moment and not attentive to the later. The next, the future, the task, the goal, the assignment, the rules. What am I supposed to be doing here instead of just having fun in the now. So to an ADHD child, it's always now. So what does that mean? Your child is blind to time and near sighted to the future. And that means there is no internal clock, no sense of time, no sense of time passing. And that will persist into adulthood in the vast majority of cases, which means they can't anticipate the future. Stop asking them to do that. Stop giving book reports that take 30 days. Some are reading that takes three months. I mean, these are crazy things to assign to sound with no sense of time. In addition to that, they are less able to wait for consequences. Where do you think all the impatience is coming from when they have to wait in line to go to the lunchroom or to go out with you to do something fun or to go to the movies or when adults with ADHD have to wait in line and traffic or have to wait in line at the movies or at restaurants, it drives them nuts. Because when you have no sense of time, time feels like it's moving incredibly slowly. And also you think you have a lot more time than you do. And that leads to two things. The future gets here faster than you thought and you're never ready for it. And it leads you to become incredibly impatient with waiting because it feels like forever, right? So once you understand that, you really can understand people with ADHD and why they act the way they do, why they make decisions the way they do. Here's a classic demonstration of an adolescent with ADHD. And look at what he's saying to his mom at 1 30 or 2 30 in the morning, whatever the clock is showing there. But it's late. And what is he doing? He's waking her up to say, mom, mom, I just remembered. I have to build a diorama of the Hoover Dam by second period tomorrow. Well, friends, if you have not experienced this yet as a parent of an ADHD child, you will because they don't look ahead. So whereas the other kids told their parents three days ago, they needed materials to put this diorama together, your kid is going to tell you 2 30 in the morning, good thing Walmart's open, huh? So we need to understand how this problem with times so impairs our children. What is this timeline? This all about? Well, look at it this way. There were events coming at you. The assignments, the tasks, the deadlines. There are the things you're supposed to be doing to prepare for those, the responses. And then there are the consequences for that preparation, the outcomes, what happens? These ease, ours, and o's are coming at us over time. Now, if they're really close together, you don't need a frontal lobe. You don't need an executive brain. That's a video game. Why do you think ADHD children have no trouble with gaming? Right? Because it's all stimulus response consequence right now, right here, right? But life isn't like that. In real life, there are gaps in time between the assignments were given. And when they're due, and when the consequences happened to us. And when you put time between these ease and ours and o's, you have to have a frontal lobe. As neuropsychologists and neurologists have referred to this frontal lobe, its major ability is to bind events over time to anticipate the future. And they can't do that. And once you get that, it leads to another suggestion to you. We need to bring ease, ours, and o's close together, which means we have to break tasks down into small units. Do this now, earn this now, and you will get to the future. But you can't point across the river of time as these people are doing and build a bridge across that, right? They're not going to build that bridge, right? That's your job. So rather than saying to them, right? You have a book report to do next week, break those longer term things down into daily baby steps, little bricks in the bridge that we are going to do right now every day. And we will get across that river in time and do not ask me when you can stop doing this. Never, right? It gets better as they get older, as the frontal lobe matures, they can anticipate things further out, but it is never where it's supposed to be for their age. They will always need a little help, a little assistance, a little structure and scaffolding, as I call it, to bridge that gap in time. But trust me, it does get better. But in the meantime, break tasks down into baby steps into bricks, then add a brick a day as this person is doing, and we'll get across that river, that chasm of time to the future. So we need to not only break things down into smaller chunks, when we have those smaller chunks, we need to make time physical and real in the visual field, externalize time. We need to also help our children learn to wait and we do that by distracting them when they have to wait for things, by giving them other things to do, busy hands being happy hands. So you can pick up this one foot timer on Amazon. You can use a cooking timer, clocks, counters and other things to help you. Give your child that sense of time they do not possess in their brain, but it must be physical outside of them in their visual field. Principle number five, working memory isn't working. Working memory constitutes two of the seven executive functions. Visual imagery and self speech, we call it nonverbal working memory, verbal working memory. Think of working memory as remembering what you're supposed to be doing. It's what you lose after you turn about 55 to 60 years of age. I'm somebody one. I've lost it big time. Right? Just why you're going to see a lot of notes around me because I often forget what I was doing when I go into the next room. And ADHD children are like old men times 100 because they didn't get the working memory that I got, but that I'm losing. So remembering what to do, not facts, not figures, not knowledge. They don't have a problem with memory. They have a problem with remembering what they're supposed to be doing. So look at your brain this way. The back part of the brain is where you get knowledge. You learn and you store it there. The front part of the brain is where you activate that knowledge, bring it into your frontal lobe, upload it to working memory and keep it there consciously. So it guides you over time. So you can accomplish your goals. That's performance. Using the knowledge we have to guide us through time and make us more effective. And ADHD disconnects the back in the front part of the brain. So that you can know as much or even more than other people know and you will do stupid things. You won't be able to accomplish what they can accomplish with that knowledge because knowing and doing are different. Right? What does this mean? Don't spend so much time conveying skills and knowledge to your child. That's not the problem. The problem is helping them use what they know where they should be using it to behave better and more effectively and more successfully. And that's a whole different beast. That means that we have to work at the point of performance, the place and time where they're not using what they know and help them to show what they know. I want you to think of working memory like the GPS of your mind because it's exactly like the GPS in a car. It's visual images, the maps that you see on your GPS. And it's verbal. The rules we give to ourselves and our mind, just like the GPS talks to you and gives you instructions. Right? So working memory is the mind's GPS. Your child doesn't have this very well. And as a result, they can't use images and words to guide them toward a destination like a GPS can do in the car. So what do we need to do? All right. We need to help offload working memory and compensate for it because they're not going to be able to do those things. I've already discussed these things on this slide. So I'll skip that and move to the what to do. Number one, don't require that they hold lots of information in mind about what they're supposed to be doing. Get it out of the brain, offload it to use text speak. Right? So get it on journals, papers, sticky notes, cards, signs, pictures, picture sequences that you can find on the internet when it comes to various routines like dressing and bathing and brushing your teeth and getting ready for bed. There's plenty of picture sequences on the internet you can print out and put on the refrigerator, put in the bedroom, put on the bathroom mirror, put at the bathtub. Where do you need these? Put them there at the points of performance to help them remember what to do at that point. And then you can also add simple drawings if you can't find these pictures on the internet somewhere, though by just using Google images, you can usually find what you're after. And then make the rules of a situation external on the list in front of the child that you go over with your child before each major activity. So if we're doing homework, if we're getting ready for bed, if we're getting ready for school, we should have a chart with those rules that we can go over with our child, assuming of course that they're on an age where they can read. But even if they're not ready to read, there are picture sequences you can download off the internet for these particular activities. So go over the rules in advance, create your transition plan, your rules, tell your child what they can earn as they move into that activity, and then you can rehearse these plans over and over again, to make them automatic with your child. Finally, I'm going to end with my 12th principle. It's number six in this lecture, of course, but it's 12 in my book, practice forgiveness. You have been blessed with a disabled child, someone with a neurodevelopmental disability, and while you didn't ask for this, you got it. But you didn't cause it, so you're not at fault. Take yourself off the hook, all right? But I'm going to put you back on the hook. You are responsible for raising this child and for how well you raise them and for being a good shepherd to them. And one of the best ways to help you remember to do that is to think about forgiveness. We have been striving to get this right for two to four thousand years. Many people still don't get it right. But, and you don't have to be religious to be forgiving. Forgiveness means three things. Number one, understand that you are going to make a lot of mistakes in raising your child. That's okay. We all make mistakes, I made mistakes in raising my kids, and I'm supposed to be an expert psychologist. You know what matters? It's not being a perfect parent. We don't want perfect parents. First of all, there aren't any. But second, what really matters in our research is what we call coping parents. Parents who might make mistakes, but apologize, ask for forgiveness, and strive to do better the next time around. That's real people. That's being a human. And we want to model that for our children. And by practicing forgiveness, that way openly, it helps us to get rid of the vindictiveness, the spitefulness, the hurt, the anger that builds up over time from the mistakes that we and our children make. Next, get good at forgiving the people around you because they don't know ADHD the way you know it now, right? They see ADHD as something you caused. You didn't raise them properly. You gave them the wrong food. You let them have too much screen time. You didn't get them enough sleep. Blah, blah, blah. All of these things that don't cause ADHD, they think do. But number one on that list is they blame you. There is no country as good at parent bashing, particularly mother bashing as the United States. And it's wrong. Parents don't cause autism. They don't cause ADHD. They don't cause learning disabilities or intellectual disability. You didn't cause this either. But they don't know that. And they're gonna glare at you in stores. They're gonna look at you. They may even say mean things to you. And you are going to be judged by your parenting. And you better get a thick skin, good ol' rhino skin if you're gonna get through this life without getting really upset with them. So learn coping techniques. Read your erroneous zones if you have to. Look at books on cognitive therapy. They're all over the place out there. And you can find suggestions for how to change the way you think in order that your feelings aren't so important and what other people say to you is not so important either. Lastly, and then we'll wrap this up. You better get good at forgiving this child. Being disabled, they will make more mistakes than other children will make. And you have to not look at that morally judgmentally. It's part of their disorder. And when we frame it that way, instead of moral judgment, what we should replace it with is compassion and a willingness to assist disabled people in being more effective, more successful, more well-adjusted and happier. So get good at forgiving your children. If necessary, find a ritual at the end of the day that you can perform that helps you to exorcise your emotional demons and your sense of hurt and vindictiveness. One mother I know took a picture of her ADHD child when he went and picked flowers in the garden and brought them in and gave them to her spontaneously. She took her cell phone, cut a picture of that, and then she printed that out at which point she gave or she put that picture on the refrigerator. And now she knows what her real child is like forgiveness. Another mother said that with her young ADHD child, she found it helpful when they fell asleep to simply go up and sit in the dark bedroom and watch them sleep. There's nothing more innocent than watching a child sleep. And if you have to take a glass of wine with you, so much the better. But find your exorcism, the way of getting over the hurt and the vindictiveness. So I hope you've learned that there are basic principles. I've covered six, there are six more in my book that if you understand them, you'll be doing about as good a job as you can at raising an effective, happy, successful child and teen with ADHD. Thank you for joining me here for this lecture today. Wayne, I'll turn it over to you. - Thanks. I was excellent, of course. Very insightful. And inspiring. A lot of people just brought up the fact that thank you so much for just saying to love the child that you have. That was very clarifying for them. - Good. - Good. - Here's one, in terms of delayed executive functions, one mom has asked, is there finally a catch up time where ADHD kids catch up with their kids? - Exactly. - Okay, function. - Excellent question. And my book goes into this, it's one of the 12 principles, but I had to put it aside in favor, but I thought we're even more important ones than the other six or other. So here's the way it works. Your child's executive age on average is about 30% behind. Don't worry about the number. It's just a guide. It's not rocket science. So if you have a 10 year old child with ADHD, they're like a seven year old when it comes to self control. Not when it comes to reading and math and spelling. They may be at grade level in their achievement, in what they know, but not in their ability to organize it, to persist at it, to engage in time management and sense time and control their emotions and motivate themselves. Those are the executive things that are failing. So your child is a lot like a younger child, which means we have to change the environment around them as if a younger child were being asked to do 10 year old level work. Break the work into small units, do small quotas, take frequent breaks, involve more external motivation like tokens and promises and privileges and chips and things like that and make them more accountable as you would a seven year old, instead of treating them like a 10 year old and then being devastated when they can't act like a 10 year old. So that's what the executive age means. Adjust your expectations down. What does that mean for a 16 year old? You've got an 11 year old. Do we give 11 year olds a driver's license? No. And you shouldn't either. They're gonna stay under their learner's permit a lot longer. They're gonna have to show you they're ready for the next level of independent driving rather than just being automatically granted independent driving at 16. That has a very dangerous area of life for an ADHD teen. So you better understand that. They can hurt people. They could kill themselves. I lost a twin brother to ADHD in an auto accident. So I know that personally. And had we readjusted for his executive age, maybe that wouldn't have happened. But that doesn't matter. The important point here is you don't ask the child to change. You change the environment to fit the executive age and maybe you don't let them do a lot of the other things that other people are doing at that age. So when do they outgrow this? Well, understand as I said, everybody gets better every year. They are growing up. Their executive abilities are blossoming. But it's never where it's supposed to be. It's always at that 30% gap on average. And then it pulls off by the time you're 24 to 30 years of age. What does that mean? If you have ADHD and you didn't outgrow it, you're leveling off somewhere around 16 to 24 in somewhere on that age. And that means that's the kind of decision making you're going to have as you go through midlife, which helps us to understand why adults with ADHD often make decisions that other people their age would not have engaged in, because they're thinking like a younger person, more in the now, more governed by immediate rewards. So just remember, about 15%, maybe as much as 35%, but I doubted about 15% of ADHD children will outgrow this and they will have a normal executive age by adulthood. But the rest of them are going to be delayed to varying degrees. And once that executive brain stops maturing, which is somewhere around 24 to 32, right? That's where they're going to level off. And we'll need to be helping them with certain activities. in task or as an adult they'll find a niche where self control isn't quite as important as it might be in other niches whether that's the military whether that's performing arts or music or stand-up comedy or someplace that's a little more forgiving of being a little less regulated and still you can succeed at it. There you go, Wayne. Okay, hopefully just to give some some support to this one mom and then we'll have to go. I have an adult age child at age 34. I never gave him the help for ADHD that you talked about although he was formally diagnosed with 17. Now how can I help? Is there any way I can help? Yes, it's never too late. Even at 50, 60, 70 you still got the rest of your life ahead of you and ADHD is among the most treatable disorders in psychiatry. Bar none. We have more treatments, more medications that help more people with ADHD, then help people with anxiety, depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia and so on. It's a very treatable disorder. That doesn't mean we can go back and correct your past. Some of the things that happened are not reprobable. But plenty is and that doesn't mean you can't have a more successful life going forward. So get them the help they need and you can find that attitude magazine has a professional locator. Chad.org has professional locators, medicine connect.net also has professional locators. These are places you can go to and search for your region for people who identify themselves as experts. If you don't do that, see if there's a Chad chapter near you. All the president, they're going to have field tests at the regional resources. You bet on it and they're going to have a good sense of what's good and what's not so good. And then avail yourself, of course, of the various online resources such as Chad and help for ADHD and my website and ADD.org and attitudes website. There's a lot of good information out there that can help guide you. But yes, get them help. If you need to, you can read my book when an adult you love has ADHD to tell you how to approach someone who may or may not be ready to hear that. There are various strategies to use for doing that. So Wayne, I want to thank you again for inviting me and thank the staff at attitude. I want to thank everyone who tuned in today to listen to this talk on six principles to raise a child with ADHD. Thank you all so much. And was excellent. Thank you for being here again. Really. Community loved it. And thank you attendees for being here. We really appreciate it as we do all the time and make sure you don't miss future attitude webinars. ADHD expert articles or important research updates. By signing up to receive our free email news letters at attitude mad dot com slash news letters. Thanks everyone for being here and had a great day. Bye everyone. Thank you. For more attitude podcast and information on living well with attention deficit, visit attitude mag dot com. 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