165: Does your ADHD child lash out physically?

Welcome to Response Able Parenting. The podcast that shows you how to parent in alignment to your emotions, needs, and goals versus your programming, bad advice, and let's face it, outdated strategies that just don't work. You'll get in the trenches support on nervous system and emotional regulation, critical mindset shifts, stronger communication strategies, and more. In this podcast, you'll gain transformational tools that take you from reacting to every frustration to responding with clarity, regulation, and finally setting the example you desire for your kids. I'm Becky Jennings, your new parenting coach, and this is the Response Able Parenting Podcast. Let's get into it. Hello, welcome back to another episode of Response Able Parenting. Oh, this one's going to be a heavy one, but I think also hopeful at the exact same time, because what I really want to share with you today is the research so we can destigmatize the physical aggression that can often be a result of really tense moments with our ADHD kid. I have compiled research because this was a topic of conversation that is not only popping up more and more inside my community, where parents are being open and honest about the physical aspect of conflict that happens in their home, and the child to parent aggression, not the opposite, we're good there. But I'm also hearing this a lot inside the DMs. I'm getting several emails a week saying my child is physically lashing out, hitting, kicking, shoving, smacking me, doing that kind of lurch at me to create fear, to create this autonomy, to basically show how they disapprove of the know or how frustrated they are in the moment, and how quickly it can go from a moment where they're building something, and that thing breaks or doesn't build the way that they want it to build, and all of a sudden that thing is flying across the room. And this is an all-too-common thing that I am hearing. This is an all-too-common experience, and I too have experienced it inside of my home. I have pulled together some studies, and I really think it shares a very clear picture of what is going on for the child, and it gives me a lot of hope. It truly does because it helps us remove this stigma. It helps us see our child's experience, not as this defiant, aggressive, awful, hopeless child, this bad child. But we get to see the connections, and we get to connect the dots between their executive functioning and their impulse, and what is going on for them. So I'm going to share several things, and I think it'll hopefully resonate in a way that, first of all, allows you to feel like you are not alone at all in these moments, and that it's not some dark underbelly that you have to keep a secret, or that we have to say on a call, "Please don't judge me. This is what's happening in my house." Because this is happening across more households that we probably have ever known, and it's really important to be able to talk about this, destigmatize it so that we can actually get the support, not just for us to keep our safety, something that is paramount, but also to help our child develop the actual skills that they are lacking, so that this isn't always their go-to when they are frustrated. I am going to be reading some parts of studies just so that you can get a really clear grasp of this, and I'm going to link and connect the dots as well. There was a study done. It was comparing 38 neurodivergent ADHD children to 34 neuro-typical child developing typically. Now I know that is a very small sample size, and that some of these are smaller sample sizes, and even though they are smaller, they do give us a lot of data, and they tend to match almost identically the data that I am pulling out of my community as well, across the analysis and the studies that I am doing inside of the community from what parents are sharing with me. Is a study between 38 ADHD children and 34 neuro-typical children? What they found is that it wasn't the impulsivity itself that produces the aggression. It's the emotional flooding that the child experiences, and its impulsivity and the lack of impulsivity, it doesn't allow them to contain that emotional flood. The emotional flood is too big mixed with the fact that they have low impulse control. The two in tandem creates this physical aggression. Knowing that, we can start to identify this not as a character problem or a discipline failure on your part. Rather, it's like a downstream result of a brain that can't put the brakes on huge emotions in the moment before it becomes a physical thing, before it actually comes out physically. So they basically, they have an inability to stop. They have an inability to think, right? But that's not the whole story. The large majority of this is the emotion overwhelm. The emotion overwhelm that they experience, that is what is the driving underlying belly of then the physical retaliation. Another study, this was of 247 adolescents with ADHD and their parents. Almost 80%, 78.9% of ADHD adolescents had engaged in some form of child-dependence. This is far greater than the general population rates. So we know that as parents of ADHD children, this is actually almost an 80% probability that child-to-parent violence will happen at some point. So this is really good information for us to know. So again, we're not completely off guard. We don't have this intense reaction to it. And we also aren't now categorizing our child and jumping to these extremes and thinking that we have to take all these really intense precautions because now our child is violent. Now our child has gone too far. Now, you know, this is actually extremely common, not rare at all experience for an ADHD child. What they found in this study is that executive function impairment was uniquely and specifically associated with the physical aggression. So let me say that again, the executive function part because the ADHD brain really struggles with executive function, I specifically emotion management. That significantly was a part and associated with the physical aggression. So if your child has kicked you, shoved you, slapped your hand away, you are not alone. And this isn't something that we need to be feeling shameful or keeping secret because this is actually now that we're seeing this. And yes, again, a 247 sample size is small, but a 78.9 percentage in that is not small whatsoever. The large majority of ADHD families at some point or another are probably going to experience this. And physical aggression specifically, not yelling, not the negotiations, not the manipulations, all of those. It's tied to an executive function struggle. It's the same part of the brain that really struggles with the planning, the self control. That's not a moral failing of your child. I'm going to say this probably many, many times. It's not a moral failing. And it doesn't mean that you're not a good parent. It doesn't mean that you're not a good parent because the physical aggression is so tracked and so connected to the executive function impairment. This is when we get to be very strategic as a parent. This is when we get to develop the missing skills. I'm going to talk about some other things that we can do, but I think it's really important to understand that in the moment, shutting it down, trying to redirect, asking them to use their words, these aren't helpful. Punishments aren't going to be helpful in the moment. We actually have to truly develop that executive function skill so that they actually physically have a different subset of skills in their body that is already through repetition, through this new behavior pathway that we create through the development. They actually have another option because right now what's happening is their executive function is chronically overtaxed. They're masking at school. They're struggling to stay focused. They're dealing with their impulses. They're dealing with sleep, challenges. They're dealing with all this so their executive function is overtaxed. And then something negative happens and they can't take it anymore. It's a flood. All of the emotional flooding happens and because they don't have the ability to stop themselves in the moment, think about it, they have that impulsivity kind of locked in and helps them contain it because these things are working out at the same time. Then what we're experiencing is that physical retaliation. Another study came out and I think this is really important to note. This was in 2022 that a random trial of 160 youth ages from 7 to 14. Now we're talking about ODD that were or diagnosed with ODD, but. ODD is a very common co-occurring diagnosis with ADHD. So I think it's important to know and include this in the information. And we've just talked about the low impulse control, which we all understand is a very real thing in ADHD, a motion management being the number one challenge in their executive function delay. Those are two really important and those are creating the physical retaliation and the physical conflict, the overtaxed executive function and the underdevelopment of skill. So these are really, really important factors to know. Now there was an interview done last year back in 2025 of parents to ADHD kids. And this research is really helpful and I can say 100% across the board that this is virtually identical and maybe even matched word for word with what I see parents experiencing inside of the community. And they identified that the situation, so essentially they are like, yes, this happens, like we experienced child-to-parent physical aggression, but they actually did like a contextual study ahead of time to be like, what's the context? And what happens most often before the physical kind of retaliation? And across the board, the parents were talking about frustration, frustration and tolerance, being told no or transitioning from something preferred to non-preferred. That was when the actual aggressions came forward. So again, this isn't something that is a moral character assassination on your child. Frustration and tolerance is a skill we can develop. Being told no, feeling like your voice isn't being heard, feeling like your opinion wasn't listened to, maybe not even agreeing with why the no is here. And this is why having effective communication strategies to talk to your ADHD child. And also they are hearing no so much more than a neurotypical child. And we can often get into a very predictable pattern just of having no be our knee-jerk reaction. And even if it could potentially be a yes, it's really hard for us to say yes to our ADHD kids because of the history and the volume and the disrupts that we don't even really want to say yes. We would much rather say no because it doesn't feel they stop hitting, yelling, negotiating, lashing out. It's almost like they don't deserve the no. But that builds and builds inside their nervous system, creating a survival response in them, which creates even more to the emotional flooding when that happens. And then their impulse container is so weak that we end up with a physical retaliation. And then of course transitions are really tricky because maybe for the very first time that day, they're doing something that they're enjoying, they're not being told to do something and then they are told to do something and it explodes. Okay, so in this research, in this interview, they had some very clear benchmarks if the parents were doing. Number one, physically stepping back in the moment and not allowing it. Actually physically removing yourself, I talk a lot about body first, like my body first, my parent body first, before I do anything else, my safety, my regulation, is going to be so essential in mission critical so that when I'm actually attending to the environment, attending to the scene, I'm not adding more gasoline to the fire. I'm actually able to stay as neutral as possible given the circumstances. We're kind of like the duck where we're trying to maintain that calm and composure on top, but our inside our body is like, ah, you know what I mean? So yes, sometimes we have to fake it till we make it. And I think that's a very real thing to say. I was talking on my community call yesterday and they were like, but aren't we acting? I'm like, yeah, yes. To a point, you have to act enough until your body starts to trust that you can do this. And in the lab, which I talk about, and that's part of my program, is where we actually simulate negative patterns and how to interrupt them and transition to the ideal behavior through new habit formation. This is the daily practice that we have inside the program with our children, and I encourage the child to act so that they can start to feel what it would feel like in that pathway because they're not in it right now. So let's rev it up and get there and then let's move over to that other pathway so that we act. We have to act in order to know what to do. So it's practice. But yes, we do have to kind of almost fake it till you make it. And I've had therapists tell me in the past, like when you're having conversations with, and you're in conflict, you might have to say it calmly, even though you're angry, which feels fake. The more you practice and the more you actually take care of the regulation practice on your end, it won't feel fake and it will become a way in which you are able to manage yourself and your emotions in the moment. Physically stepping back, and like I just mentioned, staying calm and not matching the aggression, not coming back in, not having your say, not having your points, not using logic, not putting consequences, not making these harsh statements. That really, really changes the trajectory as well as the duration of these physical moments because sometimes they're just a flash pan, but it's how we then retaliate back or feel like we have to shut it down that continues to keep this thing brewing. And then afterwards, it was having a conversation about it on the end, like afterwards, in a calm setting, maybe even a day later so that it's not just still hot and brewing. And the other part to this was that they had community support and they weren't might knuckling it all on their own, living in this shame spiral. And that's really, really helpful too, is that they were able to be in a community where other people shared their lived experience and so they didn't feel so isolated in the moment and they actually had solid structure and advice on how to handle these moments. Now I do want to talk about ODD as well because ODD is a very common co-occurring condition and diagnosis within ADHD. And there was a study, a randomized trial of 160 youth that were the age range between seven and 14 that were in fact diagnosed with ODD, what they found was that the whole study determined that the outbursts happen when a child blacks the skill to meet the expectation. How incredibly profound is that? Essentially what is happening is the child doesn't have the skill to match the parental expectation which is the entire thing that I talk about in the expectation gap. And because of that, we experience an outburst. So a true real approach is that collaboration of understanding, okay, when I ask you to do XYZ, brush your teeth, get your shoes on, come eat dinner, go to bed, do your homework. All of these daily tasks that can get really tense very quickly, having a collaborative discussion which is in fact the board meeting that I walk parents through every single day inside of my community and we basically say, this is the pattern that we constantly fall into. This is the pattern that we are experiencing on a regular basis where we end up in high conflict around this particular area. The goal here is to be able to get through it without the physical violence, without screaming at each other, without the harsh punishments, without all of that. So how do we do that? What's getting in the way for you? You know, what do you feel in your body? Do you need support in certain areas and not in others? And then this is really where we start to work with our child so that we can expose those weak parts for them and we can really scaffold those for them rather than being like issuing consequences after the fact as a kind of retroactive thing of being like, this is how you're gonna learn the skill retroactively with my consequence. That's never gonna happen. And we've now had seen so much research that punishments and consequences truly do not support behavior modification. Collaborative problem solving about what is actually going on for your child in that moment. What the context is leading up to that for them, which is starting to have that brew, that is really where we are able to finally make meaningful and impactful changes. There are a few key things that we have to have in practice as the parent to ADHD children that have experienced and have had physical aggression towards us. Number one, it is absolutely a non-negotiable and essential part of our parenting journey to have a regulation and safety practice for ourselves. That body first mentality of if I see that we are heading into the pattern, even if we're in the pattern, if we're in full blown chaos, it is my job and the only way out of this is when I am able to support my own regulation, right? If I'm able to take myself from attend down to an eight, down to a seven, so that I can actually bring back in logic and reasoning. Because what happens is when we watch our child start to explode. Our nervous system reads their nervous system, which starts to create sensations in our body, lava chest, panic, heart rate, rapidly beating, shallow breath, clenched jaw, all of those are physiological signs, alerting us to danger, which is accurate. And then our subconscious clicks in and says, Hey, my job is to scan and see when we've experienced this before, how it's linked to this physical sensation that you are experiencing right now. I'm going to, in like 10 seconds, pull up the survival strategy that kept you alive the last time. And I'm going to tell you to do that. And so we follow the default pattern and round and round and round we go. Now what looks like defiance and bad behavior on our child's end is actually all of this data that I just said, and it's their nervous system feeling threatened by our know, our telling them to do something that they don't want to do, having them transition off something fun to the next. So it's an immediate refusal of autonomy. It's an immediate threat detection for them. So their nervous system has a physiological response. And their subconscious scans all of their previous experiences and pulls their survival strategy out, which has kept them alive. And so round and round we go with these two nervous systems that are fighting each other in order to stay alive and basically win this battle. And we need to eliminate that round and round and round we go, and in order to do so, we have to learn how to regulate our body when it experiences those physiological signals. When it says alert alert, you're heading into the reactive trap. When we can keep our body neutral, when we can even say I'm frustrated here of how I'm going to protect my frustration, I'm going to push up against the wall, I'm going to squeeze it out, I'm going to do several regulation practices so that I can handle this moment. When we can be the responsible parent in the room and manage our emotions, this is actually going to support our child more than the behavior shift, more than the getting them to change. When we change, their nervous system is now bouncing off a nervous system that isn't intensifying their experience. It's actually feeling a more regulated nervous system, which they can then borrow and start to lower as well. When we don't come in with additional threats, punishments, consequences, logic, choices, all of these things, when we don't come in, when they are completely flooded, they actually can feel the difference and they don't have to escalate nearly as much because A, we're not coming in as another threat to their autonomy. The other part to this is it is really important for us to understand and it goes right along with what I just said. Again, when they're amygdala, their emotion center is activated, their prefrontal cortex such as logic, reasoning, problem solving, effective communication leaves. It goes offline and that is a biological survival strategy because you don't want to think about the other cavemen's feelings or you don't want to think about if you left your corn husks behind as something's trying to kill you, you just want to run, you want to fight or flee. So all systems turn off and your survival strategy stays on. So when we're yelling at our child, we're lecturing, we are throwing out threats that we're going to take something away, we're trying to use logic and justify and explain what's happening to them, they're not hearing any of that as logic, reasoning, communication, any of that. So their hearing is threat, threat, threat, threat, threat, and I'm so guilty of this too. I'm so, so guilty. It is so important for us to really remove that aspect because it's not an effective strategy and it is not permissive or passive parenting to not engage in the fight. I think that's really important to know. It's actually a much stronger approach because what you're doing is you're effectively stopping the pattern of going round and round and round. You are not giving more fuel to the fire because anything you say is going to be evidence to use against you to plead their case more, to have more proof that you never let them do anything. You always say this to me, you always do this, you never let, you're always saying no. Any time you try to justify, explain, you try to use logic in that moment, it is going to fall flat or intensify the moment. We have to learn this lesson three million times before we just focus on our own regulation and stop our bodies and stop our words. There is real evidence that suggests that when we slow our bodies down, that their nervous system can now no longer read us as a threat and that we're actually there as a support for them. Now again, because they are human and because this pattern is something that is probably fairly established. They're going to test and they're going to try to see, okay, when are they going to get back into the predictable rhythm that I know? Because again, the nervous system loves, loves, loves, loves, loves predictability. And even if it's horrible, the nervous system is still going to reach for that because it's familiar and familiar equals safe, even if it's awful. And so they're going to test, get bigger, get louder, say worse things and our job is to not take that bait and to actually say to ourselves, ah, this is the testing portion of this new pattern that I am creating. This is where they're trying to see how strong my resolve is, how fast I will break and join them back in the conflict so that we can go round and round again because that's predictable and safe. If you're a parent to an ADHD child, you know what your day looks like. You're correcting from the moment they wake up. Just eat your breakfast, stop hitting your brother. Oh my goodness, put your shoes on. I literally just said put your shoes on and your patient, you really, really are until you hit that tipping point where you've said the same thing 40 times and something snaps. You yell, they react, you see their face and the guilt is immediate. You are not a bad parent. You are simply a parent who needs a better system and I'm hosting a free live masterclass called Stop Yelley. I'm going to show you exactly why the cycle keeps repeating and how to actually break it. Not with more strategies, but with a system that works for the way that your child is wired. It's free, it's live, spots are limited so go into the show notes right now and save your seat. I'll see you there. So it's really important. I've gone a large tangent, but it's really important for our regulation to be paramount and our number one focus. The next part of this, and again, we've talked about this, but to have that collaborative conversation, not in the heat of the moment, outside of the moment, in a calm moment, where you actually seek to understand versus tell your child what you're going to do. You know, like, we're not going to do this anymore. This is how we're going to do it, having a true real conversation with them to identify what's going on for them in the moment, to allow them to have a say on what would feel best from you in those moments. Mom, I hate when you say this. What I really need to hear from you is this. Or maybe they don't even know, but you can start that conversation by saying, I imagine it feels challenging, hard, frustrating, annoying, nagging when I say this. That's typically what kicks off the next fight and curious what would feel better for you. And if you don't have an answer, that's okay. We'll just try to figure it out and I'll keep asking these questions, but know that you can come to me and tell me, and I'm listening and I'm not going to shut you down. So that's really, really important. Having that regulation practice for you, creating that space so that you aren't getting physically harmed in the heat of the moment. When we have moved out of the heat of the moment, having that real true conversation with them so that we can identify where that lack of skill is, and then this is the most magical part of the whole thing is then we get to support in terms of skill development. Practice. Siggy and I talked about it in our previous podcast, it's a dress rehearsal before the heat of the moment. Okay, so when this happens, how are we going to practice that or what are we going to say? And how are we going to stop ourselves from heading into the pattern? In my program, I do a code word system. The code word is intended to be said as we are heading up the mountain of dysregulation, as our predictable fight of the physical aggression. It's designed to head it off at the pass, not to say, stop doing what you're doing, but to say alert, we are heading into the pattern. Let's stop it here. And then together we, again, do what we have been rehearsing. We call ourselves down for a few minutes, maybe 30 seconds, a minute, 90 seconds. We spend some intentional time in a regulation practice that we're doing together as a team, a team against the pattern versus us against each other. And then we like, okay, what's that first step we can take in the right direction towards hearing each other? Okay, I just said no to you and that clearly was frustrating to you. What about the no felt bad? What about not being able to watch your iPad for 20 more minutes is challenging for you? What about not wanting to sit at the dinner table is feeling really hard in this moment? Can you tell me a little bit more about why it feels so challenging to jump into the shower right now? How can I support? For instance, yesterday, my son, we were leaving to go to baseball practice and I had brand new baseball pants and they're brand new white and we also had brand new black pants. And I was like, for practice, let's use the black pants because then you can get them all dirty and let's save the white pants for the games. So they're clean. So they're crisp. He was not having any of that absolutely not his frustration was brewing mom. No, I'm going to choose white that I'm not going to practice and it just kept escalating. Once he moved into a different room and I had followed him into the room because I was helping him put his cleats on and then I went to tie his cleat or untie a knot in the shoelace and he snacked my hand and my hand went back and it hit me in the face. And it was one of those moments that I was just like, oh my god. Like you feel this surge of lava chest in your body because it's almost like you've just been attacked when you're trying to help and you're trying to support. And so ultimately, once we can't calm down, we're able to regulate a little bit, we're able to create some distance and we were able to actually move out of the high conflict and back into our rational brain. I asked him what is it about these white pants that is so important and why can't we pivot to the black pants like tell me more and curious and he was like, I feel like I look ridiculous and I don't want to look ridiculous on my first practice and the white pants make me feel confident. Okay. Going to work on that, I'm willing to work with that, but just this screaming and the flailing and the that in our bodies and our parent bodies, it's like, that's not a justifiable reason. This behavior is absolutely absurd. We have to shut this down. You're not allowed to talk to me like this and all of that comes flooding into our system from past programming and conditioning and all the stuff, but it's slowing ourselves down, doing the regulation practice pushing up against the wall like we did so that then we could say, okay, now I'm curious, tell me more about the pants because it doesn't make sense to me. So help me understand. Then I understood and I was like, all right, I get it. The white pants make more sense because of how you feel, because of what you're experiencing, because of how you want to show up in the world. But if I didn't listen to that, even if he was like, came back down, calmed down a little bit on his own and he was like, mom, may I please and use the right scripted words, mom, may I please wear the white pants as opposed to screaming at me, no, I'm not going to wear the black pants. And he's like, mom, can I please wear my white pants? I would still have the instinct to say no, even though you just asked me kindly because of how intense the whole moment was. It was only after we regulated together that we were able to ask the curiosity questions that got to the root of what was going on and it was a self esteem issue, which I'm willing to support. Even though we got his pants crazy dirty and that was annoying, but I understood the context so that I could help him make a better decision on how he spoke to me. This is a very long podcast episode, so thank you for staying with me in this. But I think it's really, really important to understand what is happening in their brain chemistry so that we can support them in a better way, so that we can come to the table with a different energy so we can protect ourselves. So we have tools in the heat of the moment so we can develop skills outside of the heat of the moment and rehearse those skills so that the child's body has more than one option. And when we come in as less threatening and when we come in with more curiosity and we practice that enough times, they also begin to trust it and the physical aggression goes down. And what I am experiencing across the board inside of the community, people are experiencing a shift. First of all, simply by the way that they're showing up, but then actually having a way to develop and teach skills to their child is giving them a path and their child for the very first time has a say in these really challenging moments and it's making a monumental difference. So there's two options. I'm going to share inside the show notes, my masterclass, go ahead, sign up for one of those masterclass times so that you can get a very clear picture of my methodology and how I teach and how this looks in real application. And then if you're like screw it, we're going straight into the program, I'm going to have a link to join the program as well. I would love to see you inside the program so we can really start to flush this out and you can get a custom roadmap versus just like the umbrella strategies that I shared here on this podcast so that you can get really granular. We can look at the data of what's going on and we can have a really solid custom game plan for you and your family. All right. Thank you so much for joining me. I so appreciate you being here and taking the time to learn better ways to support yourself and to support your child. It is deeply meaningful and the ripple effect is monumental. So thank you and I will see you next week. Thank you for listening to the response able parenting podcast. If you like what you heard, please take a moment to rate, review, and subscribe. If you know someone who would benefit from this podcast, I'd be honored if you'd share this episode with them. Until next time, know that you are enough, you are capable, you've made it through all of your hardest days and we will keep growing on this parenting journey together. This podcast was produced by Kim Kelti and myself, Maggie Jennings and edited by the Kelti method, branding, and podcasting.