When Parenting Disagreements Disrupt ADHD Households: Preventive Methods
The most consistent and complicated source of our discord in our household isn’t our teenage son’s ADHD. It’s the fact that my husband and I are often at a dead end as to how to deal with his behavior.
We often find ourselves rooted in the contrasting attitudes of prosecutors and defense attorneys about our son’s actions. (My husband calls them transgressions; I call them dingbat behavior. You can read all about it on this blog.)
We finally agreed on one thing: It was time to seek professional help, so I turned to Lara Cannon, a Licensed Professional Counselor and ADHD Specialist, with this question: How can families with different attitudes towards their children with ADHD manage, particularly in relation to behavior and discipline?
Below I’ve summarized Cannon’s top strategies for reducing disagreement at home. She gave no advice on how to give our child consequences for his petty crimes. (And she didn’t really strengthen my arguments as a lead defense attorney.) Instead, to my surprise, she gave us preemptive tips — ways to anticipate and reduce parental conflict by activating our child’s desire to want what we want.
1. Find out about your child’s ADHD
First and foremost, caregivers need to agree on what ADHD means for their child and what doesn’t. It’s important to understand how the ADHD brain works, but be careful not to generalize. Drugs help many; Mindfulness and emotion regulation skills also benefit many children and adolescents with ADHD.
[Use This Free Guide To End Confrontations and Defiance]
Essentially, ADHD is an effort regulation problem that affects the ability to focus, exert and sustain effort, or exercise self-control. You set your child up for failure when you rely on their internal regulatory system for these skills. (Especially with tasks that don’t interest your child.)
My son, for example, is quite capable of taking care of things that interest him with almost no effort. (Photography and video games come to mind.) However, he lacks attention regulation and self-control when it comes to strenuous things like household chores. This is not a willful, willful oversight. The idea of chores doesn’t light up circuits in his prefrontal cortex, excite his limbic system, or reward him with buckets of norepinephrine and dopamine. All these things feed each other to continue his neglect of responsibilities.
2. Reduce friction by understanding motivation
Power struggles arise when caregivers and children have different interests, leading to a motivational mismatch.
Power struggles are reduced when you can combine what motivates your child with what he doesn’t do. For example, if your child wants your attention (high interest), give it while you do gardening together (low interest). Or if they love dinosaurs (high interest), use them as a starting point to learn about other subjects like writing or math (low interest). Make sure the low-interest responsibility is met first because once they have what they want, the motivation is gone.
[Read: How to Manage Your Child’s Toughest Behavioral Problems]
In my case, I may have to dangle the car keys or computer mouse in our son’s face and tell him that he won’t get them until his chores, homework, and other commitments are done.
Other ways to avoid power struggles? Choose your battles. Reduce the number of commands and criticism. (It’s safe to say that ADHD teens get more “corrections” than neurotypical teens.) Let go of the little things.
I’ll try not to care if his room is a stye, even if his damp towels and food-caked dishes pose a bacterial hazard.
3. Exemplary emotion regulation
Responding to challenges with anger rarely ends well. Conflicts are fueled by emotions, and emotions are contagious. Anger increases escalation, while calm creates an anchor and helps maintain control.
As a parent, you want to model emotional regulation for your family. When you’re experiencing anger, Cannon says, imagine that a butterfly has landed on your shoulder and you want it to stay. What do you have to do to keep it there? Be still, don’t make sudden movements, turn down the volume, speak less and observe what’s happening around you.
By modeling mindfulness and emotional regulation, you give your child tools to regulate and modulate their own emotional responses in difficult situations—an important life skill.
I know I tend to be quieter than my husband when it comes to our son’s little misjudgments and trifles. But there is still room for improvement. When I get angry, I’ve been known to climb onto a lectern and not get off until I’ve run out of oxygen (and the entire room). By this time all butterflies will have flown to quieter pastures.
4. Meet your child where they are
Children with ADHD often suffer from mental blindness. They don’t always pay attention to things that are boring or mundane. They may not even be aware of what they are doing until seconds after they have done it. That’s because their powerful emotional and instinctual brains are way ahead of their slow-moving prefrontal cortex. It is these traits that often lead to disagreements among parents about behavior.
To reduce conflict over behaviors, parents can support their child in developing habits they want to see through “point-of-performance support.” This means introducing life skills in small increments, with extra support at the beginning.
Access to the car is a great motivator for our teenager but he struggles to keep it clean which infuriates my husband. So we’ll meet our teenager in the driveway with a trash can and a smile. My husband may still say that “babys” our teenager is absurd, but this one-off support may only have to last a short while before tidying up becomes an independent habit.
Whenever possible, says Cannon, we should make the difficult task easier and create compliance systems to increase acceptance for more important things. Visual reminders and predictable schedules are another form of support that can form habits over time.
5. Be a coach
As you work to change your child’s behavior, it’s important to adopt a coaching mentality. A good coach is empathetic, understanding and a cooperative problem solver. They are not adversaries or authoritarians. They do not yell, shame or punish.
It’s hard to adopt the coach mentality when I’ve asked my teenager for the five thousandth time to take his dirty dishes to the kitchen or pick up his wet towels from the floor. I’ve found that saying “LBY” in a swinging voice has helped me feel more like a coach and less like an angry whiner. LBY is our code for Look Behind You because every time he moves from one room to another, flotsam is guaranteed to be left behind.
Coaches aren’t saviors either. Avoid rushing into what might otherwise be a learning opportunity for your child with a fabulous solution, especially if it’s a pain point behavior for you and your partner. Let your child invent and create their own solutions as much as possible. According to Cannon, “We learn in combat. If you deny the child the struggle, you deny him his growth, which is his own reward.”
The trick now is to let our son develop his own strategies for dealing with his ADHD. He’s about to be a full-fledged adult, and before long his parents won’t be around to constantly coax, remind, coerce, nag, reward, or discipline him. Or, if he’s been living in the basement for decades, at least our voices are significantly muted when we coax, remind, coerce, nag, reward, or discipline him.
So forget crime or punishment. Let’s focus on growth and understanding. I have a pet butterfly that I’m dying to keep on my shoulder.
Parenting Disagreements: Next Steps
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