6 Things About ADHD Parents Need To Know

I have written down-- Like, there's a million things I want you to know about ADHD, so many things.

But I've narrowed it down to six, six things that I want to teach you today about ADHD, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder.

And I hope that this will help you understand what I'm gonna call the ADHD brain a little bit better and help you understand your child, your student, your spouse, yourself, your friend, whoever it is that you know that has ADHD, because likely you definitely know people that have ADHD, whether or not you or your child has it.So let's start with my first point, which is really interesting to me, and I think it will be for you as well.

Kids with ADHD are often developmentally behind in regulation.

So that means like being able to find their own calm, work through a difficult thing without having a big meltdown or crying a lot or getting really angry or upset.

And they're also typically behind in executive functioning.

So this is your ability to use that logical part of your brain to think things through, to use reasoning, to be lo- yeah, logical, reasonable, to take a minute to think through what you're doing, to control your impulses.

Children with ADHD have an executive function developmental delay, okay? So what this means is the part of their brain that's responsible for logical thinking, regulation, and impulse control is lagging behind in development.

So the research shows that kids with ADHD are often functioning at a developmental age that's 30%, so we call this the 30% rule, but 30% behind their actual age.

So I'll sh- tell you what that actually means.

So if we're at four years old and they have a diagnosis of ADHD, we might see that their developmental age, so where their brain is at, is closer to maybe three years old or 2.8 if you want to be specific.

If they're seven, we might see them acting a little bit more like a five-year-old, okay? And so this is important for parents to understand, and it doesn't mean we change our expectations of our kids, but it does help us have a little more compassion and work with them, work within their brain at the level that they're working at, right? So for example, if you have a seven-year-old who is struggling with big meltdowns, they're having a really hard time controlling their impulses and thinking logically and all of these things that we expect that we would start to see around age seven.

Instead of treating them the same as you would treat a seven-year-old who actually can control their impulses, can regulate their emotions, we might go back to some of those basic strategies that we're going to use with a five-year-old.

So a little bit more of the co-regulating, more of the coaching, more of the helping them get to the quiet space where they can, you know, take some deep breaths and be on their own, helping them by setting up the environment to help them with their impulse control.

So we might need to put more supports in place for these kids than their neurotypical peers.

And I think that this is really important to understand because often we just get frustrated or angry, and we say, "Well, you're seven, so you should be able to regulate your emotions.

You should be able to control your impulses.

You shouldn't be blurting out in class so much." But what we need to understand is that their brain is wired different.

So we need to work with the way that their brain is wired instead of against it and expecting things from our ADHD kids that they simply cannot do yet.

The hope is that they catch up over time, but we need to help them a little bit more, especially in these early years, with impulse control, planning, organization, and it's going to vary child to child.

So instead of asking ourselves or, or saying to ourselves like, "Why can't they just do this? All their peers know how to regulate their emotions.

All their peers don't start talking randomly during class," you know, we shift to what support might they need? Or what support might a child who is, you know, 30% younger than this or like two to three years behind this, like what support might they need? And start implementing that support so that we can help our child so that they can start to build that executive functioning and those skills, okay? So just very concretely, this might look like more co-regulation with them.

They might need a little bit more time.

They might need less busy activities, just like with your toddler, you know.

With like a younger...