ADHD Parenting Tips – Part Two – ADHD and Emotional Regulation: building skills

In part one of the ADHD parenting blog, I talked about how Compassion and Curiosity are so helpful in addressing difficult behaviours, and building regulation skills (plus, importantly, building connection). Some key ideas for this part two of the blog are Consistency, Communication, and Collaboration. (and an honourable mention for Chunking).

Parenting Strategies for ADHD

Effective parenting techniques can make a significant difference in managing ADHD-related behavioural issues. (Of course, this is true for non ADHD as well – positive parenting is just even more key with ADHD). It’s estimated that ADHD kids will have heard anything up to 20,000 more negative comments by the time they are teens, when contrasted with the feedback / comments heard by their neurotypical peers.

So how we Communicate with our ADHD children is important.

Using positive reinforcement and praise to recognise and encourage good behaviour is particularly important; a great way to do this is to ‘catch’ your child doing the right thing and comment on it.

For example, if you see your kid taking turns well with a sibling, say something like ‘oh I love seeing how well you two take turns, and how much fun you’re having’. Use your own words and your way of speaking; the key is to take time to communicate your honest feelings of appreciating the good stuff!

Clearly Communicate Boundaries and Expectations

While setting clear, consistent boundaries, and consequences for inappropriate behaviour, is also very important, these need to be appropriate and achievable. For kids with ADHD many rules / boundaries are not ‘set and forget’; your child will in all probability need multiple reminders to help them in the early stages, plus occasional reminders even when things have been going well, if there’s tiredness, change in routines etc. Some key things here:

1.     Any rules or boundaries that you set need to be appropriate to your particular child, as kids with ADHD have a developmental lag in the neurodevelopment needed for many tasks of executive function, including memory and organisation, and self-regulation. This lag is generally recognised to be around three years, so things that their older sibling could do at age 7, for example, may not be achievable for your ADHDer until around age 10.

2.     Pick your battles! What are the one or two things that will make the most difference. Often referred to as ‘predictable problems’; these are the things that come up over and over and lead to that persistent ‘alert’ where you find that you tend to be braced and ready for conflict. (This is essentially chunking; not trying to do everything at once; rather breaking things down into more manageable chunks).

3.     Consistency – keeping the focus on the couple of key areas you’re working on, proactively notice and reward behaviours that are heading in the right direction. Keep communicating and collaborating with your child when things don’t go quite right. Once everyone is calm, talk through what worked, what didn’t, what could be different next time, and ask how you can help with that.

4.     Keep your focus on positives; on the actions for your child to take, rather than what not to do. We tend to say things like ‘don’t slurp your food’, ‘don’t leave that lying there’. These can sound negative and punitive, and they’re unhelpful as they don’t really tell your kid what you’d like them to do instead. Word things in terms of the actions that you do want; for example ‘please put your rubbish in the bin’, ‘please put your schoolbag in it’s spot’.

Collaborate with your child

Get your child’s input; remember that ADHD has many positives, including our lateral thinking superpower. Brainstorm ideas with your kid, get as much of their input as possible and try to find the ways that encourage that input. I generally ask my ADHDer to have a think and come back to me; we mostly then just chat through ideas, as that talking together is great connection for us. We do sometimes find a whiteboard helpful to keep track of things or get inspiration, and we also sometimes write ideas up on the mirror. Whatever way your child works best on generating ideas, try to tune into that, and they’re likely to come up with some great solutions. Which they are then more likely to put into practice as they came up with it.

Pre-empt ‘failure’ (setbacks, lessons, experience etc - find a growth word to use) It’s also important for both you and your child to understand that if you try an idea and it doesn’t really work as planned, that’s still been a positive step. You’ve gathered more data and either ruled that option out, or recognise an opportunity or need for tweaking. It can be helpful to pre-empt this by having a main idea and a back up plan. Also sharing with your child your stories of times that you’ve tried something that hasn’t gone to plan, and how you either then learned from it, or perhaps didn’t learn from it, and wish you had known a better way. Again, this is continuing that building of connection and communication, and also a way to remind us adult ADHDers that all is not lost if things don’t quite go according to plan.

Putting it all together

Here’s an example from our family that hopefully links together and illustrates some of the above points.

Getting out of the house in the morning used to be a big issue for us, and definitely a predictable problem. We generally managed to get to school and work on time, but not without frustration, anger, yelling, tears, and ultimately no one having a great start to the day.

While we were technically ticking the box of being on time; my intent was more focussed on everyone having a good start to their day, and with everything they need for their day to go well. Not just things like remembering water bottles (although that too!) but also having had time for proper breakfast, and having remembered homework, packed sports gear, or whatever, and not feeling rushed and frazzled.

Working backwards from that intent (a good start to the day), one of the chunks was simply the kids not being able to find things quickly in the morning. I realised that part of the issue was a ‘hang-over’ from the end of the previous school day, when the kids would get home, drop their bags, and get straight onto screens.

A few days of me repeating ‘put your shoes away’, ‘empty your lunch bag’ etc didn’t work, so I talked with the kids about what would work better; suggesting things like starting the reminders in the car on the way home, putting tasks on a whiteboard etc, and then together we came up with having a visual right where they would see it. I made a checklist with pictures/emojis to represent the after-school tasks, and put it right above their usual screen spot. Each day after school I then just had to direct them to that, rather than running through each thing and repeating myself over and over (leaving everyone cranky).

That one chunk made packing bags and getting ready in the morning easier, as things were in right places. We’ve revisited and refined once or twice since; putting the list in a more prominent place once they got so used to seeing it that they stopped noticing it, and building on our organisation by figuring out better places to put things away, that make it that bit easier.  

And a final one on communication – validate their feelings.

When you’re asking for cooperation but they say, for example, ‘tidying up is soooo boring’ (I mean it is, right!) acknowledge that! ‘Yes, it can be boring, I totally get that you feel that way! It’s boring for me too! Then redirect to a manageable chunk, for example ‘let’s pick up 5 things and put them away’, ‘pick up anything in your room that is rubbish and put it in the bin’, etc.

There are so many more parenting tips and ideas I would love to cover; it’s been hard to keep it (relatively) short. I’m very conscious I haven’t totally covered coping skills for emotional regulation - more the focus in this blog is on getting ahead of some of the triggers that lead to dysregulation. So a future blog will look more at coping skills; things like breathing exercises, grounding/getting present, and movement.

Please get in touch with any specific areas you’d like help with, or tips you’d like to share! Thanks for reading.