Studies on children with ADD/LD who have grown into successful adults list a variety of characteristics and skills that are essential. They boil down to three essentials

1. Positive self-esteem
2. Effective support systems
3. Skills to set goals and cope with emotions.

In this post, let’s focus on the first element, positive self esteem.

Positive self-esteem –

Positive self-esteem involves self-awareness and self acceptance including one’s ADD/LD. This involves appreciating and being aware of one’s strengths and weaknesses and being accepting of both. It involves having the belief that one is capable and can solve and handle whatever problems come our way.

As a result of this basic belief, one also is persistent. One does not give up, one keeps trying.

A positive self-image can be trained. It requires a positive environment with lots of encouragement. It also requires the chance to succeed or fail and the encouragement to recover from mistakes

Effective support systems –

Effective support systems refers to the people in our lives who encourage us when we are down. It also involves people who help us compensate for our weaknesses or disabilities. This is the classic disorganized ADHD husband with an organized wife or the disorganized ADHD businessman with an organized secretary. Having these systems in place and knowing when to utilize them are important aspects of becoming a successful adult.

Skills to set goals and cope with emotions –

Children with ADD/LD need to learn how to set goals. That tendency for an ADD/LD child is to be overwhelmed by tasks. Whether it is a school term paper or cleaning the garage, they tend to have difficulties with setting appropriate goals, breaking these down on the subgoals and accomplishing the little bit at a time they need to feel successful.

They tend to look at it all as one big undifferentiated task and get overwhelmed. It’s vitally important that they are trained in breaking big projects down into little tasks. It’s also important that they learn to take credit for accomplishing little tasks. ADD/LD kids tend to be negative about themselves and their abilities. That is one of the reasons they tend to give up too easily. It takes conscious training to overcome this.

Coping with emotions involves the basics of stress management. One has to be aware of one’s responses to stress, be able to monitor them and have appropriate coping strategies. ADD/LD kids tend to not be aware of their emotions and tend to not have appropriate ways to cope with these emotions. Therefore, they tend to ping off the walls and then explode usually in anger. Awareness of emotions can be trained in. With young children, it initially involves the parent recognizing and identifying the child’s emotion. The parent also models acceptance and indicates appropriate coping strategies.

These are the basics of the three main goals for the parent of an ADD/LD child. Helping your child develop a positive self-image, both helping him develop and being part of his support system and coaching in the skills of goal setting and coping with stress and frustration. Keeping these in mind at all times will keep you an effective parent who will raise a successful adult.

In the years since my son was diagnosed with attention deficit disorder and I started specializing in diagnosing and treating both attention deficit disorder and learning disability, I have tried to find the principles and techniques that work.

Since I have limited frustration tolerance, I like things to be simple and direct.  I like value for money and I don’t like to waste any words.  I also think that focused planning with specific goals leads to the greatest chance of success.

Focused planning with specific goals is vitally important in dealing with ADD/LD kids.  They can be so disorganized that it’s catching.  It’s very easy to get tangled up in details and forget what your original purpose was.  Therefore, it’s important to know where you’re trying to go with this child.

It’s also important to remember that the goal is not to have the cleanest room on the block.  I’m continually amazed the parents spend so much time and energy on their child’s bedroom.  The goal is not now nor will it ever be having a clean bedroom.  The goal is having your child grow into an adult who can function effectively in the real world.

For you as parents to encourage this growth, you have to have the right goals.  Presumably, you want your child to be a successful adult.  For this to occur, you have to train in the skills needed to be successful.

As parents of attention-deficit-disorder (ADD) and/or learning-disabled (LD) children, we are so busy dealing with daily crises that we sometimes lose sight of what we’re trying to accomplish with our offspring. With all the hassles of getting up, getting off to school, getting books and homework assignments home and then getting them done, dealing temper tantrums and meltdowns, it sometimes seems that simple survival is the ultimate goal.

We lose sight of the fact that someday our child will be an adult. We’re so busy trying to make it through the day that we stop thinking about what kind of person we want them to be, what values we want them to have. We’re so drained that we don’t have the energy to think about the future. We tend to spend our time dealing with the present hassles, dealing with our children tactically, that is, trying to win each battle and not looking at the long-term goal.

As parents of ADD and LD children, we need to think strategically, to think about what kind of adults we are training on a day-to-day basis.

In my practice, I call this strategic parenting. By this term, I mean never doing anything on a day-to-day basis with your child without considering the ultimate outcome of parenting, the strategic outcome of parenting—namely, what kind of adult your child becomes. There are many theories of child-rearing, but most focus on short term obedience issues. They are, in a word, tactical. This is not a problem with most children. All people have a powerful drive to self-actualize and most children eventually realize that they are better off getting good grades in school and getting along with their parents.

However, this is not always the case with ADD/LD children. As many of us know and have experienced, these children have a highly developed ability to resist at extraordinary volume for extraordinary lengths of time. Therefore, parents have to resist the temptation to respond tactically and try to win the battle. They have to get outside of the emotional battle and think about the strategic goal: what value or personal characteristics are we trying to teach?

Think about what kind of adult you want your child to become. What kind of values do you want him/her to have? What beliefs? What personal characteristics?

Presumably, you want a person who is more than just obedient. Probably, you want a person who is enthusiastic, creative and feels good about her/himself. You want a person who is confident enough to make the most of his/her talents and abilities. There is more to life than just being compliant in school. There is more to life than just a clean room. As parents we have to hold the larger picture and work to teach our children.

At a conference in Washington, D.C. in 2000, one of the presenters (name is lost in the mists of time) reported on the characteristics of ADD and LD adults who were termed successful. These characteristics for successful adjustment to the adult world are a starting point as the goals of strategic parenting. These characteristics had nothing to do with how much education they had, how severe their disabilities were, how high their IQ was or how rich their parents were. The assets of successful ADD and LD adults are all psychological characteristics that have to do with making the most of your abilities.

These characteristics are:
1. Self-Awareness
2. Perseverance
3. Being Proactive
4. Having Emotional Stability
5. Being Able to Set Goals
6. Being able to appropriately use Support Systems

In other words, these successful people acknowledged and understood their disabilities, recognized when they would get in the way, used appropriate compensatory strategies to minimize the impact. Had learned to be good planners and set goals. Were persistent in getting to these goals and didn’t let emotion get in the way.

These characteristics are all learned. They can all be taught.

As parents of ADD/LD children we must think strategically about our children. We must learn to teach the characteristics that lead to successful adulthood. We must remember that psychological strength is the most important goal of parenting. Additionally, one of the side benefits of strategic parenting is that we can enjoy our children more because we have to appreciate and encourage their talents, their abilities and their uniqueness.

Good luck and never give up,
Terry

Welcome to terrygingrasphd.com. I will attempt to cover a variety of topics related to executive coaching, neuropsychology and behavioral medicine. Believe me there is a surprising amount of overlap among these areas. I hope it will be interesting to explore. terry 6.09.06