7. ADHD: Now Understand Your Child's Behavior

I recently presented the importance of formally monitoring your behaviors and emotions as parents of an ADHD child. Most people don’t pay much attention to their own behavior and especially to their emotional behavior until things get way out of control. What we need to do is begin a more intentional process of observation of our emotions and behaviors, so that we can make changes and improve our lives and the lives of our children.. 

We are all in control of our emotions. None of us are helpless victims of our adrenal glands. We have consistent emotions because we have consistent patterns of thinking that lead to those consistent emotions. 

I also shared the notion that everybody has a favorite bad emotion -  the emotion that they will tend to feel most often, sometimes even in emotionally neutral situations. The important information to gather from self-monitoring is what is your own tendency. If you know what your emotional response is likely to be, you can maintain better control in situations in which your ADHDer may be out of control.

Now let’s consider your ADHD child and his/her emotions. We know that emotional dysregulation is a characteristic of ADHD, but we should be aware that losing control is different from a temper tantrum.  Temper tantrums are usually described as angry outbursts, but they are frequently a product of frustration, of being overwhelmed or feeling hopeless or helpless. There can also be situations in which your ADHDer can be feeling anxious, sad or depressed.

We know that ADHDers get a lot of criticism and negative comments. One study indicated that by age 12, the average ADHDer has gotten 20,000 negative comments. Another study indicates that ADHDers get 70 negative comments per day. Whatever the situation is for your child, it’s safe to assume that he or she gets a lot of criticism. Decreasing the amount of negative comments you give your child can go a long way toward improving his or her emotions and behavior.

We still have a lot of people who don’t “believe” in ADHD. I was reading an article the other day written by an elder statesman pediatrician expressing his concern that so many more cases of ADHD are being diagnosed! When I first started practicing in my current home town, there was a pediatrician who refused to treat ADHD, claiming there wasn’t any such thing. This was frustrating to me for many reasons, but I kept imagining how many of his young patients were never getting treatment because of his outdated beliefs. This is frustrating to me as a neuropsychologist, a professional who diagnoses ADHD and as the parent of children with ADHD, but it is not that rare, especially in the current political environment, to have people who refuse to believe the science.

It is important for you as parents of ADHD children to be knowledgeable about behavioral monitoring. You have to learn to discriminate anger and temper from anguish and loss of control.  Every time your child yells and screams does not necessarily mean he or she is angry. You have to be able to respond appropriately and not make the situation worse. You have to be able to recognise what is occurring with your child. It’s important for you to be able to see the patterns in how your child is responding. Do the tantrums occur at the same time of day, the same day of the week, after a certain event occurs. Do different events trigger different emotions? Different lengths of out-of-control behavior?

It may take some consistent practice before you get comfortable and accurate with monitoring both your emotions and your child’s emotions. The information you get will be valuable. Also when you start doing this, be discreet. Mark your ratings after the interaction, not during. After a while, you should see some patterns that you can then change. 

Hopefully you learned a lot about yourself and your emotional responses with your own self-monitoring experience. If you didn’t bother, I’d invite you to reconsider and start now. You’ll learn a lot that can help your child, but you’ll also learn a lot about yourself. This is a technique I usually prescribe to my patients and they usually report valuable learning and information acquired.

Please send me your reactions to this exercise. What did you discover about your child’s emotions and behavior? Does this help you?

Thanks for reading and let's make the world safe for ADHD!

Visit my website at terrygingrasphd.com to learn more about Dr. G and my ADHD coaching services. 

Feel free to give me a call  to see if coaching is something you want to do. 

DrG