8. ADHD Parenting: Putting It All Together

Understanding emotions in both yourself as a parent and in your ADHD child will help you shape and improve behaviors. In the long term, you can improve your ADHD child’s behavior and your family life, and set your child up for future success. 

I previously spoke about the basics of making behavioral observations about emotions. This is a technique that is used in most scientific research and specifically in behavioral psychology. You have now done preliminary observations on yourself and your ADHDer. This is something that you should routinely do and you will find that it gets easier and you get better at applying these techniques and sharpening your observational skills.

Ideally, you as the parent know your favorite bad emotion - the emotion you are most likely to feel when things are not going well. If you're still not sure of your favorite bad emotion, have your spouse do the observation for a week or two. You, of course, do the same for your spouse. It is sometimes difficult to be self-aware, but identifying your favorite bad emotion is important because it allows you to know what to guard against. 

Probably the most common emotion for males to have as a favorite bad emotion is ANGER. Anger is the emotion that is most difficult to control. Once you are angry, it is hard to back off from anger and become calm and in control. Like all things, the more you practice,the better you get at moderating your emotions.

Another frequent bad emotion is ANXIETY. Anxiety often occurs when parents feel inadequate and powerless and don't understand ADHD very well. My wife and I had our first ADHD child before ADHD was a psychological diagnosis in the diagnostic and statistical manual. So we were totally “making it up” as we went along in dealing with our ADHD child. On top of that I was a young newbie psychologist - I felt like I should know what was going on with my child, but I surely didn't. Many parents of ADHD children feel overwhelmed especially with temper tantrums. They frequently fear that since this child is out of control now, he or she will always be out of control and will end up in jail because he or she can't control themselves. It is important to keep reminding ourselves that now is not the time to worry about his or her future.

GUILT is another frequent bad emotion of ADHD parents because it's very easy to feel that it must be your fault that this child is having uncontrollable temper tantrums. You feel like you must have done something wrong raising him that you're having to deal with the situation now. Again, the time to entertain these thoughts is not when you are in the midst of dealing with a temper tantrum. Children will often also feel guilt because they think they can’t do anything right.

Probably the last of the favorite bad emotions is SADNESS - sometimes to the point of depression. This is also a result of feeling inadequate and unable to handle the situation. The feelings of inadequacy and helplessness frequently lead to sadness and sometimes can lead to clinical depression. The parent feels “I'm supposed to raise this child and I don't know what I'm doing and so I must be a bad person.” The ADHD child might also feel sadness because they think they are always messing things up.

Emotions are very complex and cause all sorts of difficulties. Most of the time, we prefer to ignore emotions,which of course leads to them building up and then feeling like we can't control them at all.

You also have had a chance to make observations on your child. You first have to accept the idea that temper tantrums aren't necessarily just caused by anger and so you need to do your observations with an open mind. You'll frequently find that rather than being angry, your child is just frustrated or feeling helpless or feeling a high level of anxiety. The important thing to remember is that it is not always anger and it is not a result of bad parenting and it is not willful behavior. Your ADHD child is in a very frustrating situation in a society and in school systems that he has to work in that are not designed for his mind or his brain. And you have to keep reminding yourself that it is because of a neurologic condition, it is not being willful, it is not because he's a budding juvenile delinquent, it is not that he's trying to get back at his parents. You have a child who has difficulties with emotional regulation who is in situations in school, with other children, even in his own family, with people who  don't exactly understand what's going on with him and his ADHD. This is likely to be frustrating and it is likely to lead to feeling powerless and helpless. And the more he or she tries to establish control, the more the situation or the system tends to fight him and cause more problems.

So it is important for you as the adults in the situation to, first of all,  have good control over your emotions and comfort level with your emotions.  You have to get past the anger or other bad emotions that crop up,  and get to the underlying causes of what is going on with your child and his or her behavior. Behavioral observation is a big help in gaining this understanding. Behavioral observation is not easy and it is not something that most of us have much experience with, but you can get quite accomplished at it if you keep practicing these techniques. You'll find that you are able to identify more variations in your child's emotional responses than just anger and outrage, and that will help you be able to be objective and apply some of the other techniques that are important for helping an ADHD child grow into a successful adult.