6. ADHD Parenting: Understand Your Own Behavior First

I recently wrote about the parent being the only part of the parent-ADHD child relationship that you have control over. Like most parents, when my ADHDers were young, my parenting style was just reactive. Usually one of them would do something and I would just react. Sometimes things improved and sometimes they got a lot worse. I didn’t know much about ADHD and I didn’t know much about how I was responding. Was I always calm? Was I angry? Frustrated? Sad? Anxious? And what was his or her response to my different emotions? Truthfully, I wasn’t even sure what my emotions usually were when I was reacting.

Believe it or not, most people are not really aware of their emotions. I remember one particular patient in a cardiac rehabilitation program who was totally unaware of his emotional responses. He swore that he was calm all the time and never got angry. This was a little unbelievable. He was a retired fighter pilot who appeared to be stressed and brittle. 

At the time, I was teaching a stress management workshop for patients at a large AIr Force hospital. We would routinely have our patients spend the first week after enrollment in the program doing self-monitoring -  tracking their emotions for the entire week. They would track the emotion, its strength and the situation they were in at the time. They also tracked their “self-talk,” the thoughts they were having during these emotional times.

So, the next week our retired fighter pilot reported with some amazement that he had been angry, frustrated and stressed the entire week. He was absolutely surprised that he spent so  much of his time being stressed out without being aware of it. This was, of course, contributing to his heart condition. It also points out that we frequently are unaware of our emotions.

Your ADHD child will react strongly to your negative emotions. They get an incredible amount of criticism in the course of  their lives. Some estimates say an ADHDer gets more than 70 critical comments a day. This leads to be overly sensitive to any negative comments

You as the parent need to have more awareness of your emotions than people who parent neurotypical (non-ADHD) children. 

The first thing you need to do to self-monitor your behavior is to have some objective information about your emotions. People tend to have “favorite bad emotions” that they have most often. And frequently they are not aware of these emotions. So even if you think you’re psychologically aware,consider periodically doing some formal self-monitoring.

It’s not complicated to do: 

1. Use a notebook or something else to write on like a notecard or your phone

2. Record the emotion. Angry, sad, anxious…. Add more emotions if you like.

3. Report how strong the emotion is on a 10-point scale, with 10 being the highest.

4. Brief word or two describing the situation, like “homework”

5. Record your child’s emotional reaction on a 10-point scale.

The next step is to look at your self-monitoring for patterns. Do  you have a favorite bad emotion? What about the strength of the emotions? What was your child’s response? Any surprises?

It may take some consistent practice before you get comfortable and accurate with self-monitoring. 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. This will help you learn to control your emotions when dealing with your ADHD child.  Eventually, you will find that his or her behavior improves dramatically. 

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

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.