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Welcome to the Parenting Without Power Struggles podcast. I'm Susan Stiffelman, author of Parenting Without Power Struggles and Parenting with Presence. As a family therapist, teacher, and parent coach for over 40 years, I've helped thousands of families raise kids with more connection and ease. and fewer power struggles.

And I get to share some of what I've learned with you here. In this series we talk about real parenting struggles and practical ways to address them based on decades of experience and study in attachment theory, neuroscience, internal family systems, mindfulness, polyvagal theory, and of course decades of clinical practice.

You'll hear conversations with guests like Dan Siegel, Janet Lansbury, Mona Delahooke, Tina Bryson, Ned Hallowell, and many others, along with episodes where I answer questions from parents like you. At the heart of my work is a commitment to helping you be the calm, steady, loving, captain of the ship for your children and teens.

Managing dysregulation, your kids and your own, so that you can raise confident, resilient kids who feel safe, seen, and heard. Secure and open to your loving support. You can find out more about my work at SusanStiffelman.com where you can explore a library of masterclasses on everything from meltdowns and chores to helping anxious and sensitive children thrive along with lots of other wonderful parenting resources.

Now let's get started. If your child has ADHD, you already know it comes with struggles, like impulsivity, inattention, lack of focus, hyperactivity, but what if we flipped the script? What if we saw ADHD  as different brain wiring rather than a deficit? A brain that's creative and spontaneous and energetic and full of potential.

So today we're going to talk about that. We're going to talk about how to help your child manage life's day to day challenges, because there are many. Tom Hartman talks about ADD in the context of being a hunter brain in a farmer world, and I love that analogy so much. If you were meant to be a hunter, Then you would want to be highly distractible and impulsive and attracted to novelty.

So we need to help our kids manage the challenges that come with having that kind of brain but being in a world that values order and discipline and structure and putting your name in the top right hand corner of the paper and all those things.  So we're going to talk about that, how to help your kids build on their strengths and how to shift your mindset so that you can be the parent that they need.

Let's dive in.  First, let's talk about what ADHD really is.  It isn't just about being easily distracted or impulsive or hyperactive and backing up a little more, I just really don't like the label attention deficit disorder. People with ADHD, including me, do not have a deficit of attention. We have plenty of attention.

It's just that sometimes it's hard to harness it or direct it and particularly when our brain or our mind isn't stimulated or interested in whatever we're meant to be focusing on. Because  you could think of our brains as idling a little in a slower brainwave pattern unless we're engaged with the material.

So people with ADHD don't have a shortage of attention. It's a matter of waking up the part of the brain that has to be on task and focused when the material at hand isn't very stimulating.  It certainly is not a disorder. My life has been so much better because of my ADD, or what I call my ADD ish ness.

ADD, for lack of a better term, and hopefully a better term is coming, is really just about brains that work with information differently.  Kids or teens with ADHD often have trouble with executive function, which is the brain's ability to plan and organize and regulate emotions. But guess what?  The same traits that make life hard for them in a structured classroom setting can also Make them brilliant leaders and innovators and inventors, creators,  and that's the beauty of it.

Many ADHD kids are just incredibly creative. They think outside the box. They come up with original ideas. They see possibilities that others miss.  They can be passionate and hyper focused when they're interested in something. They just dive in with full intensity when given the opportunity, and they have a lot of energy.

Which, when you channel it, can turn them into fantastic athletes, or performers, or entrepreneurs. Our job as parents is not to fix our kids, it's to guide them in managing the challenges of being in a farmer world, while amplifying their strengths. What does it take to help a child with ADHD thrive?

First of all, structure. Lots of structure. ADHD brains thrive on routine. I'm not saying that they're stimulated by it, but it creates a container. that helps them get through the day more successfully. So you want to create predictable daily rhythms. There can be a morning checklist, after school checklist or outline, and visual schedules can be really helpful if they're very simple and clear.

Let your child participate in making those, and sometimes kids like to do the, represent various tasks with a little drawing so that they get to be a little bit creative.  Chunk down. I've always been a fan of this. When I worked with, I've worked with lots of kids in my career who had the label ADHD or ADD.

And one of the things I emphasized was breaking tasks down into small manageable steps because big tasks, especially when it comes to clean your room or do this project for school, they feel overwhelming to kids with ADHD or ADD. So it's better to say, what are five particular steps? Along the way that get you to a clean room, like put your toys in the bin, and then make your bed, taking things down and also chunking down time. So I've often had kids who were just overwhelmed by a large, answer these 25 math problems I would have them cover up a page and just answer the top row of five and then maybe take a one minute Break to jump up and down, or run around the yard, or do something, have a sip of water, to break it down, to chunk it down.

Externalized reminders. So kids with ADD often struggle with working memory.  So the memories should be sticky notes, or visual charts, and timers, alarms, things like that, that don't require them to keep track of time, because as we know, many people with ADD have a sort, a time blindness.

They distort how long things take. Or how long things should take, or did take, and especially the kids with the H, the ADHD, with hyperactivity, they need to move. So expect your kids to fidget. Don't force them to sit still, even, whether it's at the dinner table or while they're doing homework. A lot of kids will do better with a standing desk or one of the bouncy balls.

They do jumping jacks before they start their work.  And  emotional regulation support is really important because a lot of kids with ADHD ishness or ADD ishness,  their emotions come really fast and furious. There's a whole other, lots of classes I've done on my website that talk about mindfulness for kids and self regulation.

But suffice it to say, it's really important to help our kids by offering them our co regulated Calm State. Develop the tools and skills to manage the strong emotions that come their way.  And finally, acknowledge their effort. It's so easy for parents to have their eye on the prize and not acknowledge or recognize or validate the small steps.

Wow, you stayed focused for eight minutes. You were completely on task doing that. That's fantastic. I'm really impressed. Now, you don't need to praise your kids up and down and sideways. I'm not a huge believer in praise, but certainly validating or  acknowledging or being Authentically impressed if you see your child's made an extra effort.

There's nothing wrong with sharing that with you. I'm inspired by you Honey, how you kept your head down and you kept at it when I know this was something hard for you to be interested in how did that feel?  I hope you're feeling some degree of pride in the effort that you made so you're helping them become more aware of the progress that they're making, because a lot of kids with ADHD are overly aware of all the ways that they disappoint others, or they fall short, and it can lead to, actually, significant depression in kids, and anxiety, because it just feels like they don't, they can't quite keep up, and if you have that experience day in and day out of being a disappointment, or falling short, or not doing something right, or forgetting something, over time, that has a pretty big effect.

Diminishing impact or depressing. I don't want to use the word, but it can be depressing for a child to feel like they're never going to quite make it. So help them start to notice for themselves.  The small or great successes and improvements and progress that they've made.  So flipping the script, it's really important that we focus on and help our child become aware of what they're great at.

And first of all, we know creative thinkers, they often excel in art and music and storytelling and problem solving. So give them opportunities to express themselves in those ways. They can be very hyper focused. Which of course can be super annoying. I know I have that tendency sometimes.

And, lose track of time and whoever's around you and the dinner burning on the stove. But, it also can be a tremendous gift when kids can laser focus on things that they love. We want to acknowledge that and help them use it rather than be used by it. One of the things I love so much about people with ADHD is that they're risk takers and they are innovators.

So they're spontaneous and adventurous.  They're willing to try new things and it is important, of course, because of this attraction to novelty that we help them learn how to balance that risk taking  tendency with being  safe. And the other thing about kids with ADD or people with ADD, ADHD, not always, some are quite introverted, but many are our natural storytellers and entertainers and leaders.

So they need. Those outlets to build up their social confidence, because sometimes we know they can be a little bit, in your face, a little, insinuating themselves into conversations or blurting things out and interrupting, but helping them develop their social strength, building on their natural empathy and awareness of others can be a great gift.

When a child believes that I'm capable, I'm not broken, I don't need fixing, these are the kids who grow into confident, thriving adults.  I so wish that I had known I had ADHD growing up.  It didn't, I didn't actually get diagnosed until I was in my early 40s. And it was life changing, and to be honest, when I first got the diagnosis and started reading everything I could get my hands on,  I went through a grieving process.

I actually had some tears because I felt like, gosh, if my parents had only known, if they had only known and helped me cultivate my strengths rather than me feeling, there was something wrong with me. Even as an adult, I would go to other people's homes and see how orderly it was and organized they were and I would come back to my house and look around and think, gosh, what's wrong with me?

So now I've, learned so, so many tools and tips. In fact, you can go to my website. There's other classes I've done. Gosh, I've done classes with Ned Hallowell and with Melissa Orlove for Parents who have ADHD, raising kids. It's become really a subspecialty of mine, but largely because I know what it felt like to be a child and teenager and adult without understanding the beautiful and curious ways that my mind worked relative to some of the people I saw around me who seemed So, so much more together.

So I urge you to learn more about ADHD  and practice some of the things that I've suggested today. Just giving yourself the gift of  seeing your child through the lens of their  unique wonderfulness  and of course then conveying that to them so that they can internalize that feeling. Children take so many cues from us.

They watch us very carefully. How should I feel about things? They watch our facial expressions, they hear our words, but they mostly take in kind of the unspoken attitudes and postures that we have toward events including the things that they do or they don't do. So the more we can better understand what ADHD is and what it isn't,  at least until there's a better term to describe the brains of these amazing humans that make such a big difference in the world and keep us moving forward.

The more we understand and embrace it, the better we'll be able to help our children see their gifts and celebrate them.  I hope what I have shared has resonated with you in some way, and maybe not just for your child, but maybe it applies to you as well.  So as we wrap up, think about two or three things I've said that you might want to put into practice this week, and  remember,  no matter how busy life gets, Look for those moments of sweetness and joy.

Stay well, take care, and I'll see you next time.