This is a Global Player original podcast. Hey, it's Katie. And Sam. And welcome to this bite-sized episode of You're Wrong About ADHD.
Over the summer holidays, we are bringing you short and sweet clips from some of our favourite conversations. Today, we're hearing from Dr Joanne Reardon all about ADHD and parenting. Yeah, it was a really lovely conversation. She had all kinds of tips for parents who have ADHD, who might be parenting kids with ADHD, things like self-awareness, recognising your own patterns, but also a really positively warm and encouraging reminder that ADHD can bring creativity to parenting.
We are empathic and we bring energy. Let's get into it. We wanted to dig a little bit deeper into what that relationship is, outside school actually, between ADHDers and their children, some of whom obviously might have been diagnosed with ADHD as well. And I would like to start with the guilt.
It's something Sam and I talk about a lot. The guilt of being a parent with ADHD and the mess that you can make of it sometimes because of the challenges ADHD brings. The emotional dysregulation, messiness, being forgetful, all of these different things. They are huge challenges in our personal lives.
My God, when it comes to raising children, you make a pig at the job parenting sometimes. You feel like you do. Absolutely. And I think, you know, it brings up a whole new challenges again, doesn't it?
Because you're in a new context, parent, you've got all these different responsibilities that you can't have previously. You've got so many more activities. Less downtime to regulate yourself. Less time for your own need.
And suddenly, you face this new challenge of parenting at the same time. I think, really, you sort of hit the ground running because, obviously, babies are unpredictable. They take all your time. You're really tired.
So, those ADHD difficulties are often exacerbated. And I think, really, right from the start of parenting, you know, we present those difficulties and it is a real challenge. And, you know, it does bring up those guilty feelings as well. How much of an effect do those issues have on the children, do you think?
You know, does ADHD make someone a worse parent, do you think? I would say definitely not. But I think it blends with challenges and strengths. I think, you know, the main strength is often when I see parents and we're talking about their child who typically either has an ADHD diagnosis themselves or would like to meet that criteria because, you know, often ones and families, parents talk about the guilt that they feel that perhaps, for genetic reasons, their child's got the ADHD.
And I often say, actually, you know, you're our best resource in this system, in the child's life because we can learn from what's been useful to you. We can normalise ADHD for a child by the fact that it's already in their family. We can look at what's worked for you and really help the child understand themselves. And that's a massive benefit.
But, on the flip side, I think the main difficulty for parents who are ADHD as themselves is that they can often feel less regulated and more dysregulated because, you know, kids are chaotic themselves, busy. And they throw up all sorts of extra challenges that we won't for living. So we have, like, you know, we're out of the busy, so are they, and what can happen is you get this dysregulation. And what we now know from, like, brain research is that, you know, this co-regulation of children is a two-way process.
So if we're calm, then there are literally neurons in our children's brain that borrow that calm and it helps to calm them down and manage and regulate their emotions. So I think that's one thing as an ADHD parent we need to be particularly careful of is, you know, how do we manage our emotions and help ourselves stay regulated so that our children can borrow our calm when possible. It's not realistic for anyone all the time. That's so interesting.
So it's about not wicking them up. It's about learning to calm down, to be quieter, to be more present, but without having to be jokey and make a big time and dance about it. It's just that if we're stressed, then they're going to feed off that stress. Or if we respond to their kind of dysregulation bucket and irritate and stress ourselves, it feeds it up higher.
So it's about how do we, in those moments of stress, make sure that we're really consciously thinking about how do we maintain our calm so that they can borrow our calm. And I think that's where it can be trickier, just because of our difficulties as an ADHD to think about. But if we're aware of that and we're consciously trying to think about, like, this is a stressful point, like, do my deep breathing, like, leave it as, you know, don't get too entrenched in the problem, I keep myself calm, if need to leave the room for two minutes, and they come back and calm my child, you know, once we know this and we can consciously put steps in place, it's easier. But that takes learning, and no one can do that all the time.
That's really interesting, because what we were talking about earlier was self-awareness and being a big part of us managing our ADHD. And certainly for me, you know, just the noise and the movement that my children bring, some days that is the chaos I can't cope with. And what I was talking about is I've learned to sort of say, if I can get a balance in myself, if I can start to manage my ADHD, it means that when I'm then faced with a situation which is potentially dysregulating with my children, I've got more space in the tank to deal with it. One of the other things I wanted to ask you about is, it's about being present, it's being, you know, it can be quite a big challenge.
Definitely, and I think that's also, you know, in today's world, the difficulty lots of parents feel even without, you know, ADHD, but it's specifically, you know, the challenge for us to have is even more. And like you said, it's about learning yourself, so I think that too, but I know that things like being out in nature with my family, A, it's not easy to talk along on my phone, B, the sort of from the sensory side, I find it much more grounding to be out in nature and so on. So trying to find those activities, we make sure we do like the family nature walk once a week, because it's somewhere where I'm less potentially in my head, in the same quality time, my children's noise is less irritating when there's like, you know, builds around them or they're not wrecking myself further, and therefore, you know, it's thinking about how can we create an environment that is enabling versus causing more difficulties. Actually, I really enjoy spending time with my children, but you know, it's all about getting a balance.
And I think one of the things for me is throwing myself into it and saying, what I'm doing today is playing with my children. What I'm doing right now is whatever task is there or eating with them. It's just sort of, it's being present in what I'm supposed to be doing. And also, being a parent with ADHD can make that a lot of fun to be around.
You know, I would argue, I know you, Sam. I know you're good fun to be around. I've worked with him for decades. And I know, not necessarily talking about my own parenting style, but I know friends of mine who have ADHD who are also parents.
That is a wonderful characteristic often, isn't it? It's spontaneous, there's energy, there are new ideas rushing in all the time. And it can make that relationship enormously positive and fun. And I do think there are upsides to being a parent with ADHD.
Absolutely, I totally agree. On that energy side, when you're having that really end of the day, having a tendency to be more creative. In fact, also things like, you know, affects the children quite hard because children are still learning skills. And, you know, we have that empathy in terms of some things that are still quite challenging for us.
Yeah, we're problem solvers. We know how to kind of come up with solutions for things. Yeah, we do solutions and think outside the box. So there's a lot of strength about, like you said, that self-awareness, also being self-aware of our strengths.
And so I think what you're saying, Sam, that sometimes some ADHD have a tendency to be quite hard on themselves. So you also remind yourself of those strengths of positive that come in because that's absolutely true, you know? Ah, so good. Loved hearing again from Dr.
Joanne Rian. If you enjoyed listening to this bite-sized episode and want more, you can find the full episode linked in the show notes or many more episodes like this one on the podcast feed. And if you want to keep up to date with everything we're doing, do check us out on Instagram and TikTok. Just search You're Wrong About ADHD on your socials.
Thank you so much for listening and we'll see you again soon. You're Wrong About ADHD is made in association with Apex Content Ventures. This is a Global Player Original Podcast. This is a Global Player Original Podcast.