Dr G's ADHD Chat

In my experience, the most usual family structure is some number of children with ADHD and one parent with ADHD and one neurotypical parent. In my practice, most of the time the neurotypical parent was the Wife and the husband was the ADHDer. Obviously there are no rules. In my own case, I’m the husband and my wife has the ADHD. It’s easy when you’re the neurotypical parent to get a little overwhelmed from time to time. All the energy, all the emotions and all the noise and the argufrments can all be occasionally overwhelming. I’ll talk about some things you can do to be more comfortable and last longer, some from my clinical experience and some from my personal experience.

Your ADHD child faces a world that wasn’t designed for him/her. Your ADHDer will find increasing difficulties as the pressure to perform increases as he/she gets older. The key to getting through all the criticism and negative feedback is having a support system he/she can trust and count on. You, as the parent have a difficult tightrope to walk to set limits but also to keep your child’s trust. I’ll be discussing this balancing act in some detail.

ADHD children frequently have difficulties completing tasks when told to do so. With their difficulties with working memory and executive functioning they frequently forget steps in tasks like getting ready for bed, getting up in the morning, and getting ready for school. Routines are important in all our lives. Once established, we follow them without having to make a conscious effort. A routine practiced consistently becomes a habit which doesn’t require thought or planning. The trick is it takes a little longer for and ADHDer to develop a habit so we have to add another procedure I call “externalizing the executive. “ For example for getting ready for bed have a checklist that is in a strategic location where it can be easily seen. The ADHDer has to mark the checklist list as every step is completed. This can be done in a variety of ways such using a grease pencil to mark the checklist that is in a document protector or you can buy the fun checklist from Easy Daysies that has magnets you move when the task is completed. Eventually the routines become habits and become ingrained so your child doesn’t have to think about or remember the routine. It’s automatic.

While treatment for ADHD, especially medication is seen as one of the most effective treatments in all of psychiatry, a surprising 80% of all patients quit within a year. If it’s such a wonderful and successful treatment, why do so many discontinue treatment. I’ll discuss this situation in some detail. In case you’re wondering, my own son discontinued medication. His mother and I loved it when he was taking his meds. He was so much calmer and easier to be around. He was distressed and disturbed by the side effects of the medication. We had a severe shortage of psychiatrists in our area and our G>P. Was in over his head and didn’t know of other options.

The thing that ADHD parents in my private practice were most concerned about was their child’s temper tantrums. I agree that these displays of anger were sometimes scary and some parents were thinking their child’s temper tantrums might have a major diagnosis like Bipolar disorder or even Schizophrenia. Temper tantrums are upsetting but they are more complicated than just anger. I’m going to discuss the more complicated explanation which involves something called Rejection Sensaitive Dysphoria. This is a recent way of looking at anger in ADHDers. It suggests that the anger is a result of the feeling of being constantly criticized and feeling inadequate. It’s a display of frustration and fear but not really anger.

Last week we discussed summer as a time of some trials and tribulation when your child could totally fall out of all those patterns of behavior that took so long to establish during the school year.I’ m going to present summer as the ideal time for you to observe your child’s strengths and help develop them in practical, applied situations. This is also and ADHDers preferred way to learn and experience life.For instance, you could teach the importance of geometry with some simple carpentry or some agronomy and chemistry with gardening. This is also a good time to develop and encourage strengths such as athletics , music, art and even get some experience with an actual job.

Summer causes a lot of questions and difficulties for ADHD parents. Just when you’ve got a routine established with school, now school is ending and you have to establish a new routine. In the next few episodes I’ll explore the difficulties and explain something’s I recommend you implement based on my experience both as a psychologist and as a parent of two ADHD kids.

ADHDers, both parents and adults with ADHD will frequently blame lack of willpower when they have any difficulties secondary to ADHD. When they procrastinate, when they forget about doing something, when they fail to complete a task on time they blame inadequate willpower and berate themselves. This totally ignores the fact that ADHD is a neurologic difference that appears to be cause by inadequate neurotransmitter production. In short, you can’t will your nervous system to produce more dopamine. You have to figure out ways to accomplish tasks with your ADHD brain, not a neurotypical brain, but the one you were.issued at conception. In this episode I’ll discuss this issue further and discuss a few of the ways to get your ADHD brain to help you get the job done.

We members of the ADHDer world are used to spending most of our time and energy with the negatives of ADHD-the temper tantrums, the “lost”homework, the “I forgots”, the dreaded morning getting ready for school on time crunch and the teacher conferences and so much more. But it’s important for us parents to recognize enjoy and praise the strengths that our ADHDer displays. This allows us to develop trust and resilience.

Parents of ADHD children need to have 3 very important skills-resilience, Intention and self awareness. Resilience makes it possible for you to come back after a bad day and learn from it. Intention so you can plan ahead and avoid many of the problem situations. Finally you have to be self-aware.both the . You have to know your strengths and weaknesses and demonstrate to your ADHDer how to handle the good and the bad.

If you are a neurotypical married to a spouse with ADHD, this show is for you. Be married to an ADHDer requires a special kind of patience and acceptance. I have been married for over 50 years and only recently has my spouse come to the conclusion that she, like 2 of her siblings has ADHD. She also has a family history of multiple ADHD relatives. We got married before ADHD was a diagnosis. I was attracted to her energy and spirit and although I knew she had some problems getting up for early morning classes, I nothing that particularly worried me. I’m not going to go through my whole marriage, we’re still together. I’m going to discuss some of the adjustments the neurotypical parent has to make as well as some of the adjustment the ADHD parent has to make. There will be some days you feel like you have an extra kid and a lot more days when you’re excited an appreciative of your spouse’s energy and enthusiasm.

It’s not easy having a child with ADHD, it’s not easy being a person with ADHD. How successfully we adapt to ADHD has to do with our attitude towards our situation. You have to accept that it’s up to you to adapt and adjust to your situation. You don’t get a free pass because you and/or your child have a brain that wasn’t designed for our current society. You can get accommodations, but those are only slight adjustemnts. They don’t guarantee that you’ll pass the course or get the promotion. Your attitude is all important in your  and your child’s adaptation. Again resilience is everything. You have to look at your situation as another case in which you have to do the best you can.

Coaching is a system. Of helping people improve their performance that is particularly effective for ADHD. It is action-oriented and oriented to improving performance immediately. It is not involved in analyzing the past or past accidents or injuries that explain current emotions or behavior. It also is more egalitarian and the client has more say in the direction treatment takes. I’ll cover this and a bit more in this podcast.

After several sessions governing various aspects of employment throughout life for ADHDers. This is for parents of ADHDers and adult ADHDers trying to figure out where to focus their efforts in terms of getting employed, being relatively satisfied with the employment and being able to perform up to standards despite their ADHD.

Another in our series on the best jobs for people with ADHD. This time we’re discussing Jobs that help and ADHDer generate more dopamine because they are so detail-oriented and so structured. This means that mistakes are immediately noted and correction is required also immediately.

In this episode in our series on the best jobs for ADHDers, we’re covering jobs that demand attention and boost dopamine because they are naturally intense. These are jobs that don’t allow for slow reaction time or indecision. I’ll cover some of these jobs and why they’re good for ADHDers

Ideal jobs for ADHDers have many different characteristics. Today I’ll be discussing jobs that allow a lot of independent action. ADHDers don’t typically do well in overconrolled environments unless there is a lot of intensity. They tend to be mavericks that like to follow their own lead so they have problems when the job structure requires obedience.

We have been discussing the ideal jobs for ADHDers. We’ve established that high intensity jobs work well because the intensity stimulates dopamine production in the ADHD brain. Today I’ll be discussing jobs that work for ADHDers because they are so structured that any deviation is not possible. This causes tension that also stimulates dopamine.

`One of the big concerns ADHD parents have is whether or not their child will be able to find employments as adults. I just returned from a podcasting conference and about 70% of the participants had ADHD. Does this mean podcasting in particular and entrepreneurship is ideal for our ADHD children. The answer is perhaps. Entrepreneurship is ideal in that there is no boss to please but there is also nobody to keep him or her from making impulsive decisions that may put the business in trouble. I’ll discuss some of the other considerations about the appropriateness of entrepreneurship for ADHDers.

When my ADHDer was struggling with school amongst other things, I worried about how he would be ale to fit into society? What kind of work could he do? I did a lot of research on that one and then he picked a career himself dealing with crystals, gemstones and jewelry design. I’m going to cover some of the things to consider in terms of employment.

Evaluating ADHD is a complicated procedure that requires a lot of experience mainly because there is not a single instrument that can determine ADHD. This leaves the evaluator with having to rule out the other diagnoses that can be confused with ADHD like anxiety disorder, learning disability and bipolar disorder. There are some instruments called continuous performance test that are good measures of the attention part of the ADHD spectrum. Bottom line is your friendly eighborhood neuropsychologist needs to have some experience because there is not just one test that gives you your answer.

ADHDers have a lot of difficulties adjusting to a world that doesn’t understand them. It’s even worse if the ADHDer doesn’t understand him or herself. Self-esteem tends to plummet. It’s not incidental that one of the first books on ADHD was titled “You mean I’m not Lazy, Crazy or Stupid.” This ls the view that ADHDers tend to develop of themselves. Even if they are finally diagnosed, it’s difficult to change the habit of seeing themselves as defective. I’ll be discussing the need to defend oneself and not accept this negative stereotyping.

Being a parent is not easy. Being the parent of an ADHD child is even harder, yet most of the treatment advice we get is focused on the child. We, as parents, are kind of overlooked or treated as an afterthought. In this show, I’m going to focus on parent care. We need to be able to take care of ourselves or it won’t be good for the whole family. I have a lot of training in what we used to called Behavioral Medicine which is just a fancy term for applied stress management. Plus I have my many years as the father or two ADHD kids. I’ll be talking about some of the things that has worked for my patients and for me , too.

ADHDers tend to have difficulties with education as conducted in the United States. Therefore, it’s important for them to develop other interests. These can be sports , music, theater, art and many other activities loosely categorized as sports. These activities are loosely called hobbies but they are extremely important for an ADHD child because they allow them to perfect other abilities that may be important to their adult life. I’ll cover some of these activities and some ADHDers who have developied world class skills in their hobbies.

One of the most important skills to teach an ADHD child is resilience. One of the quickest ways to sabotage your efforts is to let them quit easily. This covers everything from guitar lessons to Little League. ADHDers can learn pretty much anything, if they put their minds to it, but few new things will come easily. They will require effort and frustration tolerance. Your child will never develop these skills if allowed to quit at the first sign of difficulties. Therefore you have to have a contract with your child that if he or she signs up for an activity, they have to complete the season or the lesson schedule. Next season or next course of instruction, they can decide if they want to do it again. In this episode, I’ll discuss resilience in more detail and emphasize how important it is to an ADHD child.

Coaching. Is not the same as psychotherapy. People can be coaches witthout without being psychotherapists. People can be psychotherapists without being coaches. Coaching comes out of the positive psychology movement and the basic goal is to help people become the best they can be.The goals are set by the client.Psychotherapy comes from the mental health and involves trying to reduce the distress caused by mental illness, like anxiety or depression. It is much more dependent on the therapist to establish the goals of the therapy. In this podcast, I’ll cover some of the differences in the two approaches based on my experience as a psychotherapist and as a coach.

ADHDers get more criticism than neurotypical children and frequently have lower self-esteem. To help them develop resilience and better self-esteem, it’s important to remember that they have a lot of strengths and positives. On this show I will briefly review the positives and strengths that ADHDers commonly demonstrate.

Parenting an ADHD child does not always end at adulthood especially in our current economic environment, not to mention (but I will) Covid and the disruptive effect that has had. Coupled with the fact that many, if not most ADHDers tend to the sort of creative activities that aren’t particularly robust. As a result, you may get a phone call or more likely the doorbell will ring and there will stand your young man or lady with all their worldly possessions in a duffel bag. You have now entered that parenting an ADHD adult phase of life. I will share some of my experiences both as a clinician and a parent and hopefully some helpful insights.

ADHD has been identified as having an 85% heritability index, which is incredibly High and indicates that if even only one parent has ADHD, it likely that the children will have ADHD. I have a wife who’s family has a number of family members diagnosed with ADHD and she probably has it ,too (I’m not supposed to evaluate or treat family members and as a smart old husband, I’m aware that its probably better for her to decide she’s got it than for mer to say it.) We have three children, two of them have ADHD. And honestly I’m not sure that my family doesn’t”t have ADHD. I think both my brother and my father probably do. SO, it’s not that ADHD runs through your family, the important think to keep reminding yourself is that it’s genetics, it’s not anybody’s fault. It’s also not because of poor parenting.

This is the third in our series of tips for parenting ADHD kids. This time it’s presenting in a do this, don’t do this format. I’m terming to be aware that frequently at least one parent is also ADHD, so I should do some tight lean format material.

This is a time of year for thinking about life, evaluating life, thinking about our decisions, our performance, our loved ones both living and, deceased. This sometimes leads to joy and sometimes leads to anxiety and/or depression. These are my reflections on the season, life and ADHD

This the third podcast in a series about handling holiday for ADHD parents. This episode contains a series of things you can do to make it through the holidays with way less stress. They are simple but proven by research ways of helping deal with holiday stress.

In this, the second episode in our holiday stress series, I’ll be discussing the the reason why the holidays are so stressful. I’ll be identifying the specific causes of the stress that cause so much turmoil and distress, not the least of which is the idea that “ I should be happy while I’m doing all this work on top of my regular duties.”

The holidays are supposed to the time of” peace on earth, good will to all men.” So why is it so stressful? Why do the rates of mental illness go up? Why do I feel so stressed out? I’ll cover the answers to these and other questions about holiday stress in the next three episodes presented over the next three days.

Had so much interesting stuff, I decided I needed two episodes to include it all. ADHD is an increasingly researched diagnosis, so we get more and more information to use to help our ADHDers. This episode talks more about handling the neurological aspects of the ADHD brain, that hyper alert,creative, rapid responding brain can be trained.

Parenting an ADHD child is not for the faint of heart. Between the emotion regulation problems and the executive difficulties there is a tremendous amount of work for a parent. The first step is to keep reminding yourself that this is a neurotically conditioned not a behavior problem. I’ll discuss some of the other nuances of this condition in this episode of the Chat.

The morning routine is typically a problem time in an ADHD household. The problems of having everybody in the household having to get up, get ready and eat breakfast and be on time is challenging at best. It will likely never be perfect but you can. Make it easier on yourselves as the parents by starting the night before.

Given the ADHD impulsivity and the difficulties with employment, careers and relationships over 40 to 50 years, it is not surprising that middle-aged alcoholics with ADHD are common. In this episode I will explain some of the difficulties this group of ADHDers have including disillusionment that they haven’t achieved more in life.

ADHD teens are more impulsive and adventure seeking than their peers. They are also more prone to experiment with different substances. The most common of these is alcohol. It is easy to acquire because it’s available everywhere including the home. Treatment for alcohol in teenagers is a bit specialized and even more specialized for ADHD teens with alcohol problems. I’ll cover some of the most effective treatments and some of the approaches parents should take.

ADHDers have a higher rate of alcoholism than neurotypicals. Why should this be true? I’ll cover some of the reasons and some speculations about why this is so. I’ll also discuss some of the treatments available.

Does having ADHD make one more prone to alcohol abuse? Is the rate of abuse higher for ADHDers than neurotypicals? I’ll cover these issues and more. I used to do drug and alcohol evaluations, so I have worked with substance abuse of all kinds. Alcohol of all the substances of abuse is the one that’s hardest to avoid. It is literally available everywhere and is embedded in many people’s culture and religion. I’ll cover these issues and more that make alcohol a major problem for ADHDers.

We have covered the significant differences between females and males in the last 4 episodes. In this episode I will summarize what the research has shown about females and ADHD.

Another difference in females with ADHD is that masking is more prevalent. Masking is just a different way of saying that the ADHDer is trying to act like she doesn’t have ADHD. This involves denying any symptoms of ADHD or minimizing those she can’t deny.

Female emotional dysregulation is different from male emotional dysregulation. Males typically have stronger reactions and are more likely to react with anger. Female emotional dysregulation is usually less extreme and less easy to observe and identify. This is likely at least partially the reason that females are much less likely to be diagnosed with ADHD than males. I’ll present on the different issues regarding female emotional dysregulation and its impact on diagnosis and treatment.

As If having ADHD wasn’t problem enough, Women have to go through further difficulties secondary to their menstrual cycles. The fluctuations in estrogen during the menstrual cycle cause further difficulties with the regulation of dopamine, the neurotransmitter associated with ADHD. I’ll discuss this issue further in this podcast.

Like many areas of medicine most of the research has been done on men. In fact for some time it was thought that women didn’t have ADHD. This was both because overall research on ADHD was in its preliminary stages and it was not known that there were multiple ADHD subtypes.When it was recognized that the more recognizable hyperactive type was not the only type and that there was a much quieter and harder to recognize ADHD, inattentive type. This is the type of ADHD most commonly seen in females. With improved evaluation procedures more and more females were being diagnosed with ADHD. It is likely that the actual incidence is essentially the same for both males and females. I’ll discuss what is known about females and ADHD in the next few episodes.

After spending 6 hours in an environment that was not designed for the way their brain works, your ADHDer comes crashing through your front door. What mood will your ADHDer present you with. How much homework do they have? Do they have everything they need to complete said homework. Did they have an okay day? Any behavior problems? This is a potentially dangerous time for you as a parent. Your major protection is to have established routines for what homework is done. Where it’s done. What about snacks? I’ll cover some of the major points in this episode.

School has started for all of us. It’s a time of stress for all of us ADHD parents when we have to put our children into a system that isn’t designed for them. As a result we have to do more preparation than the parents of neurotypical children. In this podcast, I’ll cover some of the things to do, hopefully mostly reminders of things to do to insure a smooth transition to the school year.

Many of us assume or were taught that getting goods and a lot of education are the most important factors in being successful. But, no there is actually something that is way more important to achieving success than intelligence or years of education and that is, resilience. Resilience is basically not giving up. More abstractly, it is about learning from your mistakes. It is also about not falling apart when you fail, but being able to learn when things don’t go the way you expected.

We have discussed parents who do not have ADHD, but do have and ADHD child, families with one parent who is neurotypical and one who has ADHD. Now we’re going to cover families with two parents who have ADHD. This, in my experience is relatively rare,but still has a lot of the same issues multiplied by having the whole family be ADHD.