On this week's 'Parenting' segment on the Moncrieff show, one listener sought advice about how to parent their son if he has ADHD.
Joanna Fortune, psychotherapist specialising in Child & Adult Psychotherapy, joined Moncrieff to answer this and other listeners' questions.
The question:
"Our 8 year old is awaiting an ADHD assessment, but we are fairly sure he'll get a confirmed diagnosis."
"I'm wondering if children with ADHD do best with a particular style of parenting?"
"We attended a recent talk for parents about ADHD and the speaker was advocating for time outs and reward charts, neither of which we use at home as we don't believe either are effective."
"We work hard to keep a good connection with our three children, and in general they are well behaved!"
"Our 8 year old is definitely more challenging in ways, and we are trying to educate ourselves about ADHD and how best to support and help him."
Joanna's advice:
"You know from me answering questions like this before, reward charts, timeouts, they're not something that I personally or professionally advocate, but I can see where they've come up in this talk because it's a behavior modification tool."
"But I think this parent is seeing this really well that it shouldn't be at the cost of the connection."
"If you only ever respond to behaviours and you never invest in what's underneath those behaviors, in general, neurotypical children we would always say go to what's underneath them."
"Sometimes with ADHD, I have impulsive behaviours or compulsive behaviours that I can't get on top of and some of those behaviour modification strategies can be effective in that regard."
Parenting ADHD
"Dr. Mark Burton, he has a book Mindful Parenting for ADHD, so it's also talking about the relational piece of this parents."
"I think you might find it a nice way of blending those other parts of your parenting that are comfortable and natural for you, rather than trying to adopt an overt parenting strategy that isn't your natural inclination, because that's always going to feel a bit wooden and clunky or performative."
"[Michelle Garcia] developed this concept around social thinking as an intervention as well, and that can be a very effective mechanism with ADHD."
Tailor to you
"This is something that yes, you go to a talk and then you do some reading and then you have to filter through all of that and say, where do we fit with all of this?"
"This isn't that you're now parenting ADHD, you're parenting your child who happens to have or may well have a diagnosis of ADHD."
"Be very focused on saying what you want your child to do instead of waiting for them to get it wrong."
"If you are saying, 'please don't do X behavior', make sure you're balancing that straight away [with] 'I would be happier if you could do Y', 'Y will work out much better'.
"Give do-overs would be the other thing. Give some opportunities to correct that behavior."
Main image shows a boy on a bench in the kitchen. Picture by: Tony Tallec/Alamy
