My six-year-old recently woke me up in the early-morning hours. It was still dark outside and I was snuggled under a stack of blankets, fast asleep. He was doing me a huge favor.
“It’s 6:34.” His tone was part confused, part admonishing.
It was a school morning, after all. We should’ve been up and getting ready.
That morning, my first-grader was the most responsible person in the house.
I thanked my son profusely and sprang out of bed. I’d lost 15 minutes, but it wasn’t a disaster. I still had almost an hour before I had to see him out the door for the school bus.
To be clear, I don’t typically leave my six-year-old to fend for himself. Every other school morning I’m out of bed before him to empty the dishwasher, make lunches, and start my own breakfast. But we all have ADHD around here and once in a while things happen. That morning, my kiddo woke up and realized he was the responsible party. Something had gone awry and he needed to make sure the morning progressed as it should.
When you have ADHD too, you need all the help you can get.
Many adults reading this will recall a time (or several) when they’ve overslept, then run through the house in a panic trying to make it to work/school/etc. at a halfway-acceptable time. Some ADHDers aren’t morning people — or have made themselves that way by staying up too late. Sometimes mornings fall apart when we fail to think through a change in our routine. Meds often aren’t in effect yet. Lots of factors contribute to morning mishaps.
Take our situation: my husband had absentmindedly misplaced his phone at work and come home without it. It wasn’t a huge deal except neither of us stopped to consider that his phone is our alarm clock. Fortunately for us, our son has his own alarm clock and gets up independently.
There’s an important lesson here for ADHD families. ADHD is highly heritable. If a child has ADHD, a parent likely has it too. That means the entire family may have a hard time staying organized and getting out the door on time in the morning.
By that logic, my family can’t afford for anyone not to pull their own weight. Everyone needs to have a stake in the process. If one part of the system fails — and with ADHD we all know it will eventually — we need a backup.
In this case, the backup was a child who a.) was competent at getting himself out of bed on his own in the morning and b.) recognized a problem and jumped in to help fix it.
Independence builds confidence.
I also want my kiddo to feel confident and self-sufficient. His time living at home with us is the safest place for him to learn and make mistakes. If I let him leave the house at 18 without a full set of basic life skills, I’m doing him a disservice.
When we nag, hand-hold, and bail our kids out, we send a tacit message that we think they’re incapable. We don’t trust them. They’ll always do it wrong. If their own parents don’t have confidence in them, how can we expect them to take risks? To fail and learn from those failures?
We can’t. Our kids may be incapable at certain things now, and they will certainly fail along the way. That’s why we’re here: to teach them, support them, and help them become independent adults.
This requires us to relax a little bit. We need to accept imperfection and resist the impulse to jump in and interfere. That’s really tough for anyone, let alone a person with ADHD. But the rewards are great. Sometimes they’ll even pick up the slack for us!
My son is happiest when he feels capable and self-sufficient. He wants to feel like an important member of the household, not a burden or a nuisance. We all do. If you’ve been putting too much on your own shoulders, try to give some back to your kiddos. They probably won’t thank you now, but they’ll appreciate it when they hit the real world.
I know I did.
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