Editor’s note: this post was updated, including adding audio narration, on October 1, 2020.
Every parent goes to bed feeling like a failure sometimes. By design, children push our limits.
It makes sense that they would. They know we aren’t going anywhere. They might hold it together all day at school, only to melt down in the safety of home. We see our children at their very best and very worst.
Parents with ADHD can feel those worst days especially hard. Our impulsivity makes it difficult to stay calm in the face of our children’s goading. Emotional hyperfocus and time blindness steal our hope that things could ever improve. Past and future disappear, trapping us in a bad day that threatens to swallow us whole.
Emotional reactivity: an ADHD challenge for all ages
As a kid, this emotional volatility made me an easy target for bullies. I got picked on a lot.
“You have to stop giving them a reaction,” my mom would tell me. “They’ll stop if you ignore them.”
She gave me the same brand of advice when I argued with my father: “Sometimes you just have to let him think he’s right.”
I had no idea how anyone could actually do this. How could I not react? Who would walk away from an argument when the other person still thought they were right?
It wasn’t until I recognized and treated my ADHD that I started to understand.
Then I had a child of my own and these self-regulation skills became doubly important. If we let our kids get under our skin, our emotions spin out of control. That’s when parents with ADHD can end up yelling, saying things we’ll regret, or maybe even hitting a child.
When bullies provoked me into an outburst that got me sent to the office in elementary school, I felt overcome by guilt, shame, and regret. Adults with ADHD might feel these same emotions after bad interactions with our kids. Maybe we blame ourselves for our child’s behavior. Or maybe we struggle to hold steady on consequences because we feel bad for losing our temper and want to smooth things over. Our emotions sabotage both the interactions themselves and their aftermath.
Regardless of our feelings, our children walk away with the upper hand. They sense they have control of the situation and our reaction. This is bad news for us, but also for them: kids need us to provide structure and stability1. An emotionally volatile parent makes their world feel less safe and secure.
We’re time blind: all we see is now
All children have their moments. Children with unmanaged ADHD may have more of them than their peers. Unfortunately, ADHD — ours and theirs — presents unique barriers to putting those rough patches into perspective.
We struggle to perceive anything outside right now2. This means we might view an inappropriate outburst as an indication of our kid’s essential character rather than an isolated incident. We might fail to see a larger context for the behavior, one that reveals it as a stress response or a subconscious attempt to fill an unmet need (including self-medication with conflict). Problem behaviors feel permanent and overwhelming.
On the flip side, when we’re ready for the bad feelings between us to be over, we’re ready now. Caught up in a different moment, we lose our zest for the fight. And sometimes consequences go out the window.
“Did you really think I’d stay here [in your room] and help you get ready for bed after how you treated me?” I asked my five-year-old son one night.
“Yes,” he said, looking me square in the eye. “You always do.”
Emotional hyperfocus spirals us out of control
On top of these basic time-perception issues, emotional hyperfocus further complicates our relationships with our kids.
I’ve written before about emotional hyperfocus and ADHD. It puts us at greater risk for self-harm. Arguments and difficult conversations feel like the end of the world. Our emotions can spiral out of control even as others tell us to “drop it” or “forget it.” All of this holds true for interactions with our children.
When emotional hyperfocus kicks in, our feelings multiply against each other until they overwhelm our senses. A bad interaction can feel upsetting to anyone in the moment. To someone with ADHD, that moment may be the only thing that feels real.
The emotional hyperfocus spiral can take us up or down, depending on the trigger. We might feel:
- My family would be much better off without me
- I do everything for this family and I deserve some appreciation
- My child has terrible character and work ethic
- My child has a huge heart and is trying his best, I’m just an incompetent parent and haven’t taught him the skills he needs
- Things will never improve for our family
- Today was a great day and I can tell our family is on a positive trajectory
We can take on these conflicting views over the course of a single week or even a single day. The emotional rollercoaster is exhausting.
Kids thrive on emotion and attention
This emotional hyperfocus can confuse and upset our children. After all, they have larger-than-life emotions of their own. We’re supposed to be part of the shelter, not the storm.
But children also come pre-programmed to get our attention. In her book Duct Tape Parenting, parenting expert Vicki Hoefle suggests this has evolutionary roots: early human children who allowed themselves to be forgotten had less chance of survival. Nowadays, that instinct translates to attention-seeking behavior that drives parents crazy. If we give children a big emotional reaction for troublesome behavior, they’ll keep doing it.
Emotional reactions, good or bad, focus our undivided attention on the child and let them know they’ve made an impact on us. This has two big implications for ADHD families.
First, parents with ADHD may have less undivided attention to give in the first place. This is a good reminder to check our screen usage: how often are we staring at a television, phone, or computer screen when our kids are around? When do we look away from the screen to focus exclusively on them? If the answer has anything to do with the children provoking us until we explode, something needs to change — and it’s not the kids.
We also need to consider the potential for subconscious self-medication. Like it or not, conflict gives our brains a big dopamine boost3. If a kiddo has ADHD and it’s not well-managed — they haven’t gotten enough exercise that day, they’re underslept, meds aren’t right or aren’t being taken, etc. — their brain is hungry for dopamine. If misbehavior and conflict provide the most reliable way to get that dopamine flowing, they’ll keep doing it even if it makes everyone miserable.
How can a parent with ADHD survive the bad days intact?
Sometimes it feels like our ADHD is working so hard against us, we’ll never be the parents we want to be. As I try to remind myself, no parent is perfect. The more we know about ADHD, the more we can work with and around it in our family interactions. Here are some of the best lessons I’ve learned over the years:
Knowledge is power
Metacognition means thinking about your own thinking4. Many ADHDers only develop this skill through intentional learning and lots of practice. It takes work.
However, the more you know about ADHD and how it affects your brain, the more you begin to notice these effects in your everyday life. Any amount of metacognition — any time you can say, “oh, that’s just my brain” instead of letting yourself spin out of control — helps a lot. You don’t need to be perfect, but you do need to educate yourself about how your brain works and where its vulnerabilities are.
You need to get your ADHD under control
If you’re a parent, there’s no excuse for ignoring your ADHD symptoms or making them someone else’s problem. ADHD makes us:
- More likely to lose our temper with our kids
- Less able to provide logical, consistent consequences
- Less likely to reign in our knee-jerk emotional responses
- More likely to suffer from low self-esteem and insecurity, which can result in projecting, blame shifting, and verbal abuse
- More distracted (kids may struggle more to get our attention)
- Less in control of our behavior in general
We can improve all these areas through effective symptom management. For many of us, that will mean medication, a healthy diet, and regular exercise. Whatever it means for you, you need to make it happen. Self-care is no longer about us alone: it affects our kids’ well-being, too. They deserve our best.
Whatever you do, stay calm
If you have ADHD, there’s a chance your child does, too — even if you haven’t sought a diagnosis. Escalating situations with you or a sibling may be providing a similar short-term neurochemical effect to a dose of prescription stimulants.
Armed with this knowledge, make it a priority not to engage in the game. Firmly but kindly cut off antagonistic or inappropriate behavior the moment it starts. Create physical space for everyone to cool down. Disengage from the emotional game and provide calm, logical consequences.
This might inconvenience us in the short term. In the long term, it teaches children a critical lesson. It also puts you, not them, in charge of your emotions and attention.
Bottom line: don’t let them see you lose your cool
Perhaps the most important skill a parent with ADHD can learn is self-awareness. When we learn to identify the internal signs we’re headed for trouble, we can do something about it.
You can include your kids in this process. Tell them your frustration is rising and you don’t want to react in anger, so you need some space to calm down and think about what to do next. This models appropriate behavior for them when they’re feeling out of control.
Whatever you do, learn to recognize the signs and intervene. Don’t place the full weight of your emotional response on a child.
It’s important to note this metacognition, this self-awareness, occurs in the split-second between stimulus and response. I didn’t know this space existed, let alone how to use it, until the first time I tried stimulant medication. Then it felt almost like time had paused to give me a chance to decide how to respond.
It doesn’t much matter how you get your own ADHD symptoms under control, just that you do it effectively. This is your opportunity to teach your children better relationship skills than you learned in your own childhood. Let them see you struggling and doing your best, but try not to let them see you completely lose it too often.
Footnotes:
1: There are many parenting and child development experts I could cite here, but perhaps the most concise example comes from John Gottman’s concept of emotion coaching, which he describes in his book Raising an Emotionally Intelligent Child. According to Gottman, emotion-coaching parents help children identify their emotions and they use high-emotion moments as opportunities for intimacy and learning, all while setting reasonable limits and boundaries on behavior. This is a tall order! Children have to feel safe being vulnerable with us and looking to us for guidance. Yet this emotional learning can lead to better social relationships, higher academic scores, fewer behavior problems, and increased overall resiliency.
2: Many ADHD experts say we have two time zones: Now and Not Now. For more on ADHD and so-called time blindness, check out my post How it really feels to be time-blind with ADHD, which includes a great video from Russell Barkley.
3: This topic gets thorough treatment in two books I highly recommend: Daniel Amen’s Healing ADD and Gina Pera’s Is It You, Me, or Adult A.D.D.? The long and short of it, however, is that conflict and oppositional behavior increase adrenaline and stimulate the brain’s frontal lobe. Fighting and antagonism might make an ADHDer feel calmer and more focused. Low self-awareness (see metacognition notes below) can prevent them from seeing or acknowledging this.
4: Googling metacognition will turn up a lot of resources for and about educators. Really it’s just self-awareness, or the ability to think about yourself and your behaviors more objectively, almost from a third-person perspective. I found the discussion of metacognition in David Rock’s book Your Brain at Work especially helpful. There are many ways to increase your self-awareness and metacognition capacity. One is traditional mindfulness meditation. You can also practice pausing to focus on sensory input for short periods: for example, feeling textures of things around you or seeing how many sounds you can identify.
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