Dr G's ADHD Chat

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.

The most common pattern I’ve seen in ADHD families is when one parent is ADHD and the other parent is neurotypical. This pattern is characterized by the neurotypical parent frequently feeling  like he/she is overworked and responsible for keeping the whole family on track. He/she is responsible for keeping track of all the appointment, usually also paying the bills, making arrangements for vacations and scheduling appointments. There is frequently a lot of resentment in these situations. One woman described it as feeling like she had an extra child. The ADHD parent frequently feels that he?she doesn’t get any respect. In this episode I’ll be discussing these relationships and some ways to regain comfort and satisfaction in the marital relationship.

As the parent of an ADHD child, your relationship is bound to be tricky. Sometimes you’ll be happy and enjoying your ADHDer’s sense of humor and antics and the next you’ll be upset and anxious because of a temper tantrum or frustrated by finding out that the two weeks of homework you worked over with your child never got turned in to the teacher. I’ll be presenting some of methods for recovering your calm and improving your relation ship with your ADHDer.

ADHDers are well known for having difficulties with emotional regulation. In spite of ADHD being a neurologic condition, there are still measures that can be taken to improve emotional control. In this sessions I’ll deal with some of these techniques.

It's probably the fault of our educational system that we all think that intelligence, as measured mainly by memory, is the most important skill for having a successful life. Success, especially for our ADHD kids has more to do with resilience, the ability to learn from mistakes and make improvements, than their grade point average or their standardized score on an intelligence test.

This is a continuation of an earlier episode detailing some specific procedures ADHD parents can follow to help their child succeed and have a happier home life.