165: Does your ADHD child lash out physically?

ResponseABLE Parenting

The episode addresses the heavy topic of physical aggression in children with ADHD, aiming to destigmat/ize child-to-parent violence through

Key takeaways

• Research indicates approximately 78.9% of ADHD adolescents have engaged in some form of child-to-parent violence.
• Physical aggression is driven by 'emotional flooding' combined with low impulse control, not just impulsivity alone.

Main topics

• ADHD and physical aggression
• Emotional flooding and impulse control

Notable quotes

It's not a moral failing.

Conclusion

By reframing aggression as a lack of skill rather than defiance, paren

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) Welcome to Response Able Parenting, the podcast that shows you how to parent in alignment to your emotions, needs, and goals versus your programming, bad advice, and let's face it, outdated strategies that just don't work. You'll get in the trenches support on nervous system and emotional regulation, critical mindset shifts, stronger communication strategies, and more. In this podcast, you'll gain transformational tools that take you from reacting to every frustration to responding with clarity. regulation, and finally setting the example you desire for your kids. I'm Becky Jennings, your new parenting coach, and this is the Responsible Parenting Podcast. Let's get into it. Hello. Welcome back to another episode of Responsible Parenting. This one's going to be a heavy one, but I think also hopeful at the exact same time because what I really want to share with you today is the research. So we can destigmatize the physical aggression that can often be a result of really tense moments with our ADHD kid. I have compiled research because this was a topic of conversation that is not only popping up more and more inside my community where parents are being open and honest about the physical aspect of conflict that happens in their home and the child to parent aggression, not the opposite. We're good there. But I'm also hearing this a lot inside the DMs. I'm getting several emails a week saying my child is physically lashing out, hitting, kicking, shoving, smacking me, doing that kind of lurch at me to create fear, to create this autonomy, to basically show how they disapprove of the no or how frustrated they are in the moment. And how quickly it can go from a moment where they're building something and that thing breaks or doesn't build the way that they want it to build. And all of a sudden that thing is flying across the room. And this is an all too common thing that I am hearing. This is an all too common experience. And I too have experienced it inside of my home. I have pulled together some studies and I really think it shares a very clear picture of what is going on for the child. And it gives me a lot of hope. It truly does because it helps us remove this stigma. It helps us see our child's experience not as this defiant, aggressive, awful, hopeless child, this bad child. But we get to see the connections and we get to connect the dots between their executive functioning and their impulse and what is going on for them. So I'm going to share several things and I think it'll hopefully resonate in a way that, first of all, allows you to feel like you are not alone at all in these moments and that it's not some dark underbelly that you have to keep a secret or that we have to say. on a call, please don't judge me. This is what's happening in my house. Because this is happening across more households than we probably have ever known. And it's really important to be able to talk about this, destigmatize it so that we can actually get the support, not just for us. to keep our safety, something that is paramount, but also to help our child develop the actual skills that they are lacking so that this isn't always their go-to when they are frustrated. I am going to be reading some parts of studies just so that you can get a really clear grasp of this. And I'm going to link and connect the dots as well. There was a study done. It was comparing 38 neurodivergent ADHD children to 34. neurotypical child developing typically. Now I know that is a very small sample size and that some of these are smaller sample sizes. And even though they are smaller, they do give us a lot of data and they tend to match almost identically the data that I am pulling out of my community as well across the analysis and the studies that I am doing inside of the community from what parents are sharing with me. It's a study between 38 ADHD children and 34 neurotypical children. What they found is that it wasn't the impulsivity itself that produces the aggression. It's the emotional flooding that the child experiences and its impulsivity and the lack of impulsivity. It doesn't allow them to contain that emotional flood. Like the emotional flood is too big. mixed with the fact that they have low impulse control, the two in tandem creates this physical aggression. So knowing that, we can start to identify this not as a character problem or a discipline failure on your part. Rather, it's like a downstream result of a brain that can't put the brakes on huge emotions in the moment before it becomes a physical thing. before it actually comes out physically. So they basically, they have an inability to stop. They have an inability to think, right? But that's not the whole story. The large majority of this is the emotion overwhelm. The emotion overwhelm that they experience, that is what is the driving underlying belly of then the physical retaliation. Another study, this was of 247 adolescents with ADHD and their parents. Almost 80%, 78.9 % of ADHD adolescents had engaged in some form of child to parent violence. This is far greater than the general population rates. So we know that as parents of ADHD children, this is actually almost an 80 % probability that child to parent violence will happen at some point. So this is really good information for us to know. So again, we're not caught completely off guard. We don't have this intense reaction to it. And we also aren't now categorizing our child and jumping to these extremes and thinking that we have to take all these really intense precautions because now our child is violent. Now our child has gone too far. Now, you know, this is actually an extremely common, not rare at all experience for an ADHD child. What they found in this study is that executive function impairment was uniquely and specifically associated with the physical aggression. So let me say that again, the executive function part. Because the ADHD brain really struggles with executive function, I... specifically emotion management, that significantly was a part and associated with the physical aggression. So if your child has kicked you, shoved you, slapped your hand away, you are not alone. And this isn't something that we need to be feeling shameful or keeping secret because this is actually now that we're seeing this. And yes, again, a 247 sample size is small, but A 78.9 % in that is not small whatsoever. The large majority of ADHD families at some point or another are probably going to experience this. And physical aggression specifically, not yelling, not the negotiations, not the manipulations, all of those, it's tied to an executive function struggle. It's the same part of the brain that really struggles with the planning, the self-control. That's not a moral failing of your child. I'm going to say this probably many, many times. It's not a moral failing. And it doesn't mean that you're not a good parent. It doesn't mean that you're not a good parent. Because the physical aggression is so tracked and so connected to the executive function impairment, this is when we get to be very strategic as a parent. This is when we get to develop the missing skills. I'm going to talk about some other things that we can do, but I think it's really important to understand that in the moment, shutting it down, trying to redirect, asking them to use their words, these aren't helpful. Punishments aren't going to be helpful in the moment. We actually have to truly develop that executive function skill so that they actually physically have a different subset of skills in their body that is already through repetition, through this new behavior pathway that we create through the development, they actually have another option. Because right now what's happening is their executive function is chronically overtaxed. They're masking at school. They're struggling to stay focused. They're dealing with their impulses. They're dealing with sleep challenges. They're dealing with all this. So their executive function is overtaxed. And then something negative happens and they can't take it anymore. It's a flood. All of the emotional flooding happens. And because they don't have the ability to stop themselves in the moment, think about it, they have that impulsivity kind of like locked in and helps them contain it. Because these things are working all at the same time, then what we're experiencing is that physical retaliation. Another study came out, and I think this is really important to note, this was in 2022, that a random