152: If my ADHD kid is like this now…what will they be like at 18?!

ResponseABLE Parenting - Becky Jennings

Parents of ADHD children often fear their kids' future based on current behaviors. Becky Jennings addresses these anxieties, reframing them as skill gaps rather than character flaws. She offers tools to shift from reacti

Key takeaways

• Future fears stem from unmet expectations

Transcript preview

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you how to parent in alignment to your emotions needs and goals versus your programming bad advice and let's face it outdated strategies that just don't work you'll get in the trenches support on nervous system and emotional regulation critical mindset shifts stronger communication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 regulation and finally setting the example you desire for your new parenting coach and this is the Responsible Parenting Podcast. Let's get into it. Hello welcome back. I wanted to talk about something that was striking to me this week. It's not new to me. It's not something that I haven't thought of either, but the volume of people that I spoke to this week, I probably had a dozen conversations with parents of ADHD kids this week and virtually every single conversation that I had They said something to the effect of if my kid is acting like this now What will they be like when they're older when they're 18 when they're in a relationship? There were so many conversations of if my son is acting like this Will he be a man who doesn't take no for an answer? Or if my daughter continues to have these huge emotional outbursts? Will anybody ever take her seriously or will she be able to actually hold down a job? This deep real fear that parents were experiencing about their child's trajectory in life based off the behaviors that they were experiencing was very palpable. And I have shared these fears as well of if my son can't nail this now, what is it going to be like in middle school or in high school or will he be the really challenging employee who always is trying to figure out a way to get his way at work. And so I want to address that this is a real fear. This is a real tangible fear that is very scary for many parents because with ADHD, the negative behavior loops can feel so relentless and they can feel ever present. It's almost like it's always lurking in the background of the situation. We never can quite. trust whether or not what we're experiencing is real, if it's a projection of something that we've asked them to do, and so they're just playing the part, or can I trust that this is the new way of doing this? Is this an outlier? Sometimes the ever-present question that is in our heads on a regular basis is, what do they want? Because they're acting like this? Like, what are they trying to get? If they're doing something really positive, or if their behavior is really good, there's always that sneaky suspicion in the back of our heads like, what do they want? Why are they acting like this? And so those two specific narratives of if my child can't figure this out now, what are they going to be like when they're older? And when they're acting like doing what we want and acting well, what are they trying to get out of it? How are they trying to manipulate us? Those are two top questions and top that I hear over and over again inside of my community, inside of the calls that I have with parents on a weekly basis. And so I want to address how that can show up in the way that we parent and hopefully give a little bit of a mental reframe on why we're feeling this and then also what it is telling our nervous system and how that impacts the way we in fact respond to our children. So the underlying fears that you are experiencing, yes, are very, very real. There are many of us who have family members that are grown adults and have ADHD or show similar behavior traits and that isn't the ideal outcome that we see for our child. We've also seen a million representations of this on TV, so we're very primed to see like, oh gosh, that's the villain character, or they're the... mess up character or the bad sheep character. All of these things have such specificities to it and we can see our child in those behaviors. So we have this sensation, we have this subconscious belief system really deeply ingrained. The narrative is real. And when we experience our child doing something negative that we can see as not something ideal for their future, it's linked to a sensation. inside of our body. So our body does this really incredible thing. Every event, every experience, every memory, everything we have ever been a part of is logged in our subconscious and it's also tagged with a nervous system sensation. Positive, neutral, negative, doesn't matter, tagged. When we are watching our child do something that is out of alignment with how we hope that their future is going to look, that nervous system is activated. we are triggered and a sensation starts to percolate in our body. It's our nervous systems warning that we are moving out of our window of tolerance, we are suspecting a threat, we are feeling uncomfortable, and at the exact same time, literally at the exact same millisecond that this is happening, our body is scanning, our brain is scanning for narratives that support the sensation, anything that has been tagged with the sensation. When we've seen a movie, or when we've experienced this in our own family or when we have an example of somebody at the office who has done this. Literally any of that evidence is brought to the forefront of this interaction with our child. All that evidence comes flooding into the present moment. Our body isn't smart enough. Our brain isn't