ADHD - Hot tips to help children engage.

Hot tips to help ADHD children engage in the mundane and other stuff!!

From the talk by Dr. William Dobson

I have had the great fortune of listening to a free pod cast by Dr William Dobson on the ADDITUDE web site. I encourage you to listen to it for yourself.

However…. Here are some tips I gleaned and would love to share with you. Some of these are not just from the pod cast.

1.        How do I get my ADHD child to engage in things he is not interested in but actually have to get done? ( like cleaning teeth)

*The answer lies in understanding that motivating the child by reward or punishment will not bring the desired lasting effect on behaviour. 

This is so helpful to me. 

The mundane is not interesting and so not really relevant to the ADHD brain. The problem is these things are relevant and important in life. Paying bills is important as is regularly brushing teeth.

One of the helpful things I learned was that we need to try and make the mundane interesting. I have to say that my heart literally sighed with the heaviness of this until Dr Dobson explained what he meant.

Somehow we need to appeal to the emotional connection that the ADHD child has with the activity. In other words…. Make it real!! Give it an emotional purpose. The living reason behind why we are brushing teeth. The child and adult on the ADHD spectrum has a very real and rich emotional life and this is where we are to invest our focus, especially as parents. Because healthy life patterns ARE established in the young life.

We want our children to make healthy life choices that are good for them including the mundane. So we need to tap into the emotions and draw the important link between caring and doing. In other words…… The child will do the mundane if they care about doing it.

I know this sounds other and indeed it is but it makes sense to me. If I ask my son to do something that is not …

·       challenging

·       urgent

·       interesting

·       novel

well I have already lost ..

but if I invests in the reason behind healthy life style choices – like brushing teeth

well then these become part of the required behaviour  FOR the child and not simply because I am asking , reminding , cajoling , moaning  , so that he does it.

We want children to own their healthy, mundane behaviour for themselves. 

We want them to just do it!!