Holidays Bring About Many Emotions

Thanksgiving is now over, whether you celebrated it on Thursday or on Saturday, as we did because our son had to work in Detroit. Holidays are times that are characterized by so many emotions. Family members are enclosed in one or two rooms for hours who observe but may not understand the interests and well as the behavior of your child with ADHD. For example, each time that one of the children with whom I used to work saw his grandfather on a holiday, his grandfather would say, “Jimmy, let’s go through a football around,” or “Let’s have a catch.” Jimmy’s grandfather played football in college and was an active spectator. Jimmy not only disliked sports but also felt that “I suck at sports.”


I often talked to him about this perception that he performed poorly at sports. I asked him whether or not he had ever been taught how to play football or baseball. He said that he had never had any lessons of any kind in any sport. So, therefore, I asked him, “How can you say that you suck at a sport when you have never been taught how to play it?” He agreed with my point. However, because he FELT that he was terrible at playing sports, he did not have any interest in playing them for fear that he would embarrass himself in front of other children.

His grandfather certainly did not mean any harm, but to Jimmy, his grandfather’s constant requests to play football or baseball made him feel anxious. Additionally, he did not even want to see his grandfather, because as he said, ”He keeps asking me over and over again to go outside with him to play a sport, so I just feel like running away from him.”

The relationship between a grandparent and a grandchild is indeed a special one, especially if the child has ADHD, because one would assume that grandparents would be all-accepting. Jimmy’s story was a sad one because no one helped his grandfather to understand what was happening to the dynamics of his relationship with his grandson and more importantly, why it was happening.

It is very important, especially concerning children with ADHD, who oftentimes do not excel at sports, to find out in what areas they do excel so that everyone, parents, grandparents and siblings can enjoy spending time together doing an activity in which they are all interested.