I talk so much about helping children with ADHD to develop positive social skills, which is of course, very important to discuss. However, it is equally important, arguably, to discuss how parents of children with ADHD meet the challenges of managing their children’s symptoms each and every day. When I talk with parents, I quickly realize that managing their children with ADHD along their children who do not have ADHD is an arduous task.
As I speak to parents at my presentations at various schools, I see their levels of frustration, exhaustion as well as difficulty in understanding why their children behave as they do, which is very understandable. It is vital to remember that it is just fine to feel frustrated and exhausted.
However, it is NOT fine to blame yourself for your children’s behavior and/or the fact that you may be experiencing great difficulty managing it. It is not your fault that your child behaves in a certain way, and it is definitely NOT his fault. No child wants to be reprimanded multiple times a day and no parent or teacher wants to reprimand these children. But…getting back to your feelings…
When you start to feel that sense of frustration, think back upon the small strides that you have helped your child to achieve. It does not matter if those achievements include remembering to hand their homework in on time or remembering to brush their teeth. Each and every improvement that your child has made is due to your encouragement, teaching and patience. We cannot expect ourselves to manage our child’s behavior perfectly and/or for everything to go perfectly, as my older son always tells me, or we would not be able to function under that pressure.
What we can expect from ourselves is to try to be patient with our child’s behavior as well as when we do not really understand what to do to diminish it. If you are patient, then your child will look upon you as a model and he will learn to be patient with his own behavior as well. Trust me on this outcome…..
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