Getting Curious
After nearly an hour of listening to her son discuss the intricacies of his dungeons and dragons game, I had a mother ask me how I do it. “Do what?'“, I asked. Listen to him talk about dungeons and dragons so actively and intently. Well, for starters I don’t have kids of my own that are old enough to play dungeons and dragons ,I told her. But also, as a coach, we are trained to be curious about all things and stay that way even when our minds might want to pull us toward an assumption or a judgment. As a parent, honest authentic curiosity is one of your most powerful tools, and one of the most difficult to utilize on a day in day out basis. After all, how many times can you listen to your 12 year old tell you about his magic deck before you’ve lost all interest and you just want to make sure he’s gotten his homework done.
As parents with young children, you hone the skill over years of telling your child what to do in a way that they are able to hear. As that child gets older, however, it becomes readily apparent that no matter how you frame it, your child is likely to rebel at being told what to do. As your child ages, asking questions rather than making statements gives your child more autonomy and you more influence over their behaviors.
As teenagers with ADHD, we rarely consider the long term impacts of our actions, how our actions might impact those around us, the possibility of other perspectives among a litany of other nuanced aspects of decision making. We also struggle to problem solve and think toward our goal. By asking questions and being curious, not only are you gaining influence, but you're encouraging your child to think critically toward their goal, consider how, why, or what a particular action or process is doing for them. I once had a teenager suggest he can’t read books for school because he can’t focus on them, and in the very next breath explain to me how he was able to focus on a book about business principles, he took notes in the margins he told me. When I asked him immediately after that how he might focus on school books, he was confounded. When I asked him if he could take notes in the margins of his school books he looked at me quizzically and asked ‘ya, how come I wasn’t doing that before?’ I love this story because it depicts one of the most under appreciated aspects of ADHD. We do not evaluate our successes any more than we do our failures. By being curious about what worked for him, how it worked, why it worked, how it might work better, what changes he might make to his system to have it work for school vs a book he was interested in, he was able to think toward his goal of being able to comprehend what he was reading for school without reading the same paragraph 3 times. Additionally, because he spent 30-45 minutes talking about his success and evaluating it from as many angles as we could, he is now more likely to recall that success, and utilize the information he gleaned from our analysis in future experiences.
Being authentically curious gives your child the autonomy they are seeking, gives you the influence you are seeking, encourages your child to practice the skill of thinking toward a goal, and real life examples of how verbal processing helps them recall and utilize past experiences in present and future situations.
