Pick Your Moments
One of the principle challenges of being a parent is picking your moments. Your moments to impart words of wisdom, your moments to simply offer comfort or support with a hug or words of encouragement, moments where you must choose whether to fight that battle today or not. One of the challenges of being a parent of a child with ADHD is that if we don’t recognize the moment we are in with our child, we end up with a very jarring and unexpected outcome. Often times that outcome can be a meltdown, despite our better intentions.
While meltdowns are rarely the result of a singular event, they typically require a culmination of events to reach a tipping point. That tipping point is what separates an upset or angry 10 year old from having an uncontrollable outer body experience we call a meltdown. That tipping point, more often than not, is the feeling of isolation. Isolation is not just a feeling of being alone. It is a feeling of being powerless, having no ability to right the wrong that is before you, while everyone who does simply stands idly by watching it all unfold, doing nothing to help…or at least this is how it feels.
When a child with emotional dysregulation experiences a series of upsetting events, such as unmet expectations, they are likely to communicate that distress to you or someone else in authority. Often times, we treat these moments as teaching moments. Moments to help our child consider an alternative perspective perhaps, or to think more critically about the impact of their desired choice at this moment. And, while these lessons are vitally important, they are unfortunately so ill-timed, they might as well have been communicated in Mandarin.
One of the more frequent things I hear from parents is that Tommy has a meltdown every time we ask him to get off the game. He needs to learn to get off his game, how is he going to go through life if he can’t get off the video game. Inevitably, this is also a logic they have used with Tommy to no avail. Our intention as parents is to encourage Tommy to consider an alternative perspective, that getting off a video game or any other moment of self-regulation is a skill that he needs to develop to be successful in life. Unfortunately, this is not a moment where Tommy is going to hear that message, but what he does hear is that mom/dad are not on my team, they are not interested in helping me resolve this issue of getting off the game. They are solely interested in getting what they want from me. My struggle, my pain (whether you think getting off a game should be painful or not aside) is not of consequence to them, I’m on my own, I need to fend for myself.
At this point, I am rapidly shifting into my amygdala, in act of shear self-preservation. To anyone looking on from the outside, this is a gross over-reaction. For me, it is the only appropriate course of action. The two individuals tasked with my comfort and protection are ignoring my suffering for their own ends. Up is down and left is right, at this moment in time nothing is making sense for Tommy’s 10 year old brain.
Being the parent of any child having meltdowns is about picking your moments. When you’re the parent of an ADHD child with emotion dysregulation, if you’re seeing meltdowns, you might consider picking more moments for comfort and support.
