The Gift of ADHD by Lara Honos-Webb

Author:Lara Honos-Webb
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781608820665
Publisher: New Harbinger Publications

Feeling Good About Freeing up Time

The preceding and following exercises are experiments in escaping, daydreaming, and allowing yourself and your child a break from rational problem solving and effortful striving. You may feel tempted to skip these exercises because you feel that there is no way to make time for them in your schedule and your child’s schedule. If you find you cannot possibly set aside the time for these exercises, you may want to review your commitments and see if they are in line with your own values.

For example, are you running your children to multiple commitments each week thinking that each child needs to be involved in a sports activity, an artistic endeavor, and a social event? If so, you might want to give yourself permission to schedule only one organized activity a week for each child. You may feel guilty, but children need unstructured time alone and with their parents and siblings. The symptoms of ADHD may represent a desperate attempt on the part of the child to give his mind the unstructured time it needs to explore. Giving your child this quiet time does him a tremendous service.

Your child needs time away from structured activities for another reason. Many structured activities have an implicit or explicit performance expectation. If your child plays on a sports team, he may feel he has to be good at it or that he is being evaluated and compared to other children. In music disciplines, there is often a sense that children have to master and even excel at the skills involved in the practice. Most organized activities emphasize some form of achievement. If your child is doing poorly in school, these kinds of activities may be a wonderful outlet for him to receive praise in another area, or they may be just another setting in which he has to prove himself. The more activities he is engaged in, the more intense and relentless is the pressure to perform and achieve. This pressure can take its toll on anyone—especially a young child. And it can negatively affect a child diagnosed with ADHD even more intensely. Children with ADHD have a strong need for unstructured time to nurture their creativity. Creativity requires free time to explore, to play, and to pretend. If much of your child’s time is being shaped by structured activities, he will be restless and disruptive. He needs and prefers the time to explore and create his own structure. This is not to say that children should not participate in any extracurricular activities—just that they need fewer. To start, set the guideline that each child in your family gets to participate in one activity per week. If the soccer season lasts for four months, then that is the only activity for that child during that time period. Try this as an experiment and see how you, your spouse, and your children respond.

Similarly, parents need their own downtime and personal lives. If you are spending all of your free time running your children to their commitments, you’re not taking good care of yourself.

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