Coach Your ADHD Child

There is a story about a convicted felon who said that the best time of his life was his criminal trial because he received so much special attention from the judge, lawyers and jurors. This demonstrates that even highly negative attention can be highly rewarding. Part of being a coach to your child is understanding what may be motivating bad behavior and poor performance. In some cases negative attention that singles him out may in fact be meeting this basic need for being unique and special. One way to prevent this problem is to plan an activity that highlights how special your child is. This means something that only your child gets, and it involves a treat and extra positive attention. Sometimes if you take away treats, attention or a sense of uniqueness from from your child in response to bad behavior, you set up a vicious cycle. He desperately needs the special feeling so he acts bad – both out of frustration and as a strategy to get the special but bad attention. For this activity, make sure it involves only your child. If you have other children you can emphasize to your child that only he gets this activity and NOT his brothers and sisters (of course you’ll want to make sure each child gets a special attention activity). Use your creativity in planning this activity, but it could be as simple as taking him out to dinner just you and him with no siblings. Emphasize to your child that this activity is just to show him how special he is and he doesn’t have to do anything to earn it. www.visionarysoul.com

Comments

[Tan]

Generally, one can't go wrong by staying on the side of "positives", but sometimes the dividing line between positive and negative is not quite clear cut. Anyway, this is an excellent and uplifting article.

I would like to add a bit about bad behavior. In the context of say, a ADHD child throwing temper tantrums, research have shown that conflicts are made worse when both parties shout and are aggresive to one another. Thus, if parents hope to reduce tantrums in their children, it is pertinent that they (parents) have to try not to provoke the tantrum in the first place.