HealthyGamerGG - I HATE my ADHD Son

Episode Date: October 19, 2022

Dr. K talks all about parenting a child with ADHD from both the parent's side, and the child's. Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/healthygamergg/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

My patience, my dedication, my intelligence, the research that I do, my emotional temperament will result in the child being healthy or unhealthy, successful or unsuccessful. I hate my ADHD son. I know. I'm sorry. I know as his mother, I'm supposed to love him no matter what, but I cannot stand the little brat, no matter how hard I try. He is the literal definition of a troublemaker. He brings nothing good to our family. My son is eight years old. He is diagnosed with ADHD and ODD. Terrible combination to deal with. He does not listen or do what he's told. He has broken boundaries over several occasions. He never follows the rules. It's taken emotional, physical, and financial toll on his father and I and the rest of the family.

We can no longer visit family for the holidays because he is out of control. I can't even take him to a damn Walmart for errands because he's wandering around touching whatever he can find. He has caused us thousands of dollars in damages from throwing rocks or eggs at other people's cars, especially when our apartment is directly next to the freeway. He has caused at least two car accidents on the interstate. I cannot spend a week without having the cops called on him for random things, including smacking a neighbor's truck to set off the car alarm. He doesn't understand when you tell him no. Actually, he will not take no for an answer.

He will get violent and destructive when he's mad. He loves to kick, scream, bite, and make a scene when things don't go his way. He broke every expensive thing I had, including the Samsung TV we bought last week. I can't take him to a Walmart without him acting up. Every time we go, he always wants a random thing off the shelf. He will touch things. He will open up toys, and I have to pay for them each time. Look away for a second, and he's gone.

I had to invest in a leash to keep him at my side. When I tell him he can't have a toy, candy, whatever, he will scream like a banshee and break things and throw things. This is after I told him not to touch anything in the store and not to ask for anything. I tried everything. Punishments, timeouts, taking away toys and video games, spankings. They don't work. I've tried parenting tips online. None of them work. Medications did work until I complained to the doctor that he was acting like a zombie. I regret not opening my mouth about it. It sounds like she regrets opening her mouth about it.

Trying to find medications that work. Fighting with insurance to cover his doctor visits and medications every month. I can't. It's too much for me. School started three weeks ago and he was suspended from school twice for violent behavior. I just want to lock myself away and throw away the key. This kid is too much. I'm asking the world of him.

I'm not asking the world of him. I just want him to behave and sit quietly like a good kid and not cause us or anything else trouble. So, as a parent, we're supposed to love our kids. And sometimes they do things. Like they'll do thousands of dollars worth of damage. We can't take them to run errands. They get suspended. We get the cops called.

And even as a parent, we have to cope by putting the child on a leash. And then if you're a parent and you walk around outside of the house with an eight-year-old child on a leash, imagine the looks that you get. Oh, my God, how terrible is this parent? And so as parents were just taught that like, hey, unconditional love for a child, right? You're supposed to love your child. Like, you're not allowed to hate them. And so since we're not allowed to hate them and children are perfect and they're innocent, right?

And they're eight years old. Can this child really know what he's even doing? And then what we do is we diagnose them with something. We give them an illness. And so then what happens if you're a parent is like once your child has this ADHD illness, it's even harder to hate them, right? because like, oh, the child is sick. Their brains are different.

Like, it's not their fault. This is just the way that they're wired. And so it's really hard having a child with ADHD. So a couple of interesting facts and figures for you. The first thing to understand is that we assume that our parenting affects our child, right? That it's a one-way relationship. That, like, if my child grows up to be a productive human being,

that is because I don't. did a good job as a parent. And if my child grows up to be like a little POS who's bothering people and goes to jail, then it's my fault as a parent. We think about parenting is a one-directional relationship. My patience, my dedication, my intelligence, the research that I do, my emotional temperament will result in the child being healthy or unhealthy, successful or unsuccessful. The first thing to understand if you are parenting a child with ADHD is that it's bidirectional. There is overwhelming evidence that children with ADHD induce changes in parenting style. There's strong evidence that having a child with ADHD increases the risk of depression in parents,

increases the stress level of parents. So the child will affect you as well. way I mean by bi-directional. So I'll give you all a simple example. Parents of children with ADHD yell at their kids more than parents of kids without ADHD. And what happens is when you go out to like, let's say a grocery store and you see some parent losing their shit with a kid yelling at their eight-year-old child, you're like, oh my God, what a terrible parent. So here's what happens. So I'll explain it to you, okay? So when I have ADHD, I'm highly distractible and I can be very perseverative.

So if I start to do something, this is what happens in our brain. When we're focused on something, there is some part of our brain that is paying attention to other stimuli. Right? So like if I'm sitting there, let's say, playing a video game,

and there's a fire in the next room and smoke starts coming into the room and I smell it, there's a circuit in my brain that takes a very, very faint smell of smoke. Very faint. It's not like the fire's in my room. takes that signal and then shatters my attention and says,

hey, stop playing the video game. Pay attention to some smell of smoke here. So if we kind of look at it, my mind is focused on A, how strong does the stimulus have to be to break that attention? So in a neurotypical person, that stimulus is small. So if you're like sitting at home and like someone is yelling outside, like, oh, you can't focus because you can't drown out that noise, right? So here's the thing.

if you have a child with ADHD, you need a very, very strong stimulus to get their attention. So if you say, hey, it's time for school. The child will not even process that information. Hey, it's time for school. No processing. Hey, it's time for school.

You say the third time. Now you get frustrated as a parent. And you say, hey, it's time for school. And then the kid snaps out of it and looks at you. Now, mind you, this is like a four-year-old kid or even three-year-old kid, right? Or even two-year-old kid where you're like, hey, don't pick up the knife.

And you have to yell at them to get their attention. So what parents will learn because of this kind of attentional block in the hyperfocus that children have, parents learn to raise their voice. This is actually the effective method of communication for kids with ADHD. But when you yell, it activates certain parts of your sympathetic nervous system. You kind of get emotional. You get angry.

It's hard to yell at people and not have some kind of negative emotion. Furthermore, the kid gets yelled at, right? So, like, they don't hear anything except for yelling, but it's still startling for a kid to get yelled at. And then they're getting yelled at all the time because that's the effective way of communicating. That's what parents with kids with ADHD learn, is yelling is the only thing that works.

Now, this isn't the kid's fault, and it's also not the parents' fault. This is what we've learned when you look at parenting with ADHD, is that ADHD induces changes in parenting. Now, this situation is even worse, because now we have oppositional defiant disorder at play. And oppositional defiant disorder is basically any time you tell me to do something, it's not really about me getting something. It's not about what I want.

The defiance is, I just don't want to do what you want. I don't even care about the way it goes. But if you tell me to put them away, I'm not going to. So when you get oppositional defiant disorder coupled with ADHD, it's a real mess. sometimes this can also cross into conduct disorder, which is what we call antisocial personality disorder in adults, which is like sociopathy, for example. So it can be a really bad mess because what you have is oppositional defiance, which sometimes has difficulty with emotional regulation. And then we also know that the brains of people with ADHD, they are more sensitive to negative emotions.

So they also can sometimes experience emotional dysregulation. So when you have this kind of situation, it's very hard to deal with. So as a parent, like the first thing that I want to say is like, it's okay. It's okay for you to have feelings of hatred towards your child. Just because you hate your child does not mean that you also don't love your child. That the situation that y'all are in is very, very, very difficult. And this is the other thing that I think is really important to understand. Just because someone is ill doesn't mean.

that they're not, doesn't absolve them of all responsibility. And I've learned this lesson the hard way as a psychiatrist. That we want to have compassion, for example, for people with, like, bipolar disorder and ADD. Like, we want to have compassion for them. We should have compassion for them. And I encourage you to have compassion for them. It's important to remember, though, that people with, let's say, bipolar disorder, and I think about bipolar disorder, because that's really like a couple of patients that I really learned this lesson with, they are also something. They are also something. somewhat responsible. Right? So I don't really buy that your eight-year-old, sometimes they're emotionally dysregulated, sometimes they're distracted, sometimes they're impulsive, but sometimes

they actually know exactly what they're doing. Sometimes they know full well what's going on and they choose to do it anyway. And I think it's really important to assign some responsibility to the child. Because until you assign some responsibility to the child, you can't ever expect them to like help you fix this. And that's the key thing. If you're really struggling with a child with ADHD, you need the child's help. You can't parent your way to success without the child's help. And what we tend to see in situations like this is there's a very antagonistic relationship between you and the child.

And if you hate your child, how do you think your child hates, I mean, it feels about you? They hate you too, right? This is a mutual thing that both of y'all are carrying. There's conflict and there's a war between parent and child. And hatred is it an unfortunate emotion to have in a parent-child relationship? Absolutely. But it is also a completely acceptable emotion in something that can be dealt with. It's reasonable to sometimes hate our kids because sometimes they're little brats, right?

They do that sometimes. Now, I'm not saying that you should let the hatred run wild. I'm not saying that you shouldn't have compassion. I'm not saying that you shouldn't try to change things. But I think you're allowed to feel some hatred. And just because you feel hatred doesn't necessarily mean you also know. don't feel love. So now the hardest question is what to do about it, because this parent sort of says, I've tried everything, and nothing works. And so the biggest thing that I would sort of suggest in a

situation like this, and I got to first start by saying, no suggestions from the internet will do any justice to your problem. But what I found in the most difficult cases of people with ADD, anti-social personality disorder, oppositional defiant disorder, okay? So I'm talking about adults as well, or even things like bipolar disorder. is that you can't win without the person's help. And so what I tend to see, especially in kids with ADHD, by the time they're eight or nine, is that they're so incapable of responsibility at four, five, or six

that as a parent, we don't give them any responsibility because they can't handle it. And then what happens is that they get to this point where they're eight years old, and they can actually handle a little bit of responsibility. But since we never gave it to them when they're four, like developmentally, like brains, their brains can handle it, but they haven't learned how to do that.

So I know it sounds kind of weird, but what I found to be really, really effective is to really like ask the kid, hey, why are you doing this? What do you think is going on here? When we go to Walmart, are you allowed to open the toys? Can you open the toys?

Can you not open the toys? What happens? Are you supposed to open the toys? Why aren't you supposed to open the toys? I know it sounds kind of bizarre, and I'm not saying that this is going to work in this situation. But if you're a kid, if you're a parent with a kid with ADHD,

what I oftentimes see parents doing, and I've had a lot of success with this, is they try to control the child, right? The kid doesn't listen, doesn't listen, doesn't listen. What I don't hear is that does the kid understand or do they not understand? Well, they don't listen. When I tell them to do something, they don't listen. Well, do they understand? Well, yeah, I've explained to them a thousand times.

Hold on a second. Do they understand? And I want you to think about this. if you have ADHD, think about all the times when you were growing up and your parents told you to do something. How often did you really understand what they were trying to get you accomplish and why they were telling you to do it that way? Because what we tend to see is ADHD induces an authoritarian parenting style.

So it induces a parenting style that's my way or the highway. And so the more authoritarian you become as a parent, the more you yell, the more it's like no more. more opening toys at Walmart. End of story. Explanation and understanding go completely out the window. You'll try to explain things. That's where I use a different technique,

which is ask your kids questions. Why are we going to Walmart? What are we supposed to do there? What do you like about Walmart? What do you dislike about Walmart? How do you feel when you don't get a toy that you want? Is it possible to go to Walmart and you do, not to open a toy? Do you think you could handle that? We're not telling them to do it or not do it.

What do you think you're capable of? Because here's what I've also seen with kids who are oppositional defiant is if you can ever get them on your side, that stubbornness will start working for you. It's not easy to do. Don't get me wrong. So it's not like one conversation has this. But in the situations where I've worked with families, so usually this is like families with video game addiction and some comorbid attention deficit disorder or oppositional defined disorder. So usually they come to me because there's a problematic behavior in the household where the kid is throwing a temper tantrum because of games or like it's bedtime and they like start flipping chairs, right? I've seen a lot of broken objects, things like that. There's all kinds of stuff that gets

messed up. So this isn't, we don't really see this in this kind of situation, but I've seen it a lot. And what I tend to find is that once again, the most important thing that most important thing that most most people miss is building an alliance with the child and trying to really figure out what is the child to understand. Now, if you're saying, I've explained to them a thousand times, that's not how you recognize understanding. You ask questions. So I'd start by asking your kid lots and lots and lots of questions. And the more that you ask them questions, the more you see what they understand, you're also modeling a different kind of behavior there. Because think about this for a second. If I have a kid who goes into Walmart and starts opening up toys, what do I do?

Hey, you can't do that. Stop, stop, stop. Not allowed. Punishments. What are you modeling for the child? You're actually modeling my way or the highway. Think about it, right? Because there's absolutely no way that you can open up a toy at Walmart without paying for it.

I don't care what your opinion is. No means no. No means no. And so what is the child learning? Child is learning, no means no. So when mom tells me to put the toy away, mom, no means no. I'm not going to put the toy away.

No means no, because that's what you've taught me. So I'm learning it. And that couples with the oppositional defiance, enhances it. Now is not only the child ODD plus ADHD, now the child is modeling my way or the highway. And sorry, the parent is modeling my way or the highway is exactly what the child learns. So I know it's kind of like weird and it's easy for me to say this like I'm some dude on the internet, right?

Like I don't have to parent you're a kid. Easy for me to say, you got to talk to the kid. You got to understand the kid. And if you know anyone who's like an adult who has ADHD, talk to them too. What was it like growing up with ADHD? How did your parents respond to you? How did it make you feel? Were you rebellious?

Tell me about that. And what you'll discover is that all that stuff is tied together. Last thing to kind of mention is that this is a situation where, unfortunately, I think, too much of psychiatric care around this stuff is medication focused. And not enough of it is about communication and boundary setting, like teaching parents these parenting skills. So the first thing that I'd say is that if you're in a situation like this, you yourself need therapy to deal with those negative emotions, process that kind of stuff, process the guilt. Recognize that like you're not a bad parent just because you hate your kid. right? Like they're a little brat sometimes and that's okay. You can love your kid and hate your kids. You've got to kind of like work through that stuff on your own. Second thing is strongly, strongly

strongly recommend some kind of therapy with someone who really understands ADHD and ODD-defined kids. Medication ain't going to cut it. And I totally understand that sometimes what we'll try to do is we'll like medicate them to compliance, which I don't think is a good strategy. The good news, the last thing that I'll sort of say is it may sound really simple, but don't give up hope because I I know you've tried everything, but like, I don't know if this makes sense, but the way that you've tried everything is with your stressed out brain. And that's where, like, once you've tried everything and, like, you're so stressed out, you can't be patient and then, like, things don't work.

So then what I'd sort of recommend is once you kind of take care of yourself, you, like, revisit things. And you may be surprised because each month that goes by your child's brain develops a little bit more. Each month that goes by, you may learn something. So there may be capable of things a year from, now that they weren't capable of two years from now. So it's an ongoing process and don't give up. It's okay to dislike your kid because sometimes they're a little brats and like good luck, because it ain't easy. Questions? Yeah, so I see that Conziate is responding to a question.

Thank you very much for doing that. Conzite. We've interviewed parents on stream, so I encourage y'all to go watch that if y'all want. Adkari is saying, Some kids truly hopeless, I don't believe so. I'm not saying they aren't, but I don't believe so. I've just seen too many hopeless kids, hopeless patients, hopeless people get better. I'm not saying that there has to be someone out there who's hopeless. Like, I've certainly had some patients in my practice that I haven't been able to help substantially. But I don't know if that's like a deficiency of me as a provider.

Or like, the case is hopeless. Does that make sense? So I think as a provider, like, is a doctor, like, I got to be super careful to say, like, a patient is hopeless. Because that's, like, one of the most arrogant things that I can say, because it implies that I'm doing everything right. Does that make sense? So I'm not saying there aren't people that I can't help. Like, I think there are people out there that are hard to help. But is it a shortcoming of me? Are they so sick it's hopeless?

I mean, there's some illnesses out there that are terminal. So if you want to call that hopeless, definitely. You can say that. But in psychiatry, I mean, I've seen too many success stories that have made me... I just don't think it's like logical to be as hopeless. And when people feel hopeless, I think it's completely logical for them because they haven't seen it yet. Right? So gaming comics, what about when parent has undiagnosed or untreated ADHD?

Well, like, so that's the cool thing, right? So if you look at a situation that you call hopeless, and the parent has undiagnosed ADHD, well, like, that's a pretty easy fix. Like, get the parent treatment, and then, like, things can turn around real quick. That's exactly what I'm talking about. So I'll have, like, a hopeless kid. And then what we realize is, like, oh, like, maybe the parent has undiagnosed anxiety. So I've seen even kids that were really, really struggling, turned out, like one of their parents had really bad undiagnosed OCD, which can be crippling.

and like a year after the parent got into treatment, kid was doing way better. Okay, do you think it's bad for my four-year-old and never take a nap during the day? No, I think kids are different. The important thing is that they get sufficient sleep. Some kids sleep longer overnight. Some kids take naps.