← ADHD Experts Podcast
ADHD Experts Podcast
543- Parenting Resistant Tweens and Teens with ADHD: Getting Buy-In from Your Adolescent
01:02:38
Sharon Saline, Psy.D., helps parents understand the biopsychology of adolescent development and use practical, strength-based approaches that foster cooperation with resistant, oppositional tweens & teens and help them develop self-esteem and...
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- [00:00]
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- [00:34]
Dr. Sharon Saline
Welcome to the Attention Deficit Disorder Expert Podcast series by Attitude Magazine.
- [00:45]
Annie Rogers
Hi everyone, my name is Annie Rogers and on behalf of the Attitude Team, I am pleased to welcome you to today's ADHD Experts presentation titled Parenting Tweens and Teens with ADHD Getting buy in from your Adolescent. Leading today's presentation is our good friend Dr. Sharon Saline. Dr. Saleen is a clinical psychologist and an award winning author. She specializes in working with children, teens, emerging adults and families living with adhd, anxiety, learning disabilities, autism, choice, exceptionality and mental health issues. Her unique perspective growing up as a sibling in an ADHD home, along with her decades of clinical expertise helps her guide families toward effective communication and closer connections. You can visit www.doctor that's Dr. Sharonceline.com to learn more. In today's webinar we will discuss teen oppositionality. Dr. Saline will help us understand the root of defiant behaviors in tweens and teens with adhd. She will also share tools and strategies for reducing conflict, increasing engagement and encouraging collaboration. And finally, the sponsor of this webinar is Play Attention. Play Attention, inspired by NASA technology and backed by Tufts University. Research, strengthens executive function, emotional regulation and focus, turning resistance into cooperation. Your customized plan builds critical skills for success and fosters collaboration within your family. Click the link on your screen to schedule your consultation with Play Attention and learn how you can improve executive function in just 10 minutes a day. Home and professional programs are available. Visit www.playattention.com to learn more. Attitude thanks our sponsors for supporting our webinars. Sponsorship has no influence on speaker selection or webinar content. Okay, without any further ado, I am so pleased to welcome Dr. Sharon Saline. Sharon, thank you so much for joining us today and for leading this incredibly important and close to home discussion.
- [03:23]
Dr. Sharon Saline
It's great to be here. Thank you so much for that lovely introduction. Let me ask you everyone who's joined today, do any of these things sound familiar? Monica, who's the mother of a teenager or 11 year old daughter, says, My 11 year old daughter Lily recently started having emotional outbursts that turn to panic and anxiety attacks. It's clear she doesn't understand what's happening, gets scared and has difficulty calming herself down. So then she attacks me. Charlie says, it's hard when Jericho gets chippy, when his verbal provocations don't work. Then he ratchets it up to physical behavior. There's no ownership. He's so convinced that it's all against him. He's punched walls, slammed doors and broken things. Let's hear from kids themselves. Joaquim, age 13, says, People get mad at me because I have a bad habit of back talking. I want to know why before doing something and then I want to say my piece. What's the problem with that? That's one reason that my dad and I get into fights. He's more like, do it because I told you so. I'm the father, you're the son kind of deal with my parents. It's like, stop nagging me. You're giving me such a hard time and making me feel like sh about myself. So I end up yelling at them to f off and leave me alone. Callie, age 16 Layla, age 15, says, I haven't been succeeding at school and life and I expect myself to succeed. My parents want me to get all A's and sometimes I just can't do it. So I yell at them. Today we'll be talking about how to live and work with teens who can be and tweens who can be resistant who give you pushback. And we'll learn some tools and techniques that you can use right away. After this webinar, I'll touch on some common major themes of pushback. But we're going to spend our time looking more at the process of changing and how to pivot rather than coping with this challenging behavior and that challenging behavior because I can't know all of the challenging behaviors you are experiencing. And when we work in the content we're really playing whack a mole. What do I do about this? What do I do about that? What do I do about the third thing? Yes, we want to have some idea of the major themes, but we also want to step back what I call zooming out onto this platform to look out and see what's happening with my parenting that this keeps occurring. In the question and answer section, I'll answer questions about your specific problems, so stay tuned. Next slide please. Now we know that ADHD rarely travels alone in adults and in children and teens. Nearly 2/3 of children and teens with ADHD have at least one co occurring condition. Behavioral oppositional conduct problems actually are most common. But we actually a recent Statistic says that if you combine the rates of learning disabilities and ADHD and mental health conditions, the co occurring rate is much higher, closer to 70, maybe even 80%. So what we see most commonly are oppositional or conduct problems, mostly in boys, around 52%, followed by anxiety at 34%, and depression, or between 16 and 30%. We know that the male female ratio in terms of diagnosis patterns are about three to one boys versus girls, and that coexisting mood and anxiety disorders are really common, particularly in the adolescent years. There's an increase in general and social anxiety, and that untreated anxiety can lead to depression. Unfortunately, what we know is that there are higher rates of attempts at suicide by kids with ADHD because they're having these big feelings and that combines with impulsivity. We see bipolar disorder at about 20% and we see OCD at around, you know, a little bit less. I think it's close between 15 and 20%. And the thing about it's the 30%. Excuse me. So with OCD, we see sort of unwanted intrusive thoughts or behaviors that people feel like they have to repeat. I want to say a few words about oppositional defiant disorder, which we'll be focusing on today. The rates of that in terms of occurring with ADHD are about 40%. And ADHD likely contributes to or could even cause oppositional defiant disorder, commonly known as ODD because of poor emotional regulation and the lack of control of verbal impulses or physical responses when angry or hostile or aggressive. We also see substance abuse. There's about 10% of kids with ADHD meet the criteria for a diagnosis of substance abuse disorder, but about 35% have a history of using some type of substance. And there was an interesting study that came out in 2017 that said that about 74% of teens who were in therapy said that their provider had asked about substance use, but very few, particularly in the terms of alcohol. But very few had said that alcohol could make ADHD symptoms worse. And finally, in terms of sensory integration issues, and we see that at about 10 to 20%. And this would also include something called misophonia, where people are very sensitive to sound and eating disorders. Research shows that adolescent females with ADHD are three and a half times likelier to develop an eating disorder and five and a half times likelier to develop bulimia. I want to say one thing about bipolar disorder and adhd. With bipolar disorder, what we see is intense mood cycling. And sometimes this mood cycling can happen within an hour, sometimes within a few hours. And you know, there's a lot of symptom overlap with adhd, but they need different kinds of interventions. With adhd, there are more consistent triggers that set kids off. And with bipolar disorder, there's more random cycling. So that's the background of what we're talking about today. Next slide, please. Let's say a few things. I'd like to say a few things about the adolescent brain. So the brain develops from the back to the front and the inside out. The back of the brain is our physiological brain. It's often called our reptilian brain. And it keeps us alive. It's fully myelinated when we're born. This has to do with breathing and heart rate and blood pressure and some gross movement, motor movements. The middle of the brain is called the mammalian brain. And this is where we have the emotional brain. It's where we'll find the limbic system. It's actually also where we'll find the seat of memory and language. And the front of the brain is the prefrontal cortex. And if you take your hand and you put it on your forehead, you can join me in what I call the oh my goodness, what were you thinking? Part of the brain. Because that's what we, as appearance of teaching will say, oh, my gosh, what were you thinking? So this part of the brain, the prefrontal cortex, we know, develops, connects with the rest of the brain more slowly in kids with ADHD up to three years of a delay. And it really coalesces in neurotypical brains where around age 25. So we'll see that a little bit later for people with ADHD around age 28. And the last part, part of the executive functioning skills to really kind of pull together are the parts that have to do with judgment, self awareness, and what we call metacognition. So by the age of 18, about the brain is about 80%, you know, fully, you know, sort of, kind of connected and developed in adolescence. What we see are all kinds of physiological changes. Height, weight development, development of primary and secondary gender characteristics, you know, acne, hair growth, body odors, changes in sleep patterns, menstruation, sometimes erections, with or without ejaculation. The whole body is going through a big change, and so is the brain, the synapses, the brain, the parts of the brain which, you know, had had to do with like, learning new information and, and building neurons which proliferated in childhood, undergo a change in adolescence. And so what we see is that teens can learn new things really quickly, but it can be hard for the teen brain to pick out the right signals in the midst of all the activity that's happening. And so starting in puberty, the brain starts to prune away excess synapses, unnecessary information. We've all seen inside out 1 and 2, so we know how this works. And so this process of streamlining and pruning things away increases the brain's efficiency. So it's like a use it or lose it model. I remember from Inside out one where she goes up to part of the brain and she's like, do we need Beethoven's Ode to Joy or chopsticks? And she like throws o joy away and she says, chopsticks is just fine. You don't really play the piano anyway. So we also see in adolescence exploring gender identity and sexual preferences, as well as racial identity, socioeconomic awareness, and thinking about religion and big philosophical questions. We do know from the research that kids with ADHD engage earlier in sexual activity than their peers. We will see higher rates of unwanted pregnancies. Next slide, please. So when we're navigating the complexities of adolescence with our kids, we want to really think about how do adolescents think? What is adolescent cognition? And this means that they can create a hypothesis about an actual or a potential event and they have the capacity, capacity to test that against reality. Adolescents are interested in the process of problem solving, not just the solution, which is why we need to incorporate them into any plans they're making. Teens can be very self centered and self focused, and there's generally a movement away from family bonds into the society at large. They can be very critical of parents and adults in an effort to create distance, yet still, still dependent on them and connected with them. So there's a lot of experimentation and exploration and kind of what I call the push me, pull me of the parenting teen relationship. I'm going to push you away, but then I'm going to pull you near me. One of the things that we see a lot with teens is what I call the dump and jump. I'm going to come up to you, I'm going to dump all my big feelings or provoke you into an argument, and then I'm going to walk away feeling much better. And, and you, the parent, are holding this container of, you know, smelly trash that wasn't yours, but now you're all upset. Sometimes teens with ADHD will welcome help from adults, but often they're ambivalent about it or they downright reject any kind of well intentioned advice. Luis, age 17, says, yeah, you know, I'm like Well, I don't really need their help. I can deal with this on my own. Would I say I'm proud? Sure. I get a little cocky sometimes, though. You do need help from other people. Even though you're independent, you can't always just storm through life alone at all times. So why don't kids ask for help? Or they reject the help when you offer it? Shame and a real sense of again, wanting to feel separate from you but knowing they're not, that they need you, and then being confused about that. Rowan, age 15, recalls that as early as fifth grade I was embarrassed to ask for help, that I had a disability. I think I denied it, but I definitely knew that I was add. I argued for a long time because I didn't want to be seen as someone that needed extra help. Next slide please.
- [17:29]
Rubrik Agent Cloud Announcer
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- [18:02]
Dr. Sharon Saline
Our teens and tweens want to do well, but struggle with how. Ross Green says doing well is always better than not doing well. Well, that's true, but they lack not just the self discipline to put efforts in advance to do things differently. They lack a confidence in their abilities to access the resources that they might have inside of them. They might not know what those resources are or they can't remember them because of working memory challenges when they need to apply them. When kids expect failure, what they're showing us is that they've given up on themselves because the message often that they've received from adults is I've given up on you or I can't help or understand you. And what the child interprets is therefore I'm unhelpable. And that is a very shameful and depressing dark place to be. So instead of us asking what is wrong with this kid? When kids are difficult, we need to ask what's happening to them in their lives or what's happened to them in their life and what changes can we make in the environment that would support them and in a different and more effective way. I call this looking under the hood. We have the behavior that's the shiny outside of the car. Sometimes it's not so shiny it might have dents or scratches or whatever. But then we want to look underneath what's happening underneath. And this relies on my second C for those of you who know my work. The five C's of ADHD approach is compassion. Remembering what it takes them to get through through every day. What. Realizing what it might have taken you to get through at that age. What it takes you. What, what. What you need now to get through. And how we can help our kids accept the brains that they have. This is our number one goal with kids with ADHD who are particularly resistant because they don't like themselves. No matter what they tell you underneath the they feel insufficient, a core sense of deficiency. They're not like other kids. They can't do it as well. And the person they're going to take this out on or the people they're going to take this out on are their parents or primary caregivers. So we want to help them normalize that we all have different kinds of brains. God knows I have an anxious brain. I wish I didn't, but I do. And I have a name for my anxious brain. I always work with kids to name the brains that they have. Dreamy brain, fast brain, worry brain. I've heard them all. Music brain, improvisation, brain, whatever it is. How would you characterize. What name would you give your brain? Because nobody wants to have a disorder. Adhd. Nobody wants to have a disorder. So we want to create a name that feels closer to their daily lived experience. And we want to emphasize biology and genetic loading. Research has found that at least 55% of parents who have ADHD have a child with ADHD. Dr. Russell Barkley, in some articles that he's written, have stated that he thinks that's much higher, closer to 75%. So maybe share something about your if you have ADHD, some of your challenges. Who are some famous people who have ADHD that your child might look up to? Next slide, please. Okay. So that's sort of our context, our background, and some tools to help you and your kids work with living with adhd. Let's roll up our sleeves and talk about defiance. I believe that kids are defiant for a reason. Maybe they feel controlled, disempowered, disrespected, frustrated, unheard or unseen. Defiance doesn't just happen overnight. It's something that is a combination of an environment and the relationship with the adult with whom they're being defiant. So what might be contributing to defiance in your child? This is worth thinking about. Many defiant kids reject the parent or other adult as their leader or teacher. Defiance is showing us that kids don't feel connected. They feel disconnected, and they lack confidence in their abilities, which also contributes to it. When we punish defiance, we make it worse. What we have to use are logical consequences with clear limits that are much more effective. We know that adolescence is a time of development where kids experiment with testing limits. We want to expect that instead of being surprised at it, okay, they're working or they're living with kids their own age at school who are suggesting and modeling things that they might want to try on. And they bristle at directives. They will work with you, but they don't want you to say, do this or else it doesn't work. Often kids who are defiant have weaker emotional and impulse control, not just because of adhd, but also due to puberty. And they will engage in risky behaviors because they're curious and they want peer acceptance. And they might want to see what your limits are. Next slide, please. So, oppositional defiant disorder. So these are young people, 20 queens and teens, and even children who have tantrums due to an inability to control their reactivity. They can be spiteful. They can upset others on purpose and blame others for their own mistakes. If they're overly excited and they may, you know, break something or accidentally elbow someone, they'll lash out and blame the environment or the other person and perhaps refuse to apologize. Oppositional defiant disorder is a reflection of a relationship, and the problem in the relationship is then blamed on the young person. So my difficulty with this diagnosis is that the child has oppositional defiant disorder, implying that the child is the problem rather than how people are interacting with this child, which is also fostering the difficulties. Most kids who have a diagnosis of ODD have some areas of their life where they're not oppositional. Why is that? What's happening in those areas now? Oppositional defiant disorder is different than a conduct disorder, and that occurs about 14% with ADHD. Kids with a conduct disorder, lie, steal, destroy property, can be very aggressive, physically, harm, hurtful to people or animals, and there are serious violations of rules, running away from home, truancy, carrying knives, or other things like that. With oppositional defiant disorder, counseling really needs to involve both the tween. The tween and teen, both the child. I'm just going to say that for language sake and the parents and focusing on ways to cope with behavioral issues and differences as a family. A parent management training in which parents learn to change the way they react to their child's behavior is very effective in combination with medication for adhd. So, you know, one Thing that we want to think about is, you know, who's helping you, because it has to be something where there may be family therapy interspersed with just parents, interspersed with just the tween or teen. That is really going to trip me up here. Tween, tween. So I'm just going to say teen. You'll know who I'm talking about. One thing that I think is worth thinking about with, with our teens with ADHD is that no may mean no, but no can also mean, wait a minute, I want to think about this. Or I'm confused. I have to buy some time. One of my clients referred to the automatic no as knock them down and shoot them up. Because it would be like, you know, coming in with a huge no, blowing you back and then thinking about it for a while and coming back and maybe changing their mind. So we want to really think about is no a hard no? Absolutely not. Never forget it, or is no kind isn't a no. And then let's think about it. We want to open the door to let's think about it. Okay, so you're telling me no. I'd like you to think about it and we'll come back and revisit. Next slide, please. One thing that we see a lot with resistant kids is lying. So lying is saying something false with a desire to deceive someone. Lying is also about saying something false with a goal of denying something that you've done on trying to protect yourself from further damage. And what we see a lot in teens are lies of omission. Oh, you didn't ask about that, so I didn't tell you. So lies are really about increasing comfort in the present moment. I'm really uncomfortable. I'm ashamed, Ashamed. I feel bad about something I did, or I'm trying to reduce stress, or I'm trying to minimize conflict. So I'm going to lie about it based on some knowledge that I can remember about what I think would go better from my past. Or I'm just inventing something. So saying something incorrect might not be a lie if you really believe what you're saying is actually what happened in the past. So there's a difference. Right. So with our teens with ADHD who have poor impulse and emotional control, this makes lying more common. And they also might get facts mixed up, which they're going to insist is the truth, but actually it's because they are confused or they misinterpreted something, but they're going to hold on to what they believe is the truth and. And so how we want to circle back about. It's not exactly how I remember it. I think I have some notes about it or a picture or something, and it's okay, you know, you remember it one way, I remember it something else. How are we going to meet in the middle and move forward? Lying is a social behavior that occurs between two people, often due to avoidance, denial, or a desire to avoid punishment. But lying doubles the problem. There's the lie and then there's the thing itself. So rather than tell you the thing itself, they're going to lie about it. I'll never forget when my second child was in maybe 10th grade. This was 10th grade was like the big year of pushing and testing. And my husband and I had gone out to a movie, and we came back and they were there with one of their friends, and there were two empty hard cider bottles on the kitchen counter. And I was like, huh? So I said, did you have some hard cider? And my second child looked me in the eye and said, no, no, no, we didn't. I don't know where those came from. And I said, okay. And I knew I was going to lose it, so I said, I'm going to go upstairs and excuse myself. And I went upstairs and excused myself. And my husband said to my second child, we'll talk about this tomorrow. And then he came upstairs and excused himself. And then the next day, you know, when they Woke up at 11 or whatever, they came downstairs and they said. And we said to them, we'd like to talk about the hard saddle bottles. And they said, oh, yeah, you know. You know, I guess we did drink them. You guess you did. Of course you did. They're empty. And we were out of the movies. So, you know, we had an agreement around lying, which is both of my husband and I hate lying. And when there was lying, the consequence that we sat down with my. My second child and mapped out was that when you lie, the following weekend you will be spending two nights at home and not going out with your friends. And what we decided was we weren't going to go out on those Saturday nights either or Friday night, because if we're out, they're around. We also got rid of our liquor. That's a whole nother story and not why you're here. So the thing is that trust is earned, right? There's a trust bank account, and adolescents think they have a bazillion dollars in their trust bank account just because they exist. And the fact is that's not the case. You earn trust so in that instance, my second child lost our trust because they lied to our face about something. So they had to earn it back. And we had certain things set up for them to do that. Like you come home by midnight in order to do that, if you're home at 12:01, then you're not actually following up on what we agreed on. You can't ask for honesty and then punish it. So in this instance with my second child, we had agreements about dishonesty in advance, and that's what I want to suggest to you, to sit down with your child and say, there's lying going on. How do we want to handle that? What agreements do we want to make? What are some logical consequences? So the logical consequence that all of us agreed on is when there was lying the following weekend, there was no going out with friends. That was what we agreed on, and that's what we followed up on. Because if you say, I want you to call me at any hour, anytime, wherever you are, and we'll pick you up, and then they call you and you pick them up, and on the way home, you berate them while they're drunk or high or whatever, and tell them all the things that they're going to lose, they're not going to tell you anymore. So you wait. There's nothing wrong with having your kids sweat a little bit to have the conversation. A positive response to dishonesty includes discussion. A positive response to honesty includes discussion. Instead of shutting things down with anger, guilt, blame, and shaming. Next slide, please. So one of the things that happens that leads kids to lie is overwhelm. So there's too much to do and there's like the brain is overloaded. And so this floods. Someone's ability to process information. Maybe a task or an activity feels threatening. And if an adult is frustrated, this increases a child's stress. So what are we going to do? We're going to basically slow things down. This is how we also teach self regulation. We slow things down. We address anxiety or worries, concerns that people have if they're overwhelmed by a task, we reduce the size of the task, we break it down, and we help people zoom out to get a bigger picture. Because what happens for kids with ADHD is they're zoomed in, they're in front of the tree, they can't see the forest, and we have to help them see the forest in order to teach them how to regulate themselves, how to get perspective on a particular situation. Because if they can gain perspective, okay, you know, we were curious about the Hard cider. And we found some and we decided we wanted to, we thought we see what happens when we drank it. Now we're having a conversation, you know, that's the truth. And when you're, when you've had some perspective. That was actually what happened with our second child the next day. Next slide, please. So when we're teaching self regulation, we have to remember that reactivity is related to the stress response and that amygdala hijack. So how are we going to slow things down? Because in an amygdala hijack, the emotional brain kind of tells our prefrontal cortex take, go to the Bahamas for a little while and starts, you know, acting like they're in control when actually we need our thinking brains and the language attached to it. So in advance. Have a conversation with your child. How do you know you're getting dysregulated? Your body will show you there are signs. Maybe you get tightness in your chest or a knot in your stomach, or you clench your fists or you start to perspire. These are all signs that you're getting activated. And then you want to have a pause. You want to really have some time to slow down, to cool down. It takes seconds for the brain to be activated, to sense danger and to send the message to all of our limbs to tighten the muscles and slow our digestion and start perspiring to get ready to fight, flight or freeze. And it takes almost 20 minutes for the body to recover. So in my stop, think, act, recover model, the star model we call pause in the action before activation or once it's happening. Immediately we take a break for a pre agreed upon amount of time. Then we come back together to basically decide what are we going to do that's the next right action. How are we going to move forward? And then we do that and then we allow time to recover. Processing happens later at night the next day when you're further away from the event and clear thinking has returned. Kayla, age 17, says, it's like being a volcano that's ready to explode at all times. There are bubbles of big things happening at all times inside of me. Sometimes they radiate out and sometimes they explode. Explode. Next slide please. So we want to expect that our kids will stumble and mess up. And so we want to create practical, strength based approaches for working with our oppositional kids. How are we going to soothe the stress that they're dealing with? How are we going to challenge the assumptions that they're making about a situation? Oh, I'm not going to tell my parents that I drank that hard cider because I'm going to get in trouble. Well, actually, yes, you might, but your parents can see the bottle. How do we collect evidence? How do we account for change? And then how do we promote choice? Because choice for resistant kids is your key to calmer family moments. Because we're offering them options. Next slide, please. So I want to present my get in Sync method. And this is not based on the boys singing group, by the way, so it's based on my five Cs of ADHD approach, self control, compassion, collaboration, consistency, and celebration. So get in Sync Sync is the key to remember. Stop talking and start listening before giving your opinion and telling them and telling your neurodivergent child what to do. Pause. Give them a chance to fess up, to state what's happened and what matters to them. This is why I like the Wait now acronym. Why am I talking now? So I struggle with this. I've struggled with this, and I will continue to struggle with this in my lifetime. But it really helps me when I'm talking and somebody's eyes are glassing over or I realize my voice and the intensity is getting louder and I am like, okay, why am I talking now like this? I'm going to pause. I need to pause. So we want to restate what we hear from them and how. How what they want or what's happening fits in with some agreements that we've already made. Yes, yes. And. And yet. So yes and is a thing from improvisational theater. I love this. Yes. And actors start from the principle of yes, and then they work together to grow an idea into a scene. You can do the same thing with your kids when you validate. This validating process opens the conversation up for dialogue and brainstorming, and it yet offers hope that things will change as kids develop cognitively and physically and socially, which is what actually happens. I've been in this business long enough to tell you that who your child is at 15 is definitely not who they're going to be when they're 25. Negotiate together for solutions. Kids with ADHD are sick and tired of hearing about what they're supposed to do and how they're supposed to do it. So instead, they want to have a say in any plans or agreements that they're supposed to participate in. So be their ally and reflect back to them. What you hear from them, what you observe has worked in the past because their limited working memory may not recall what has helped them in the past and how brainstorm how you can apply those lessons and techniques to to the present. Better buy in means improved success. And lastly, C. Compassion and choices. Collaboration relies on meeting your child where they are, not where you think they should be, by comparing them to other kids who are their age or height or have the same eye color. So whatever goals you set have to be rooted in who your child actually is. Next slide, please. This means giving them choices. So how do we have collaborative conversations? We want to find their buy in and their currency. You each talk and you each listen. Before you make a comment about something your child says, reflect back what you hear. Have your conversations at specific plan times so it's not on the fly and they don't feel like they're calling constantly being bombarded. Brainstorm ideas. Remember, if interrupting is a problem for you or from them, take some notes. Offer a pen and paper. So use some of these tools. Curious inquiry, active and reflective listening. Open versus closed questions. Why is often a closed question. So use the other starters. Keep the focus of the collaboration narrow. The wider that it gets, the harder it is to remember and maintain and offer limited choices. This, this or that. Establish boundaries with wiggle room. You know, when my kids were little, I used to do this counting thing. That's a one, that's a two. And then I always gave them a two and a half and then that was a three. And so it was like, I'm drawing a blank here, but I think it's Thomas Phelan. It was about, you know, magic. One, two, three. So, you know, what is the wiggle room that you're actually going to allow and are you going to tell them that or not? That would be helpful if the wiggle room includes warnings. And then, you know, identify what matters when, what's important. This is a place where actually why makes sense. Something matters to you. Tell me why. I want to know more about it. Next slide, please. So how do we motivate neurodivergent youth to do the things they hate? I'm actually starting a group on this exact topic. It's starting in early March. It's called Turning no fun into done. There'll be a link for it at the end of this session in the notes. And if you're curious, please go to my website and check it out. But we are motivating them based on interest. Interest fosters motivation. Motivation. So we're going to increase their engagement. We're going to use incentives that matter to them. This will add value. We're going to include choice within any task to increase Buy in. And then we're going to work with them if it's time, clean sweep at night. So everyone picks up their stuff around the house so we start fresh in the morning. You're doing that too. You're helping them. You're working with them. You create a program. You choose incentives based on what your child loves to do and then you put the have to before the want to. Here's the thing. Do not renegotiate any terms of your program. If your child isn't meeting them in the moment, you just say, okay, we're calling a pause. This isn't working. We'll come back to it later. Because if you threaten them or you try to renegotiate and they will try to renegotiate with you in the moment, you just say, we're not talking about this now. We'll talk about this at such and such a time. Next slide please. We are starting small. We're looking for small wins. So I just wanted to throw this slide up so you can have it. About how we use the easy on, easy off method for smart screen parenting. Because screen time is a privilege, it is not an entitlement. And so you want to create a collaborative plan about when, where and how screen screen time occurs. There's a baseline amount and then there's a bonus amount. And kids can earn that bonus by doing things around the house and cooperating in areas so that this is a part of their privilege. And so you can link that bonus time to completion of chores, lack of yelling or cursing, how they get off the baseline time for dinner, any lack of pushback or testing. Next slide please. Of course anxiety affects motivation and that's not the focus of what we're talking about today. But I do want to say that anxious kids often have low self confidence and problematic peer relationships. And so anxiety can reflect all or nothing thinking and a negative in expectancy. It's an I can't versus let's try and see what happens. So some tools that we want to use to help reduce anxiety for our resistant kids. Zoom out to see the big picture. Consider what could go right. Compare reality to the imagined outcome and then use distance self talk. So I know Dr. Russell Ramsey has talked about it. A distance self talk is when you talk to yourself in the second person. You say you. Sometimes people even say your name, Sharon. But for kids to be able to learn how to soothe themselves by talking to themselves, you tried. It didn't quite work out. What can we do to do it differently? Next slide please. There's a myth that procrastinators aren't doing things, they're usually doing other things except the thing that they have to do. So when you want to reduce procrastination with your pushback, with your teen who's doing pushback, break things down, start small and create limited work periods with specific tasks and specific breaks. If you want to know more about this, please come and join my group. We'll be talking all about motivating the unmotivated and how to turn really unpleasant or undesirable tasks into completed tasks. Next slide please. So of course we want to think about resilience and a growth mindset. We want to build resilience. We want to help our kids tolerate the discomfort of not knowing. And this means asking, what could I do differently? So with a growth mindset, people say, oh, I'm trying, it worked out great, I'm going to do that again or I'm trying, it didn't work out. What could I do differently? How could I pivot? Instead of saying to themselves, wow, you are such a loser. You got that wrong again. You never get anything right. So it helps if we can understand how our kids talk to themselves so we can work with them on creating a healthier, more effective distance. Self talk. Next slide please. So seven takeaway tools for tackling pushback 1. Health and safety concerns may rule out any kinds of collaboration in certain situations. That's a given. Your teen is not in charge, but you are willing to cede some of your authority as they mature to work with them to create solutions that reduce conflict. Reflect on how what you're doing use why am I talking now? Also, I like something that I created haha called take back of the day. So you know, you could institute a policy where everyone in the family gets a chance to take back something that they said. You can't demand that someone takes it back, but you can offer it. It's a thing. So this gives our kids a chance to reflect on maybe I shouldn't have called you that horrible name and I'd like to take it back. Okay, then we give you forgiveness for that. Brainstorm ideas and listen to what they have to say without grimacing or laughing in their face. Set up fallback plans for when they don't follow through on the agreement that you made. And here's the kicker. Expect to renegotiate and alter programs because that is part of trial and error learning. That is part of a growth mindset. Next slide please. Thank you so much. I know we have questions Please scan this code right now so you can get your free downloadable which really, you know, teases out how to use the In Sync method. And then check out these two groups that I'm starting. One is on parenting, improving motivation in teens and tweens, and I'm doing one for adults with anxiety resilience for overthinking. So check it out and I look forward to your questions right now.
- [51:04]
Annie Rogers
Sharon, thank you so much for that presentation. We have a lot of great questions. But before we kick off the Q and A, I will quickly thank Play Attention once more for sponsoring today's webinar. And I'd also like to share results from the poll question that we asked at the outset, which will help to steer the Q and A. So we asked the audience which of the following challenges causes the most stress, arguments, frustration in their family, and four answers really rose to the top. So the first one was a lack of personal responsibility, responsibility and blaming others. We'll get to that. The second was losing emotional control when stressed, facing consequences, etc. And then the third was lying and disrespectful behavior. And the fourth was rejecting help and tools designed to help. So I'll get right to the first one, the lack of personal responsibility. We heard from a number of people today who said their teen just does not acknowledge that any problems reflect a fault or an area of need within themselves. And so if they won't even acknowledge that they have room to improve, how can we get them to sit down for these collaborative conversations?
- [52:38]
Dr. Sharon Saline
That's a great question. You know, people basically deny that they have situations or behaviors when they actually know full well that they have them. And so their denial is really an ineffective coping mechanism. And so what I think would be most helpful in these situations is to stick with the facts, ma'. Am, you know, here's what I'm observing. Here's what your behavior is showing me. Here's what we're fighting about. And this is causing a real conflict in the family. So I want to deal with some of these things that I'm observing. And then you can ask them, what are you observing? So we show that they're interested because you can, if you, if what you're observing is only focused on what they're doing wrong, then they're not going to be interested. So if what you're doing is saying, I notice that when you do this, I respond in this way and that's not working. So there are two issues here. One is this behavior and one is my response. So I'd like to talk about those together. And then that helps them feel like, oh, it's not all on them. This is where many kids with ADHD and neurodivergence are super defensive. They're just like, oh, it's always me. And I don't think it's always me. So I'm just going to stick with my belief and dig in that I'm not the problem here. You're the problem.
- [54:11]
Annie Rogers
That is incredible, because that reflects my daily life exactly. Sharon, thank you. I'm going to replay that one and listen to it a few times to let it soak in. But in the meantime, the next biggest challenge in this group was so emotional control around facing consequences. So you talked about coming up with very clear and logical consequences. Now, when. When our children are facing those consequences and rejection, sensitive dysphoria, or just emotional dysregulation kicks in and they cannot hold it together, what is our best response in order to not renegotiate in the moment, as you said, and also not lose our stuff?
- [55:08]
Dr. Sharon Saline
So when your child is dysregulated, really what's called for is a time apart. And they may not want to do that because they want to berate you, because they're angry, and you can then separate yourself. So because you don't have to, you know, stand around and listen to your child, you know, whale on you, that's not okay in any way. When kids are dysregulated, they are. They. They. They need help figuring out how to manage, how to soothe themselves. So not in that moment, but in a calmer moment, you're going to have a conversation when you get upset, when you start to lose it, what helps you slow down? What helps you settle down? I do not use the word calm because nobody wants to be told calm down. But when we have. And then you write those things down and you put them on the fridge or they put them on their phone or whatever, and then you ask, what happens if you refuse to do that? What do you want me to do? Is if you refuse to do the things that you're telling me help you? That's the question that we need to ask. Because when kids are refusing, they're telling us something that they're like, beyond the beyond, they can't pull themselves back. So we want to know what they think would be helpful. And if they don't know, then we can come up with some mutual ideas. That's a time for brainstorming. When kids have rejection, sensitive dysphoria, we. They still need Limits, they still need boundaries. And if they are not, if they're feeling, you know, persecuted in that moment because you're, you know, enforcing the structure that everybody's agreed to, that isn't really your issue. That is their issue. And you can talk about it with them a few hours later when they've calmed down. But it's important that you set up what the parameters are in advance and a non cooperation clause because then you have things that you can fall back on.
- [57:29]
Annie Rogers
Okay, I'm going to squeeze in one more question because it really was so common. And it dovetails with the third big challenge which you had mentioned, the natural consequence that your family devised for your child's lying. And a couple people just wondered, could we spend a minute brainstorming some natural consequences for. I'm going to name like three big challenges that I'm seeing today. Okay, so one is breaking house rules. So that could be like staying up later than you're supposed to, sneaking downstairs using devices, not doing your chores, your responsibilities around the house, and disrespectful behavior. Can we just brainstorm a few natural concepts?
- [58:18]
Dr. Sharon Saline
Let me just say there's a difference between natural and logical consequences. A natural consequence is if I go outside right now and it's 28 degrees, which it is, I'm going to be cold for more than like 30 seconds because I'm not wearing a coat. Right? A natural con. That's a natural consequence. A logical consequence is what we're talking about here. So logical consequences are things like if you lie to us anytime and we know that you're lying and you admit that, or you admit that you lie or whatever, then the following weekend you will not be going to, you will have not earned the privilege of hanging out with your friends outside the house because these are earned privileges, then, then that's what the agreement is. And so logical consequences are things like, oh, if you decide to drive my car with your, your jol, even though you're not supposed to, when I go to visit your grandmother for the day and you hit a stop sign, let's see, you're going to help me pay for it. You're going to sit with me while I get the car estimate. You're going to go with me for the car estimates. The logical consequences really relate to something that the child has done or something that you've agreed to in advance. So for example, you know, with my, I mean, when a child is, you know, smoking marijuana in your. If you come home and your, your garage smells like marijuana and there you know, your, your son and his buddy, your 14 year old son, you know, they've left a tornado size wake of munchies in the kitchen. Then what's the, what's the logical consequence going to be? Hmm. Well, I guess you haven't earned the privilege of having a sleepover. That's that either A is unsupervised or B even is supervised. So, so we want to link things and there are different kinds of logical consequences, but they're always, you know, sort of related to things that matter to kids. So you earn the privilege of extra screen time, you earn the privilege of going out with your friends, you earn the privilege of having the keys to the car, et cetera, etc. Etc. Etc. So I think it's really important as parents of teens to think about what does my child think he's entitled to and what are actually privileges that he or she earns or they earn through trust and honesty and doing their chores and things like that.
- [61:12]
Annie Rogers
Sorry, muted myself.
- [61:14]
Dr. Sharon Saline
Are you still here? I can't see anything.
- [61:18]
Annie Rogers
I was taking notes so feverishly. No, that's very helpful. Thank you so much Sharon. Unfortunately we have run out of time, but I do have a notepad full of notes and I know that our audience as well appreciated your expertise as well as your solutions and that they will be trying these things out in their homes tonight.
- [61:44]
Dr. Sharon Saline
And if you have questions, feel free to contact me through my website or at info r Sharon Saline.com Check out my groups, join me. You know, let's dig deeper. These are, these are not easy situations and I'm here to help you. Wonderful.
- [62:04]
Annie Rogers
Thank you so much and thank you also to everyone listening today. If you are interested in accessing the event resources, you can visit attitudemag.com and just search for podcast 5 4, 3 and you will get the slides and the recording. They'll be available a few hours after the live webinar. If anyone's listening in replay mode, you can just simply click on the event description to get all those things. And I hope everyone knows that our full library of Attitude webinars is available as a podcast. It is called the ADHD Experts Podcast and it's available on most streaming platforms. We hope to see everyone again next week. Our free webinar then will be on the topic of ADHD and caffeine. So to make sure that you don't miss any future Attitude webinars, articles, research updates, just sign up for our newsletters@attitudemag.com newsletters for now. Sharon, thank you so much again. We love having you and we hope to see you again soon.
- [63:10]
Dr. Sharon Saline
Thank you so much for having me. And thank you everyone for attending and those people who are listening. I wish you well and I wish you luck. For more Attitude podcast and information on living well with attention deficit, visit attitude. That's a D D I T U-E-M-A-.com.
- [63:38]
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