TRANSCRIPT OF SHOW:

[Music: The Wilds Beyond by L-Ray Music]

Natasha  0:04:   She’s sweet, she’s social. She’s smart. She does her work. She doesn’t do it on time, but she’s always walked to the beat of a different drummer.

Leslie Cohen-Rubury  0:20: This is: Is My Child A Monster?, a parenting therapy podcast that allows you to listen in as parents share their trials and tribulations in therapy sessions recorded live. I’m Leslie Cohen-Rubury, a parent and a therapist with 37 years of experience helping families navigate this question. In today’s episode, we meet Tim and Natasha, whose six-year-old daughter Rosie is exhibiting ADHD behaviors, both in school and at home. This is part one of a four part series, where Tim and Natasha navigate the aspects of their daughter’s behavior that are challenging and confusing, as well as aspects of their daughter’s behavior that sparkle and shine. As you can imagine, when parents and caregivers come to therapy, there’s a lot for us to unpack, and a lot to assess. Parents can easily get confused when they are trying to determine when a normal behavior is a problem, and when a problem behavior is normal. This can lead to unrealistic expectations. 

So in this episode, we talk about managing expectations. Because understanding the expectations that you have on your child is going to affect the way you speak to them, what they’re capable of doing, and what you want them to be able to do. In this first episode, you will hear how Tim and Natasha interpret their daughter’s behavior, and base their expectations of her on those interpretations. How we interpret our child’s behavior will have a direct effect on how we parent them. Though I am a therapist, this show is for informational purposes only and not a substitute for therapeutic intervention. As always, the names of my guests and the name of their child has been changed along with any other identifying information. So let’s get started. 

Leslie Cohen-Rubury: Can you start with what’s on your mind and what are the challenges? But don’t forget to tell me her strengths, too, okay? I want to hear it all.

Tim  2:35: The main concern that I have at this stage is that she’s been identified by her teachers and her school…they have identified her as potentially having ADHD. They phrase it as she suffers from attentiveness issues. And it’s recurring and she’s got an IEP, and the amplification of their concerns has gone up and up. They don’t really come right out and say there’s nothing we can do about it, we will continue to try to work with her through different strategies of prompting, et cetera. But right now we feel like we’ve used all the strategies that we have, and we no longer feel that it is within her control. It is something that we’ve, of course, observed at home. But bear in mind, Rosie is our first and only kid. So what’s our point of comparison here? I’ve never heard any parent who doesn’t complain that their kid doesn’t listen–at what point should I really start to get concerned? At the same time, I noticed that she really is progressing along her learning pathway, so to speak. So I don’t know where to be concerned and where not to be concerned. That’s kind of where I am.

Natasha  3:53:  The biggest thing that they say at school is that it is now impeding her learning process. And it’s hard to gauge that because she’s writing, she’s reading…like, where she’s exactly supposed to be in kindergarten? And then I get her report card and she’s satisfactory, her social skills are better, it’s this and that; it’s just she doesn’t pay attention. And I can see what they mean in the sense that sometimes she’s sitting there and she’s daydreaming and she’s singing to herself or she’s wandering around the room with a piece of paper in her hand because she totally forgot where she’s supposed to put that piece of paper. However, she’s incredibly creative. She’s incredibly witty, she is funny—she is a funny, funny kid and she’s very observant. She’ll catch you: “You said you were dying mom, you’re not dying.” It’s something, it’s funny, she takes things very literally. And she catches me on stuff all the time. And I’m, like, “grrrr” and I have to be careful about what I say now. And she’s really, really quite clever. Her phrasing, the way that she says things. And they’re on point—her sarcasm, her sense of humor is very well developed, much more developed than a lot of the kids that I deal with. And I deal with a lot of six-year-olds in my business. She’s so social, I don’t have to worry about her making friends at all. She’s not afraid of anything. And I have other kids that have anxiety, and they’re scared to do anything. And they’re clutching onto their mothers’ skirts, literally. And my kid’s just like, “Bye mom.” And so she’s very confident. So why don’t we just trust the kid? She seems to know what she wants. Obviously, you’re parents and you have to guide. But what is the standard that we’re trying to reach here? She’s sweet, she’s social. She’s smart. She does her work. She doesn’t do it on time, but she’s always walked to the beat of a different drummer. She’ll get it done. It always gets done. 

Leslie: Mm hmm.

Tim  6:09: It’s not as though she’s stagnating? In any of her…

Natasha  6:13: Yeah. And she’s not sitting there, vibrating that she can’t focus,

Tim  6:16: …sounding out words. 

Natasha: …she’s just, like, “I’m bored.” Whatever. 

Tim: At the same time, we’d had a couple of meetings with the pediatrician with an APRN at the pediatricians office who was very helpful. It did say one thing during our last meeting; she was very, very broadly sympathetic to what we were saying. And said, she does look fine to me right now. But bear in mind that teachers are sort of trained to see things that might be a problem down the road. So maybe she’s doing fine right now. But if she continues on this path of inattentiveness, never wanting to really pay attention to something that is not immediately captivating, or being distracted by things that pop into her mind, or whatever bright and shiny object is there in front of her; eventually, she’s going to have problems or eventually she may have problems. That’s where we are.

Natasha  7:02: And that’s exactly the concern: “We’re still in school, I’m sorry, kiddo. But until you graduate from high school, you kind of have to go with the flow here.” On the other hand, I’m very, very aware because I think I had a very domineering mother. I don’t want to squash her individuality. My mother ruled with fear. And I would hear the garage door open as a kid and I would get butterflies in my stomach because my mom’s home and what did I do wrong? 

Leslie: Mm hmm. 

Natasha: So I have to stop myself from expecting her to reach my expectation of when I want things done. And that’s what I tried to do with Rosie to say and use those levels of tone of voice of, like, “I need you to do this. We need to brush our teeth, now. It’s not in half an hour–it’s now” When it’s not urgent, I’ll sing-song it and when it’s urgent, it’s, “Now, Rosie–upstairs now.” So there’s no confusion in her brain of… ”Okay, Mom is upset. Mom is serious.” And what I was doing before was just, [Quiet tone] i]\==]“Rosie, please put on your shoes. Rosie, please put on your shoes. [Loud tone] Rosie, please put on your shoes!” I would lose my mind. And then I’d get so angry. And then I’m mad for the next hour.

Leslie:  Yes…

Tim: You did comment once that I could just manifest anger and then be like,”Okay, I love you. Let’s go to bed. Now let me read you a story.”

Natasha: And I’m like, How do you…

Leslie:  8:28  So let me stop you. And I’m going to ask a few clarifying questions. I want a little more information. But just to comment on that one last thing. There are people— and this is sort of biological, you’re wired that way. Some people recover slowly from emotional situations. And other people recover very, very quickly. When you recover slowly, it’s a good thing to know about yourself, which means you may need more time, whereas some people really can just, “Uuup I was really upset. Now I’m moving on to the next thing.” So that’s just a given, just to know who you are and a little bit about yourself. 

Let me ask a few questions about Rosie that might be helpful. I hear she’s very social. I hear she’s talkative. She’s very clever, which usually indicates a higher level of intelligence in terms of what she can figure out which also, I heard you say, she can be bored. And that can be a cause of inattention. When someone wants intellectual stimulation, and in school, it’s, “I already know that.” There’s a very good chance that part of it—I’m only saying a little part of it—might be due to “I’m bored” and so she gets distracted. We may talk about how to engage her intellect because one of the things we’re going to do is to really work toward her strengths and the areas that need work: we’re going to look at both. Because we don’t want to constantly say—which I think I heard you say, Natasha—that you don’t want to be yelling at her, like your mother, and you don’t want to be shaming her. So we’ll come back to that in a moment. 

Let me ask some questions. In terms of being physical, does she like moving a lot? Does she move, because when I think of a very common characteristic was someone with ADHD, having the experience personally, myself, is if I want to think clearly, I need to move. Moving helps me make connections in my brain. And that’s the way I think, that’s the way I learn. So for example, when I want to write a lecture for a parenting workshop, I go out for a walk, and I take my recorder and I talk. So we might need to find ways that she learns. 

Howard Gardner spoke about multiple kinds of intelligence. Because we need to look at each child and look at the way they learn. And look at what their strengths are. So multiple intelligence says there’s not just verbal/linguistic, and, I don’t know the exact names, and mathematical intelligence. Those are the ones that are primarily taught in schools. But the child who is kinesthetically intelligent, that means how you move your body, like the athlete, like the dancer. Those kids, yeah, they get a half hour recess, but that’s it. They’re not moving while they do their math work in class, they’re not moving while they write their English or make up a story. They’re sitting in a chair, expected to sit. So if you have a different kind of intelligence, then you might be struggling. And so we want to maybe use that framework, maybe advocate for that. I know, the schools, as you said, are very supportive. They are trying, and my guess is they’re working with her now. And they are concerned that her style of learning may not be, go with the flow in school, because she may be more of, like you said, walk to a different drummer. What other examples can you share with us?

Tim:  12:05  Let’s see, when she started to walk, we were living in Brooklyn at the time. So we would go into the park, Prospect Park—let’s see how long it’s going to take for her to turn around and notice that her parents are not following her. She gets smaller and smaller and smaller. And suddenly it’s a game of chicken and we always blink first—”Rosie!” and “Stop, you’re so far away, you can’t even hear us,” and she’s just walking away.

Leslie: Right!

Natasha:  12:30  One and a half years old, the first time I put her on a horse—cried, did not want to get off.

Leslie:  12:57  Didn’t want to get off?

Natasha: Didn’t want to get off. 

Leslie: She didn’t cry because you were putting her on the horse! [Laughter]

Natasha:  12:40  That’s not a thing for her. She walks right out into the fields and pets the horses and does whatever she wants. She builds things. Golly, can she build.

Leslie:   12:50  Building. So as we can see, there’s naturally a kinesthetic propensity towards those kinds of activities of moving…

Natasha:  12:58  Oh, yeah. Even now, when she meets my mom, “Can I have a glass of water?” and she’ll do a twirl. And her hand gestures, my word her hand gestures are hysterical.

Leslie:  13:10  She’s moving all the time. So I love your attitude of seeing her strengths. And she’s living in a world, which may not be as respectful or as tolerant as you are. I grew up thinking I was stupid, I was losing everything. I lost my glasses—I wore glasses as a kid and I’ve lost my glasses. How do you lose glasses when you need them? I was losing everything. There are things that we want to start working on now. Because right now, most likely, it’s cute. She’s six years old.

Natasha:  13:47  That’s exactly the issue. Next year, I’m going to buy hats and gloves in bulk. If I have to say “Where’s the water bottle,” one more time! [Laughter] I have to pick and choose my battles.

Tim:  14:00  It’s not always cute. [Laughter]

Leslie:  14:04  Okay, so we get that the picture is that there’s a biological…this is who your child is. She’s similar in ways to the two of you in different ways. And she’s her unique self. So in terms of the parts that are frustrating, one of the things you said is I have to pick my battles. That’s what I call managing our expectations. Really important to manage our expectations because as you said, you could start off going, get upstairs, get upstairs, get upstairs and then by the fifth time you’re screaming. I love that I can ask kids, how many times does mom or dad have to say something before you listen, and kids come up with an exact number…yours is five, you raised your hand—five, and then you lose it. I say: let’s manage that. Because yes, it might work in the moment, but it’s not a great long term strategy. I get that you do it, we all do it. And we want to find other strategies that help us.

[Music: Acoustic Folk Guitar by Art Music]

Leslie: So one thing I want to focus on is her ability to shift attention. When you have ADHD, it’s sometimes very hard to shift attention. As a matter of fact, there’s something called hyper-focus. So she may be hyper-focused on her drawings, because she said she loves her drawings. And then to get her to actually shift to come to dinner, go outside, even if it’s something she wants to do, like, go ride her pony, or whatever, she may still have difficulty making that shift. Because shifting is what’s difficult. So I want to start early with her—early with her letting her know who she is. Wow, this is a transition. This is one of those shifting, can you shift gears? Can the train track shift? Use metaphors, use imagery, use stories; repeatedly, but have a variety.  Have three or four different ways of describing shifting, because her mind is on a single track, she’s drawing, and that’s everything. 

You might even say to her, “You’re drawing, and it’s time to shift, what are you going to do to help yourself shift?” You can set timers, which might make her anxious, might not. You can get her to count to three, you can get her to set a clock, instead of you setting a clock. I would say one of the things you’d want to do is start her working on this idea of shifting for the next 18 years—give it the long term. Really think about helping her day-in-day-out, helping her over the years, mindfully learning to shift her attention when she needs to wrap up with something and when she needs to move on. Because in life we do have demands: the demands of teachers, demands of home life, demands of eating. Oftentimes, some ADHD kids forget to eat because they’re so involved in what they’re doing. So how does this shifting sound to you?

Tim:  17:23  Some of that we’re doing and a lot of that we could do a lot more of. We have Alexa in the house and Rosie can speak to her. 

Natasha: Rosie sets her timers.

Tim:  She sets her own timers.

Natasha: We ask her flat out, “How much time do you need?”

Leslie:  17:38  Excellent, excellent. There’s the respect. A lot of respect.

Natasha:  17:42  So the number one rule that I’ve learned with my daughter is that you have to give her a choice. She wants to be treated like a grownup, she wants to be treated like she has a voice or she has an opinion or she has some control. 

Leslie: Beautiful. 

Natasha: I totally get that because I was a very anxious person, I’m still a little bit anxious. And the whole anxiety—I had panic attacks—and the whole thing came from not having any control over anything because my mother, blah, blah, blah. 

Leslie: Right. 

Natasha: And I think the issue that I know with her…I don’t want her to be a ball of nerves like I was. So she needs to have some control and say so over her life.

Leslie: 18:15 Beautiful. I actually thought about the idea when I was going to clarify, besides being physical, I also wanted to ask you: Is she someone who doesn’t like to be told what to do, because she’s an independent little soul?

Natasha: Correct. 

Tim:  18:28  She wants to know when she’s gonna grow up. 

Leslie:  18:31  So I believe this is an important balance. We are balancing between respecting her and giving her the ability to make decisions and helping her deal with limits. And I think the more we can validate and respect, give her choices, the more we can do that, the more we can dance that fine line between giving her the respect and being able to set limits.

Natasha:  18:59  That’s exactly what I would like to focus on for her and her future. It’s that self moderation, exactly. Like, “What are you going to do to prepare yourself for the shift because now it’s seven o’clock and it’s time to put on our pajamas. I know that you wanted to keep painting.” And she needs to be able to do that as a grownup, as a teenager, as a middle school person. She can’t be 13, 14 years old and mommy saying, “Okay, go brush your teeth and put on your pajamas.”

Leslie:   So guess what? You might be a mom of a 13-year- old who’s still asking her to get moving upstairs and do things—we’re not changing who she is. So those managing expectations happen at six and happens at 13 and 14. Again, as I said, it’s cute on a six-year-old, you have more patience…

Natasha:  19:46  

I don’t want to see what bundle of nerves I’m going to be if she has to go to college like this. So…

Leslie:  20:16  Well, you’re going to focus on building a muscle of mindfulness, right? That mindfulness is going to give her both the awareness of who she is, and the muscle to be able to shift her attention or focus her attention, or follow through on something that she wants to do. So in terms of, let’s say she starts drawing or painting at, I don’t know what time her bedtime is, but let’s say it’s 7:30. And she starts drawing at seven o’clock. I would stop, and I’d put up my hand and I’d say, “Oh, I see you’re excited to draw. Let’s check in and see if you have time to do what you want to do. Or is this a project you want to save for tomorrow, when you won’t have a 15 minute limit?”

So you gave me the story that she goes to the park and she runs, runs, runs and doesn’t stop running or walking away. She doesn’t know limits. She doesn’t have that natural limit. That’s why a lot of ADHD people are more likely to take risks and go to the edge and figure out, “Oh, I think I overdid it. I think I stayed up too late last night, because now I’m exhausted.” Or maybe they don’t even get that they stayed up too late. So that’s not uncommon. And I see you’re smiling Tim—did you do that alot ? [Laughter]

Tim:  21:11  I was thinking about something that happened yesterday, actually. She is starting to have these limits now. She has a friend, same age. He disappeared into the…we went for a hike on a very clearly marked trail. And the two of them had the idea that no, there’s another trail, we don’t want to go on that boring trail, we want to explore the woods. He wouldn’t turn around. And I had to say, hey, time to come back now. And she was the one that was like, “I miss my daddy.” But there are two things that I want to raise. And I don’t want to get too far off track with the whole strategies for shifting because I think that’s important. But there are two things that have come to mind that I want to get out there. One is there are obviously situations where you do have to shift quickly. And I’ve always admired Rosie for her level, her ability to recognize her own and other people’s emotions.This idea of emotional intelligence—it’s there with her. But sometimes she gets so wrapped up in what’s going on with her head that you have to sometimes literally bang your hand on the table and say, “Rosie, what’s going on? Is anybody else laughing? Look at your mom—is she laughing right now?”

Leslie: 22:34  Mm hmm.

Tim:  22:35 You know, she will have, I don’t know, kicked you in the face or done something that is just like…get out of your head!

Natasha:  22:43  I had a coughing fit. I just started coughing and coughing and coughing. And she’s like, “Mom, can we go, Mom…” And she was just asking me all sorts of things about, “Mom, can I have this for lunch tomorrow,” and I can’t breathe. And Tim is saying, “Rosie? You want to ask your mom if she’s okay?” 

Tim:  22:04 …which is quite common, shutting herself off from what’s going on around her and this inability to read the room, if you will. Sometimes I just want to be able to snap my fingers and say, “Okay, I know you got a lot going on in there. But there’s a lot going on here that you have to look at right now.”

Leslie:  23:23  Right. And that is challenging for a young child, but can be challenging for an adult, which is to again, be able to be aware of what’s going on inside as well as what’s going on the outside. Your managing your expectation with that is: she’s going to need practice. She’s going to need practice and you cueing her. That’s why probably she’s having so much difficulty in school because she is in her head. And they want her to tune in to the outside world.

Natasha:  23:54  Literally, like, “Look what everybody else is doing.” And she’s like, “Huh?”

Tim:  23:58  The teacher said that they have got her laughing in her own jokes.

Leslie:  24:02  So we want to encourage that she might be a writer, she might have stories in there. There’s a wealth of information in there that she’s figuring out. And we want to help her tune in. So it does relate to what we’re talking about. And let’s just think about one more thing before we wrap up in terms of this shifting. You can cue her with physical touch. It’s a little bit of a dog training model, which is called behaviorism. And training a dog and training a child are very similar. I am saying that with complete respect. I actually think a dog and a child both deserve to be respected. So what that means is, let’s imagine your child’s out on the playground, in your backyard on a swing, okay? And you call, it’s dinnertime. And for some kids, they hear that, they know they’re hungry, they tune in and they come right away. Not every child does that. So then you stand at the door. And the second time you say, “Come on, let’s go. It’s dinner, I already called you.” And you do that five times, like you said, until you’re screaming, “Get up here, I called you to get up here for dinner, dinner’s done.” Well, let’s take a different approach. My approach with the child who has difficulty shifting, is: I’ve got to put the effort in, I don’t really want to go down and walk to the swing set and get down there. But I have to if I want to be effective, I need to go down there, because I am going to waste my breath, I’m going to waste my breath up at the back door and try calling her. I have to know who my child is. So I go down to the swing set. I might say it once, “It’s time for dinner.” Or it might even validate, “You’re having fun, you’ve been swinging for 20 minutes.” give her lots of information—”You’ve been swinging for 20 minutes, you are having fun, you might even be singing a song in your head.” I put up my hand: “Can you stop and shift, it’s time to go for dinner.” Okay, that’s very important. Now, I don’t expect her to shift. So my second approach could be my first, but my second approach is I put my hand on her back. And I say, “It’s time for dinner, you can walk yourself or I can walk you.” Which means she knows I’ve got my hand on her back, I don’t have to be angry, I can be…it’s very quiet, I can be firm, my hand is not coming off, we’re moving towards the house.

You’re not going to really be able to do this with a 13-year-old. That’s why you want to do it now with the six-year-old. So now I’ve given her information, I’ve given her a little choice, but I’m almost making it that she needs to listen to me rather than optional. But I’ve given her the choice, you can walk yourself or I can walk with you. You can hold my hand or you can walk by yourself; things like that. And I’m not going to leave until she comes. Does that make sense to you? 

Tim: Yes, absolutely. 

Leslie: So the reason why I say it’s like dog training is because people…I had a harder time training my dogs than I did my kids. That’s not so true. But it is not easy for me because I’d stand there, yell at the dog, “Come on, come on, come on.” I said “come” and the dog doesn’t come—you have to have that leash on in the beginning. So that when you say “come” and you give them that physical sensation of a tug, they know that the word “come” really means it. You say what you mean and you mean what you say. Go home and start working on this. Remember, these are long term goals that we’re working on, give her some more awareness of what’s on the outside, what’s on the inside, and talk about the shifting. So I’m going to check in with you again, after you have a chance to practice that. 

Tim: Great, thank you.

[Music: Acoustic Motivation by Coma-Media]

Leslie: I want to thank Tim and Natasha for sharing their story and working with me. These parents are not alone when trying to navigate the school system and potential diagnoses. As you heard, there is frustration and confusion in this process. I love that these parents are asking the questions. And I believe that they are challenged, like most parents would be, by the idea that they see these incredible qualities in their child, they see the sparkle, they see her cleverness. And then there’s this other information where as Mom said, she’s wandering around with a paper not knowing where to go and in the classroom, or when they’re trying to get her to get to bed. There’s a lot of frustration by these same behaviors. 

So what is so challenging for parents is how to hold these two things together, how to hold dialectically these two parts of the child that you love and adore. And figuring out how to manage, as we talked about managing expectations, how to manage their behaviors, how to live with them. So you noticed in this session that I spent a lot of time focusing on shifting the behavior and the attention of Rosie as a six-year-old. It’s not that big of a deal. And usually it’s cute and a little kid, but it’s that same behavior—that difficulty and transitions which I’m calling shifting—but it’s difficulty in transitions that are going to be the same for a 16-year-old and a 26-year-old. And so early intervention means we start as soon as we can. We start as early as we can to help the child understand that this is an area of difficulty for them, and that they have skills. And we can teach them skills that can help them work with who they are, because they’re not broken. They just need to understand how to live with being themselves. 

And in this session, we miss two opportunities to understand the causes of Rosie’s behavior. I call that getting below the surface. And I want to introduce that right now. Because if we get below the surface of how Rosie is behaving, we actually will see that there is anxiety, so that when her mother was coughing, and Rosie was asking for dinner or asking for her to get her something, it’s not disrespect. It’s that she was so uncomfortable. She was so scared that it comes out as misbehavior where it’s—really if we get below the surface—we see that there’s a lot of anxiety there. And the same thing happens with some of the family patterns, the generational patterns that we have, because as we heard from Natasha, she has a lot of shame from her upbringing. And that’s not easy to let go of, even with the best intentions as Natasha said, she does not want to do what her mother did. We’ve got to be extra, extra careful, because you might hear some unintentional shaming. Listen for both of these patterns as we go forward into our next episode. So subscribe to Is My Child, A Monster? wherever you get your podcasts and don’t miss the next session with Tim and Natasha.

[Music: The Wilds Beyond by L-Ray Music]

 

Is My Child, A Monster? is a new parenting podcast and we would love your help getting the word out. So find us on Facebook and Instagram at Leslie Cohen-Rubury. And let’s start a conversation. I’d love to hear your insights about the episode or if you have any other parenting questions. This episode was produced by Alletta Cooper, Dale Rubury, and me. Our theme music is by L-Ray Music. I’m Leslie Cohen-Rubury. Thanks for listening. And remember, begin where your child is, not where you think they should be.

 

Transcribed by https://otter.ai edited by Eric Rubury