A Reflection: From Personal Experience to Private Practice

Misunderstood - the personal experience

“You need to give your child less sugar,” a friend responded when my child was running around high in energy. “You are rewarding him for his bad behaviour” was his grandparents interpretation when we removed our child from a family event in response to behaviour that felt increasingly difficult to manage. I affectionately referred to him as the “tutt tutt” kid as this was the reaction we often got from older members of the family.

At school the narrative continued with his teacher commenting that “he got really upset when we spoke about filling up each other's buckets with kindness, and he could not find his own bucket”. My child had misinterpreted that analogy literally believing he was missing a body part. The School’s response to the inevitable physical altercations taking place during break times was that “he will be required to stay on the concrete areas during lunchtime while those other children will be on the grass”.

This was the early messaging and feedback we received as parents for our youngest child. This framed our child as overactive, badly behaved, difficult, rude, disrespectful and of course in need of firmer discipline. This framed us as parents who were too soft, should enforce firmer boundaries, and put our parenting in question. Failing to notice we had two older boys who we had previously parented and were continuing to parent without excessive difficulty!

At home we were facing anger, aggression and physical violence. We would clear the house when things turned bad. We would turn down social events when the anxiety around managing in such a public way became too much. We walked on egg shells. We wore our masks to try and maintain that “normal” family of five facade when within our walls we were crumbling.

Even more devastating was that in the midst of his trauma and what appeared as defiant and oppositional behaviour, this child could see and feel everything that was going on. This boy admitted to me one night as I was tucking him into bed that he was “tearing this family apart” and that we should just leave him - not in bed that night but forever.

For a long time we responded with threats and punitive discipline. The statement “wait till your dad comes home” and other unrealistic threats like “you have lost your device for 6 months” were commonly turned to as we were desperate and confused. This appeared to only fuel a fire in our youngest child that seemed impossible to contain.

Understanding what was underneath - the personal journey to professional growth

As a social worker I was baffled - and needed to figure this out - to fix it. We found ourselves on the lonely and isolated journey of piecing a puzzle together to fit the parts to figure out what we needed - wondering why this was so hard and questioning what we were doing wrong.

At points we were just lucky who we connected with, via which service, on what particular day - yes that is sometimes how it felt. So much left to chance, not to mention the perseverance needed to stay in the game in the face of services who had closed their books, judgement from those who thought that chasing an ADHD diagnosis was just an excuse, uninformed unhelpful comments from those who did not realise their sideways glances touched deeper than some of their words.

What I know now is that we had a child who had received his fair share of negative messaging. We had a child who was arriving home from school each day with nothing left in the tank with which to even hold a conversation, at which time all that was left for him to draw from was a reactive response of fight, flight or freeze. We had a child who was using an incredible amount of cognitive energy just to get through his day and face the challenges that were part of his world. We had a child who was now showing up in fight because that was how he was now conditioned, and we had been fighting back not realising we needed to fight alongside.

What I also now know is that we deserved so much more as a whānau and that our child deserved so much better. If our child was using a wheelchair, there would have been a ramp to enter the classroom. With his disability less visible, but his need for support equally obvious, where was his ramp?

Through this lived experience I made a promise to do everything I could to make sure other whānau did not have to walk this same journey alone. I extended on my social work practice, trained as a ADHD coach and established Partnering with ADHD to create the space that my whānau had needed to make sense of the chaos, feel heard without judgement and ultimately to find practical ways to move forward.

Working alongside whānau - the private practice

When working with whānau we change the lens through which we have been viewing. We learn about the “why” - why might my child present in this way. This increased understanding and empathy help us move away from judgement and blame.

We begin with education: understanding the difference in functioning of the ADHD brain and how executive functions are the skills that we use to create “pause”, to remember instructions, to manage emotions and to adjust when plans change. When these skills are impaired as they are in the ADHD brain this might look like a child reacting before they have time to think, interrupting at inappropriate times, not waiting their turn, becoming overwhelmed by small change, or forgetting instructions as soon as they are given. When whānau understand what may be happening beneath the behaviour, this makes sense for them and we learn the language to describe it and work out what supports their child needs.

We shift our approach from trying to find ways to stop the behaviour - to asking what is missing and what further we need to support. We put more in, we don’t take it away. We learn that the times our children appear the hardest to reach is the times they need us beside them the most. While we offer more for the support our child needs, we equally learn how to deliver and hold firm boundaries around safety.

We figure out what practical “ramps” need to be put in place for the child to participate and succeed. We preserve self esteem, realising that this is at the basis of functioning and vital for long term health and wellbeing.

Importantly, we face the critique of others thinking we are letting our children away with bad behaviour, with knowledge that a different approach can help children build skills with the intention to get there in time but potentially via a different route.

And ultimately we honour the whānau as a unit with caregivers weathering the storm that can be turbulent at times. We provide understanding and a place without judgement - lived experience has taught us that. It is our hope to support a child to feel less misunderstood and a whānau to feel less alone and more capable to move forward together.

You don’t have to figure this out alone - kia kaha.