Successfully managing a child’s school life is challenging for the most competent adult. It requires excellent time management skills, good working memory, the capacity to multitask, flexibility, people management skills and good humour. A parent is required to deliver a child to the correct gate, in proper attire and with a sustaining recess and lunch before most shops have opened. Additional tasks include managing homework and communicating with teachers while maintaining vigilance over school bags to ensure there are no essential notices or rotting bananas. Little wonder parents often gather to share coffee after drop off.
If the Child has Been Diagnosed with ADHD
An additional layer of stress is added where a child is diagnosed with ADHD. For the inattentive type, this may include being easily distracted, having difficulty completing tasks like homework or packing a school bag, organizing to prepare for the day, losing things, avoiding, and forgetting. Where the child also experiences hyperactive symptoms they may talk excessively, be unable to be still, have trouble waiting and interrupt and intrude on family members who are trying to organize themselves. A morning that is taxing enough with the tasks that must be completed, takes on a whole extra dimension.
When the Parent and Child both have ADHD
If a child showing these symptoms is challenging, a whole new level of complexity is added when both parent and child have difficulty managing these tasks. It is easy to see how permission forms are overlooked, homework incomplete, and arriving on time becomes impossible. Too easily the parent, the school and other parents begin to view the child as naughty, uncooperative, or stupid. They may soon become known as the ‘difficult’ child in the class who no one wants to pair with for activities as they are annoying and dominating. It doesn’t take long before the child will similarly identify themselves, beginning a process that exacerbates the difficulties, fuels anxiety, and erodes self-esteem.
The Parent
The parent of the child was also once a child themselves who exhibited the same behaviours and elicited the same responses. For them school may have been a place of shame and failure, and it will be hard to genuinely encourage their child while remembering their own distress. If they are impulsive and intrusive they may become the ‘difficult’ parent who demands attention at inappropriate times and appears uncooperative with all the best efforts made by teachers to support the child. Little wonder everyone becomes overwhelmed and hopeless.
How Can We help?
Practitioners will, appropriately, recommend psychoeducation, positive parenting, discipline strategies and problem-solving skills development. Social skills training to model and encourage positive social interaction may also be advised. However, unless these are delivered to both parent and child in a way that they can process and apprehend and consistently applied at home and school, success will be limited. The challenge is to devise strategies that ensure information is heard and self-esteem bolstered so both parent and child are members of a community that can accept and value them and teachers supported to be effective educators. It is challenges of this order that bower(note) is designed to meet.
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