Learn strategies to support your child’s autonomy and build their stamina and perseverance, fostering independence and resilience with ADHD-friendly techniques.
Key Concepts:
- As our children grow up, we want to make sure what we are doing is supporting and not enabling. Enabling means “over helping” or rescuing a child from challenging situations without considering if they could handle it themselves.
- Supporting, on the other hand, means providing reinforcement and encouragement without stepping out of the picture entirely.
- One parenting strategy that has repeatedly been linked to mental health benefits is supporting children’s autonomy. Parents support children’s autonomy when they encourage children to make decisions for themselves (in age-appropriate situations), to decide how they want to complete tasks, and to develop their own interest and perspectives.
- Studies have found that supporting children with ADHD in finding their own approach to solving problems increases their ability to deal with frustrating situations, the ability to make decisions for themselves, and persevere on challenging tasks. Parents are not just supporting autonomy. They are also supporting perseverance and resilience!
What to try:
Gradual stamina building:
A way we can support our children’s autonomy is through building their stamina to allow them to stay on task for longer periods of time. Ultimately this will allow them to complete work more efficiently and independently.
Let’s use getting through homework as an example.
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- Start by asking your child to work for as long as they can. Use a timer and stop it when you see their attention and focus starts to fade. That is now your baseline for how long you should expect your child to be able to sit and work productively.
- Whenever they have homework to complete, you will ask them to work for their baseline time and then give them a 10 minute break. Ideally something that involves physically moving, but you and your child can come to an agreement on their break time. Repeat working for the base time, with 10 minute breaks, until the task is finished.
- Next time see if they can increase their work time by 30 seconds or one minute. Give praise and positive feedback if so, but remember this will take time and will not be linear. What we are looking for is that their time on task is growing overall.
Backward Chaining:
- Backward Chaining is another tool for promoting independence. It is a method used to teach a new skill working backward from the goal.
- How we can do this at home:
- Start by breaking the task down into small steps.
- Teach your child the last step first, working backwards from the goal.
- You complete all the steps except the last one.
- You get your child to practice the final step
- Once your child can do the last step you complete all the steps except for the last two. You teach your child the second from the last step and they then complete the last step themselves.
- Keep going until you are teaching the first step and your child is completing all the other steps.
Things to keep in mind:
- Teaching a new skill should be done when there are few time constraints. Pick a time when they don’t have to rush out the door for school or an appointment.
- Keep focused on one task until they have consistent success