UNLOCKING THE SECRET #3.

ADHD Secret #3: Leverage The Child’s Desire for Positive Attention.

Children with ADHD usually crave positive attention while being more likely to have a severe over-reaction to negative attention or punishment.  Using what is called “selective attention” can be very helpful in increasing appropriate behavior while decreasing inappropriate behavior. Begin to pay attention to appropriate behavior through praise while ignoring inappropriate behavior.

For example, your child is wiggling around and making silly noises while you are helping him with homework.  Ignore the behavior and say, “Let’s see how fast we can get this work done.”   When he settles down you can say, “Wow!, you are really working hard and look, we’re almost done now.”  This may be difficult at first because it’s usually the opposite of how parents tend to respond to behavior.  It’s our instinct to jump on irritating behaviors and try to correct them, simply to make them go away.

Without knowing it, we are rewarding the inappropriate behavior because, with these children, any kind of attention is better than no attention at all. Even worse, when we ignore appropriate behavior, we don’t reinforce it. So the child with ADHD doesn’t learn that appropriate behavior often leads to positive attention..  When you use selective attention, rewarded behavior will increase while ignored behavior will decrease.  It’s a parental 180-degree turnaround that can work wonders with a young child who has attention and hyperactivity problems.

Helpful Tip:  Inappropriate behavior should be ignored 100% of the time while appropriate behavior should be praised 70% to 80% of the time at first and then to below 50% as things improve.  The goal is for the child to gradually be able to control their behavior on their own.

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UNLOCKING THE SECRETS #2

Unlocking the Secrets to Good Behavior.

ADHD Secret #2: Use Reward, not Punishment.

One of the most important things to realize about children with ADHD is that they respond much better to reward than to punishment. So here’s how to adapt the time out to a child with this diagnosis so that the tool is more effective. If your 6 year old won’t sit quietly in timeout, tell him the timeout is 8 minutes (double the time based on the 30% Rule). But he can reduce it to 4 minutes by sitting quietly.  Then watch how hard he tries to earn the “reward.” By moving away from punishment and giving the child a reward, albeit a simple one, you are speaking the language that an ADHD child understands.

Helpful tip: Don’t nag! Help your child to correct errors and mistakes by showing or demonstrating what he should do rather than focusing on what he did wrong.

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