Does it ever feel like your child with ADHD goes from calm to completely overwhelmed in a matter of seconds?
Big emotions can be confusing and frustrating—for both children and parents. But these emotional responses aren’t a sign that your child is being dramatic or difficult.
Hi, I’m Jennifer Davis, and I’m an occupational therapist. Today, I’m going to talk about why children with ADHD often have such big emotions and how we can help them build the skills to regulate those emotions more successfully.
Why Children with ADHD Have Such Big Emotions
Emotions are such a commonly misunderstood part of ADHD. ADHD is really a struggle with emotional regulation and executive functioning skills.
When you struggle with emotional regulation, you’re often going to have unexpected emotional responses, which look like really big emotions in the moment. Think about a child who drops their ice cream off the cone. Well, that really does suck. You may have offered that you’ll get them a new one, and then problem solved; but in that moment, that child may be having a huge emotional response to that. They may be unconsolable that the ice cream has dropped. And those responses, those emotions seem really big for the situation.
For children with ADHD, emotions are often big, they come on fast and they come on intensely. They’re not having this type of emotional response because they’re trying to be dramatic. They’re really struggling with regulating themselves in that moment.
How Co-Regulation Helps Children with ADHD
We need to help create emotional situations and environmental situations where our children can be successful. Since our children with ADHD often struggle with emotional regulation themselves, they often really benefit from co-regulation.
As an adult, a parent, a caregiver, hopefully we’re able to keep our emotional responses steady and we’re able to use that steadiness to calm the storm that the child may be having in the moment.
When a child is having that big response, just being able to sit with them in that moment with your sense of calm can often bring them a sense of calm as well.
Why Many Kids with ADHD Melt Down After School
Our children with ADHD often experience a lot of challenges in their lives. They may be able to hold it together during the school day, which takes all of their energy. And by the time they get home, they may seem to fall apart. It’s not that they’re trying to be challenging or difficult for you at home.
It’s that they spent all of their energy holding it together at school so that they didn’t have a meltdown in front of their friends. They tried to pay attention when the teacher was talking, which means when they get home, they have very little energy to do anything else. They may become emotional, snappy, and not doing a whole lot when you know that they’re capable of it.
When our children are having big emotional responses, we want to help teach them to recognize early warning signs of emotional responses that are coming on. When a child knows that they’re starting to get frustrated and knows the tools that they can use to decrease that frustration, it’s going to minimize those big emotional responses that we often see.
Teaching Your Child Healthy Ways to Manage Big Feelings
We also want to work on normalizing emotion. Every emotion is okay. It’s okay to be happy when things are going well and sad when things aren’t going well. But what we don’t want is the over-exaggeration of those emotions at the wrong time. And having children recognize those early cues and helping them shift where they want to be allows them to be more successful in the moment.
A child may want to be going out and playing with their friends, but at the moment they’re feeling stressed, overwhelmed, sad, or any combination of negative emotions. While those things may be okay, if they’re interfering with them wanting to go play with their friends because they know that’s not going to be the right emotion for that situation, we want to make sure we’re giving them the skills so that they can shift their emotion and be in a more playful state when it’s time to play with their friends.
When it’s time to be calm, quiet and sad, we can do that at another time, and it’s good to be able to shift into that when it’s the time for that.
When to Seek Help for Emotional Regulation
If emotions feel big, frequent and uncontrollable, it’s not a failure on your part or the child’s part. It just means that they’re still learning some of those skills, the executive functioning skills and emotional regulation skills that they need to be successful. Occupational therapy can often help bridge the gap for children who are struggling with those emotional responses.
Emotional regulation can be learned through practice and through supported intervention. If you feel like your child is having big emotions that make things a struggle for you and them, reach out to an occupational therapist. We’d be happy to take a look and figure out a way to support your child in regulating their emotions so that everybody can be happy.
