Have you ever tried talking your child through a meltdown, only to feel like they’re not hearing a word you’re saying?
If your child has ADHD, it’s not because they’re ignoring you. When they’re overwhelmed, their brain may not be ready for logic or problem-solving just yet.
Hi, I’m Jennifer Davis. I’m an occupational therapist, and today I’m going to talk about why reasoning doesn’t always work during emotional moments and how using the right strategies at the right time can help your child be more successful.
Why Reasoning Doesn’t Work During an ADHD Meltdown
If reasoning always worked during a meltdown, parenting would be easy. If you’re like me, when your child is having a meltdown, talking them through it is not always going to help. You might tell them, “There’s no reason to cry. Get up. Let’s keep going.”
Those strategies often don’t work, and that’s because we’re using a top-down approach. We’re trying to logic and think our way through an activity in a moment when the child is not able to use that type of reasoning. For our children with ADHD, we often struggle with some of our executive function and emotional regulation skills, which can make a top-down approach challenging.
A top-down approach requires the cognitive skills to stop, think about what’s happening, and then act appropriately. Top-down methods to stay organized, for example, will often include things like visual timers, organizational systems, or checklists. While a checklist may seem like a great way to help organize things, if you don’t have the ability to use that checklist at the moment because you’re overwhelmed, it really is going to do nothing for you.
It’s Important to Support Your Child Before You Expect Them to Listen
When we’re using a bottom-up approach, we’re really focusing on some of the underlying deficits and building on skills to help the child be successful. For example:
- A child who struggles with sensory processing skills may need additional sensory work to help regulate their bodies before they participate in an activity.
- A child who has weak muscles or poor range of motion may need to work on strength building and exercise before they have the skills to go play a game.
- A child who struggles with working memory or processing speed may need to improve those executive functioning skills so that they’re able to participate in the academic skill at hand.
When we’re working with a child, we need to use a combination of both bottom-up and top-down approaches so that we’re able to meet their needs.
How to Know Which Strategy to Use in the Moment
Recognizing when one skill should be used over another is an important way to have success in treatment sessions. For example, if you think about a child having a tantrum in the grocery store because they want a candy bar, that’s not the time to have them checklist all of the different things that they need to do in the day so that they could earn the candy bar at the end of the day.
It’s not even a great time to reason with them that they have a candy bar at home, or that we’re going out to ice cream right after. In that moment when the child is having that tantrum, they’re not ready for those cognitive, logical thinking skills of the top-down approach.
At that moment, we’ll really need to work on those underlying emotional regulation skills, those bottom up skills that we need to do to help them. Recognizing which one to use at which time will help create success. When working in occupational therapy, we often use a combination of top-down and bottom-up approaches. This can help our children with ADHD because we’re combining skills from both angles to meet success.
Occupational Therapy Can Help Your Child Build These Skills
If you need help with understanding different strategies for helping your child, occupational therapy can be a great way to find those skills. Often as parents who have good underlying skills, we tend to use a top-down approach. And for our kids with ADHD who are missing some of those underlying skills, there’s often a disconnect, which creates a frustration for both you as the parent and your child.
Children with ADHD really want to do well. They want to make you happy, and they want to complete the tasks. They often find themselves being frustrated that they’re not able to do the things that they want to do, and it’s not because they don’t want to do them. It’s because they’re struggling with the underlying executive functioning and emotional regulation skills.
When we’re able to use those bottom-up approaches, we’re able to help fill in some of the gaps and help them be more successful with their daily activities.
If you need help in any of these areas, we’d love for you to give us a call at (408) 337-2727 so we can work through what your child is struggling with and how we can help them be successful.
