Have you ever wondered why your child with ADHD doesn’t seem to recognize when they need a break, are getting overwhelmed, or are becoming frustrated?
My name is Jennifer Davis, and I’m an occupational therapist. Today, I want to talk about one of the most important thinking skills that helps children better understand themselves, their brains, and what they need to be successful. That skill is called “metacognition.”
What Is Metacognition?
Metacognition is your thinking about thinking. It’s your ability to be your own brain coach, recognize what’s happening and what you need to do to improve the situation.
Our children with ADHD often struggle with metacognitive skills. They have a hard time recognizing what’s happening in their body and how they can make improvements.
How Recognizing What’s Happening in Your Body Is Important for Metacognition
One of the most powerful ways we can help our children is to recognize what’s happening in their body without blame or shame so that they’re able to make improvements in the skills they’re trying to accomplish.
When thinking about metacognition, we want our children to be able to recognize what’s happening in their body. Because, when children are able to recognize the physiological things that are happening in their body, they’re able to respond to them.
This may be things like, “I’m cold right now. I should go get a jacket.” Or, “That pain in my stomach. Maybe I’m hungry and I should go have a snack.” This may also include more emotional things like, “I’m feeling sad right now. I should go play with a friend.” Or, “I’m feeling a little scared. I’m not really sure why, but I should change the environment.”
Being able to recognize what’s happening emotionally or physiologically in our bodies allows us to adapt and make changes.
Children with ADHD Often Have Other Challenges That Make Metacognition More Difficult
Many children with ADHD have sensory differences that make them experience the world differently. They may also need more opportunities for rest, breaks, and things may become more overwhelming to them. If a child is able to recognize right now, “I need to take a break because I’m not doing very well,” allows them to then be more successful with the next activity.
One of the biggest mistakes that people make when working with children with ADHD is to continue to try to push them when they’re not ready. When you’re trying to have a child do a 30-minute seated activity who isn’t emotionally or physiologically ready, you’re going to be struggling the whole time.
Of that 30-minute activity, it may only result in just a couple minutes of successful actions versus if you take things slower and recognize that the children first need a bathroom break, a water break, or even a movement break. Then take those couple of minutes to meet the physiological or emotional needs of the child. That will set you up for success for the rest of the 30-minute activity.
How to Help Your Child Recognize What Their Body Needs
Many children struggle with “thinking about thinking,” that metacognitive skill. But you can actually help a child with metacognition. You can help point out when you think a child may need something.
For example, you may see a child shivering and ask, “what’s happening?” They may not actually recognize that they’re cold at that moment. You need to help them recognize, when you’re seeing that physiological response, that they need a jacket in the moment.
We could just hand them a jacket. We know they’re cold. But that doesn’t actually help them learn to recognize that physiological response that’s happening in their body so that they’re able to then bring a jacket in the future.
Teaching Your Child to Recognize When They Need a Break
Oftentimes, we see our children with ADHD being wiggly in their chair; and we often just tell them to stop or try to tell them what to do. We may even say something like, “Oh, okay, let’s just take a break from this activity.” Again, the break from the activity may be what the child needs in that moment, but they haven’t gained the skill to recognize within their own body that they need the break.
In the future, when you’re not there and you’re expecting your child to do their homework by themselves, what’s going to happen? They might start getting that wiggly feeling, and they just continue to wiggle because they don’t know they need to take a break. You never told them they needed to take a break. And so the activity, that homework, doesn’t get done.
But when they’re able to recognize that the wiggly feeling is an early indicator that they need to take a quick movement break, they’re able to take that break and then get back to the task at hand.
How to Model Self-Awareness for Your Child
One way to help your child with metacognition is to model it for them. I know I’ve found myself multiple times, when driving in traffic with my children, getting frustrated because I’m worried I’m going to be late to where we’re going to go. The car in front of me cut me off, or one of the many other struggles associated with traffic.
I feel that upset and frustration building up in me, and that’s a great opportunity for me to help model that for my children. I’m able to say, “Hey, I’m feeling frustrated right now. There’s a lot more traffic than I was expecting. I’m feeling worried that we’re not going to get to where we need to go on time.” Or, “I’m feeling angry because that guy just cut me off.” Then, once I recognize the emotion that I’m feeling or what I’m experiencing in my body, I’m then able to help apply one of the tools that would help with that emotion.
This also helps our children recognize that we can change our emotional state. I’m feeling frustrated that that car just cut me off. I think I’m going to turn on the music so that I can focus on something I enjoy. This lets my children know that it’s okay to have that emotion.
Teaching Kids with ADHD Healthy Ways to Respond to Big Feelings
Here’s a tool that you can use to improve upon it, which we use with our children. When they’re feeling frustrated because the Legos aren’t stacking up the way they want to, for example, we can also help them by scaffolding. This means providing just enough support to help a child learn a skill on their own, then gradually removing that support as they become more independent.
You could say, “Oh, this is really frustrating. The Legos aren’t working like we want. I’m going to take a deep breath, and now I’m going to try to do the Legos again.” Oftentimes, once we’ve let some of that frustration out, the Legos are going to work a lot better.
So, when we help scaffold out our children, they’re able to gain the success. We want our children to be able to stop, recognize what’s happening in their bodies, choose an appropriate way to respond to that that’s going to help them create success.
Finding the Strategies That Work Best for Your Child
Knowing what responses are going to be successful often takes a little bit of pre-work. We want to work with our children when they’re doing well to find out what types of sensory supports may be successful.
For some kids, swinging on a swing, running around the park, or playing loud music are what they need to feel better. Other kids may need the lights lowered, the music quiet, and limited movement for them to be successful. We need to start identifying these successful actions early so that we’re able to then apply them in moments of frustration or dysregulation.
This allows our children to match the emotional response to the successful activity so that they can be successful in the task that they want to do.
How Metacognition Builds Confidence and Self-Advocacy
When our children better understand what’s happening in their bodies and their brains, they’re able to be a self-advocate. They’re able to advocate for what they need without blaming themselves for the struggle that they’re experiencing.
Nobody is going to blame you or be upset at you when you’re cold. You recognize you’re cold, and you get a jacket, and we move on. We want to build that same confidence and self-advocacy for our children with ADHD. They recognize that they’re feeling a little distracted. They do the task that they need to be less distracted, and we move on.
We want to build confidence and self-advocacy in our children, which is often achieved by improving those metacognitive skills.
If you feel like you or your child may need support with that, reach out to our office. We’d be happy to work with you in identifying how to support your child in learning about their thinking and their emotional responses so that we can build successful strategies for them.
