The Whole Parent Podcast
The Whole Parent Podcast
Parenting ADHD Kids (with Dr. Josh & Dr. Tina Payne Bryson) #36
Resources Mentioned:
Punishment Free-Parenting
The Way of Play
Emotional Regulation Game Guide
Traditional Parenting Fails for ADHD Kids.
Growing up with ADHD this is the episode I wish my parents had...
In this episode, I’m sharing why traditional, compliance-based parenting doesn’t work for kids with ADHD and what we can do instead. I sat down with Dr. Josh Wyner and Dr. Tina Payne Bryson—two incredible experts—to break down the science behind ADHD and offer practical, brain-based strategies you can start using today.
We talk about identifying ADHD in kids, what’s really happening in the ADHD brain, why traditional parenting (aka compliance and punishments) backfire. We also give an alternatives: collaboration, creativity, and especially play to completely transform your relationship with your ADHD child.
This episode is personal, practical, and, I hope, incredibly helpful for anyone raising an ADHD kid—or even just trying to parent differently.
What You'll Learn in This Episode:
- Why traditional parenting strategies fail kids with ADHD.
- How understanding emotional tagging and time blindness can change your perspective on ADHD behaviors.
- Three practical strategies to connect with ADHD kids: collaborative problem-solving, fostering autonomy, and using play to build essential skills.
- BONUS: An exclusive never before heard exerpt from my upcoming book Punishment-Free Parenting
Featured Guests:
- Dr. Josh Wyner: Neuroscientist and founder of Willow Family Health, a nonprofit focused on neurodiversity-affirming mental health care.
- Dr. Tina Payne Bryson: Co-author of The Whole-Brain Child and The Way of Play—and one of the most compassionate voices in parenting today.
My Key Takeaways:
- ADHD isn’t about laziness or bad behavior—it’s about brain's placing different emotional value on things. Understanding those differences is the first step to parenting with empathy.
- Collaboration is everything. When we involve our kids in problem-solving, we’re building lifelong skills and deeper connections.
- Play isn’t just for fun; it’s one of the most effective ways to help ADHD kids build impulse control, emotional regulation, and attention skills.
Call to Action:
If this episode resonates with you, I’d love for you to preorder my book, Punishment-Free Parenting. It’s packed with practical tools and real stories, just like this episode, and it’s designed to help you parent with more connection and less stress—whether your child has ADHD or not.
Thanks for listening to The Whole Parent Podcast! If you found this episode helpful, share it with a friend or on social media—I’d love to keep this conversation going.
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@drjoshuawyner
Welcome to the Whole Parent Podcast. My name is John. I think the first time I realized that there was something different about me than other kids was first grade. Back then I thought I was just bad at being a person Not bad in a dramatic movie villain type of way. Bad in the small, unremarkable ways that make you wonder if you're just weird, like how I was the only one who got in trouble for not being able to sit still during reading time, or how my handwriting was totally illegible, or how I could never remember which spelling list we were on, even though everyone else seemed to know this. One time my first grade teacher, mrs Amos, handed me a sheet of graph paper that I was supposed to write consecutive numbers on one to a hundred. She said that it was due by the end of the day. I stared at it like I hadn't understood her. I had, it wasn't hard, but I just couldn't start. I sat there tapping my pencil against the desk, distracting other kids, feeling the seconds slip by. By the end of the day I'd written seven numbers, seven. A couple of months later, all of the other kids had five or ten sheets of graph paper all taped together, their numbers tallying up into the thousands, I was still on my first sheet.
Jon @wholeparent:It wasn't that I was lazy or indifferent. In fact, I almost cared too much. I cared so much that every time I failed which felt like every day it felt suffocating, overwhelming. I was the kid who couldn't keep up. By the time I was in middle school, my life was a blur of missed assignments, forgotten gym clothes and half-finished science project that lived eternally incomplete. My parents would sigh and say things like why don't you just plan? I tried harder. I even started to finish the homework, but then I wouldn't turn it in. Every assignment felt like I was standing at the bottom of a giant staircase looking up. I couldn't make my legs move, while everyone else seemed to just fly to the top.
Jon @wholeparent:Once in sixth grade, I forgot my math homework for five days in a row. It was a clean sweep for the week. My teacher I can't even remember her name called me to her desk after class and said you're smart, but you have to focus. You know this stuff, just pay attention. I nodded, demoralized. What could I say?
Jon @wholeparent:In seventh grade, I was diagnosed with what was called then ADD attention deficit disorder. Today we call it ADHD inattentive type, if you want to be specific. I got accommodations and medications and the results improved, but I still waited until the last few days of May of my junior year of high school to start on the big junior research paper that we were assigned in October. The truth is, more than the meds or the extra time, it was the fact that in middle school, I had been given another word, a word other than lazy, to describe why I struggled, and that alone made things better.
Jon @wholeparent:But even so, my parents didn't get it. My dad still freaked out when I missed stuff and yelled that I needed to try harder. My mom still made excuses and defended me to teachers, without ever actually understanding. It wasn't until I was 30, having spent more than half of my life in formal school, that I finally understood what it meant to be a kid with ADHD. On this episode of the Whole Parent Podcast, we're answering one simple question why doesn't traditional parenting work for kids with ADHD, and what can we do that will work for kids with ADHD? And what can we do that will A lot of people have advice about what works for kids with ADHD If you have a child with ADHD who struggles to listen.
Dr. Josh Wyner:The four best things you can do to help your child with ADHD.
Jon @wholeparent:Number one ADHD parenting tip. Here are five tips when your child has ADHD. If you're a mom with an ADHD kid, then this video is for you. Some of that advice comes from experts and is grounded in research. Act, don't yak.
Dr. Josh Wyner:The more you blather, the more you natter. The more you nag, the less influence you have. I'm going to explain why punishments don't work and what you should do instead.
Jon @wholeparent:Some is not.
Dr. Josh Wyner:Two supplements that kept my daughter off of ADHD medicine.
Dr. Tina Payne Bryson:Do the exact same thing with kids, with.
Jon @wholeparent:ADHD and ODD. They are no different. They are exactly the same.
Dr. Tina Payne Bryson:In today's society, a lot of people are susceptible to get ADHD because they have bad diets.
Jon @wholeparent:With all of the conflicting information, it can be hard to know if your kid actually has ADHD, much less what you're actually going to do about it if they do. I'm not going to lie, I've hesitated to talk about ADHD on social media or on the podcast. I'm not a psychologist or a psychiatrist or even a person who has studied ADHD. All that much I just don't want to add to the noise. But on season two we're pushing boundaries, and so I had a conversation this week with two experts. First is Dr Joshua Weiner. We call him Dr Josh. He's a clinical neuroscientist, program chair of marriage and family therapy at the Chicago School and founder and executive director of Willow Family Health, a nonprofit counseling center dedicated to providing neurodiversity-affirming mental health services to families in need. Then, later on in the episode, we have Dr Tina Payne Bryson, founder and director of the Center for Connection and Neurodiversity and co-author of not one but two New York Times best-selling parenting books. With their help, we're going to try to one learn some telltale signs that parents can use to make a reasonable guess at whether their kid has ADHD. Two, deconstruct some harmful myths about ADHD, including why traditional parenting usually backfires. And then three, implement three practical tips that we can use for parenting kids with ADHD. If there is any chance that you think your kid has ADHD, you are not going to want to miss this. You are not going to want to miss this. So the first step in learning how to parent a child with ADHD is actually determining whether your child has ADHD, and recent studies show it's actually way more common than you might expect.
Jon @wholeparent:According to the CDC, rates of ADHD diagnosis in kids have risen dramatically in the last decade. In their last report from 2022, rates of ADHD diagnosis in kids have risen dramatically in the last decade. In their last report from 2022, it showed that over 7 million kids in the US that's one in nine have been diagnosed with ADHD. That's more than a million more kids from the previous report in 2016. Of those more than 7 million, a little more than half of them were already on medication and a little less than half of them had already received some form of formal behavioral intervention. That said, as a parent, it can still be hard to know. A lot of that is because we don't even really understand how ADHD manifests in kids, what's going on in their brain. Here's what Dr Josh had to say about that.
Dr. Josh Wyner:When we talk about ADHD, what we're really talking about is what we call emotional tags. So I'm sitting here, we're talking and I want to talk to you. You're emotionally valuable to me. To talk to, that matters. I want, maybe I don't know if I'm hungry, maybe that's emotionally important to me. I'm thinking, oh, I can pay attention to you, maybe I run off and get a snack. Or if I had to go to the bathroom, that's going to be valuable to me. Or I know there's something coming any moment that I have to worry about at the door. Those matter. But what's happening outside my door? Not necessarily important to me. What color the wall is behind me not important to me. I'm not even thinking about it.
Dr. Josh Wyner:So the choices that I've been presented with are pay attention and talk to you, go get some food, go to the bathroom, worry about whether the doorbell is going to ring, and then I choose between those choices. So each of those has an emotional tag. Then you take your ADHD kid right. They're sitting there and, unlike that neurotypical experience you have, all of those have emotional value, but that emotional value is less for them than for your neurotypical person, for them than for your neurotypical person. Each of those tags I just represented have reduced emotional value. And then now what's going on outside? Maybe it had that little bit of value, maybe the color of my wall is kind of interesting.
Dr. Josh Wyner:Well, now I've got six things to choose from. That's the better description of ADHD. So if one of those talking to you happens to be bigger than the others and I focus on you, and then all of a sudden somebody comes to the door and I don't even notice it because I'm talking to you, you say, oh, you're ADHD, you're hyper fixating. Well, you know, that was the thing that mattered, the others don't. Or I switch between them really quickly and you're like, oh, look, how the thing that mattered, the others don't. Or I switch between them really quickly and you're like, oh, look, how hyperactive you are. Again, same thing, right. And we can go through all the others inattentive and everything else. That's all that's happening is, all of those emotional tags are reduced and now, depending on your experience of that reduction, you express it in these different ways, right? So if you understand it from that perspective instead, then you can start to unravel a lot of the myths and misunderstandings.
Jon @wholeparent:Okay. So that kind of leads me to my second question, which is what are some of the outdated or damaging myths that you hear out, just kind of said parents that have come to you, or just out in public, when people talk about ADHD, what are they getting wrong and how is it harmful to our kids if we adopt or internalize those things?
Dr. Josh Wyner:The worst is they're lazy. Just try harder or just make a list, right, that's. That's. That's a favorite that you hear from a lot of folks as they come in and say, well, if you just made a list of things you could do and you followed the list, then you'd be fine. But you're so lazy that you won't even do that and the consequence is we actually have a word for it is demoralized. So what will happen is an ADHD, especially an adult, will come into the office and they'll say I'm depressed. And you'll say explain, what do you mean by depressed? Well, I'm just such a shitty person. I do everything wrong. I can never follow through with anything. I'm just bad at life. That's not quite depression, is it? No, you're demoralized. You've been told you're lazy, you're not good enough, and you've taken that in now as fact.
Jon @wholeparent:Yeah, I'm smiling because I did not intend to go to therapy right now, but that feels dangerously close to my experience of the world and I am a person who I've had some success with making lists, when I can actually determine that making the list is the right thing to do, of course. But I've had some success of following the list because there is an inattentiveness and a look, the next thing can come up and I can just be distracted. I can just move on to that. I can just move on to that, and so I found that lists are helpful.
Dr. Josh Wyner:And I think they can be helpful if they're yours Because notice what you said I decided to make the list, which means you tagged the list with some emotional value, of course.
Jon @wholeparent:Okay, let's pause for a moment and think about that. We'll come back to the part about lists at the end of the episode, but let's consider first what he said before that. What Dr Josh is saying here is that, for kids with ADHD, labeling their struggles as laziness, far from encouraging them to improve, actually demoralizes them. It causes them to adopt a self-image that's grounded in their inadequacies rather than their inherent value. This really shouldn't surprise us. One of the things I talk about extensively in my book, something that we talk about on the podcast all the time, is how our words about our kids become their inner voice, that our perception of them shapes their perception of themselves, and so when we call our ADHD kids lazy, they believe us, not because it's true, but because we are their parents, and they're more likely to act in accordance with that self-critical mindset as a result. But how do we know that if that experience of having diminished value for emotional tags, as Josh called it, is actually what's going on with our kid?
Dr. Josh Wyner:Yeah, I think with ADHD there's a lot of misunderstanding about what is actually happening for the kid. So, in a very short form, if you notice that your child is able to do things like most children can do, that really engage them, that they find that they're really interested in, right, and that's a normal human thing too. Of course we do the stuff we like, but when it comes to the stuff that they are not connected to, there is an exceptional struggle to engage with it. That is the first clue. So it's not so much directly about attention and hyperactivity those words that go with the name as much as that connection to the thing that we're trying to engage with.
Dr. Josh Wyner:If we go back to the model that I appreciate from Russell Barkley, he will talk about it from the perspective of time. So rather than saying, let's talk about attention, can you pay attention? Are you hyper fixated or hyperactive or are you inattentive? Instead of talking about those potential symptoms, he will talk about your sense of time. Are you what he would call time blind or nearsighted? In time He'll say temporarily myopic, but that seems like a big mouthful. Are you very focused in what's happening in the present, often at the expense of the future, even the near future. The kid is doing something where you're looking and you're like hey, don't you realize that if you do that thing, if you go and play with those Legos after we've talked about how you need to put them down or else going to have to take them away and they can't disconnect from it, even in that moment where the consequence is like 10 seconds in the future, that's not that far Right. Here's a timer, ten nine Right, and they're like whatever Legos. Now we're potentially in that time blind mode.
Jon @wholeparent:So now that we've determined what ADHD actually looks like in kids and what actually is going on in our kids' brains who have ADHD, we have to figure out how, as parents, we're supposed to deal with that. How are we supposed to parent kids with ADHD? Maybe it's obvious at this point, but the answer is not traditional, authoritarian parenting. When I say traditional parenting, what I'm talking about here is parenting that emphasizes strict adherence to rules, unquestioned obedience and high expectations for compliance, without negotiation or explanation. It usually relies on some sort of hierarchical structure where the parent holds ultimate authority and the child is expected to follow directions without discussion. Expected to follow directions without discussion.
Jon @wholeparent:Discipline in this approach is often punitive, using fear, shame or well punishments to enforce what they call good behavior. If you were raised like this, how most of us were raised, you know that emotional expression and individual autonomy are not usually encouraged. Compliance and even convenience are prioritized, while fostering understanding or connection are just not the focus in traditional parenting is less about guiding a child's emotional development or understanding the reason behind their behavior, and more about shaping their immediate actions to align with the parent's expectations, and that just doesn't work for kids with ADHD, which actually leads us to our tip number one. If you have a kid with ADHD, you have to ditch traditional parenting.
Dr. Josh Wyner:With ADHD, there is going to be more of a disconnect between the quote-unquote value of complying and doing the task, Because there's other things that have more positive value. One of my favorite examples is with ADHD, you often have something that's called inveracity, meaning the child will say something that's not true, but it's not a lie in the way we mean it normally, because it's more reflexive. They're often not even aware it happened and so, for example, the parent will say clean your room, and the kid will be playing a video game and they'll say, sure, Right, and they won't even register that they actually were asked to clean the room. And then later the parent will say did you clean your room? Yep, Right, and they're playing their game Like no, they didn't, but they won't actually remember saying yep, and then the parent will come in and say what the hell? And they start screaming and we have a whole thing and the kid will be.
Dr. Josh Wyner:I don't. Genuinely, I don't know what you're talking about. I never said that because the reflex was simply this is the thing I'm doing. It matters. There was this noise in the background mommy's voice and I had to make a noise with my mouth to make the noise go away, because I'm working on this and that was the whole.
Dr. Josh Wyner:So there wasn't actually a conversation, but it's perceived that way, and so if we take that model a step further now, there's not compliance, and that's part of the reason why is we have that reflexive dismissal rather than a genuine, you know, noncompliance or kind of thing. It's very in reflexive space. The second is, we also have this feature of what we sometimes I hate the term have pathological demand avoidance, which we see more in autism. However, there's a lot of overlap with autism ADHD we have that whole term ADHD for people with both, and at that point what that's really about is going through life feeling like they have reduced autonomy to begin with, and then the compliance-based request comes in and now it's just one too many and we say, no, I've had enough, I cannot comply anymore.
Jon @wholeparent:Okay, let me summarize this for you really quickly. The way that kids with ADHD respond to this type of parenting punishments, compliance, focus, command, demand parenting is with resistance. So if traditional parenting doesn't work for them, what does?
Dr. Josh Wyner:Parent collaboratively. That's it. Let them guide you in what it is that matters to them. I'll use a real example. We have a young kid that really struggles, like many, to brush their teeth and you say, hey, what would be helpful for you? And the kid will say, well, it's just really boring, I don't like brushing my teeth. Could I have my iPad in there and watch a two-minute video while I brush my teeth for two minutes? And I'll say, sure, right, that's a good use of the iPad. That's not the bad screen time we often talk about of oh no, you're vegging off and you're not engaging. It's hey, you're using it in order to make something less difficult, because the pain of the toothbrushing is often that it has so little emotional value that it's like being stuck in an emotional void for two minutes, and nobody wants that.
Jon @wholeparent:This leads us to tip number two we have to learn to parent collaboratively. Rather than explain how I would use collaborative problem solving, I want to read you a section from my new book which, unless you're listening this before January 28th, is already available wherever books are sold. It comes from the very end of my book, where I give this five-step practical guide to handling any behavior or big emotions in the moment. What I didn't know when I first wrote it was that, like the rest of the book, this is actually tailor-made for parents with ADHD kids. But I guess I shouldn't be surprised. That's just what happens when a kid with ADHD grows up, does a bunch of research and then writes a parenting book. Here's the section Empower through collaborative problem solving. I talked about this in Chapter 4, but collaborative consequences are a great example of collaborative problem solving.
Jon @wholeparent:Collaborative problem solving doesn't always have to be about consequences, though Often it's just that problem solving always have to be about consequences, though. Often it's just that problem solving. If the issue is, for example, getting out of the house in the morning on time, ask your kid what they think some good strategies might be. Younger children usually need to pick between options that you provide, while older grade schoolers, preteens and even teenagers will be able to come up with solutions totally on their own. When they do, even if their ideas aren't what you would have come up with, you need to celebrate it. It's a snapshot into their future where you won't be around and they'll be left to parent themselves. They're building neural pathways in these moments that will serve them for the rest of their lives.
Jon @wholeparent:Celebration isn't enough, though. The key to all of this is that you have to be actually willing to consider what they propose. This is not the meaningless choice that you give to a toddler between putting their left or right shoe on first, though that's effective in its own way, especially when they're seeking autonomy. This is truly gaining their input, because it's valuable to them and you, their guide. Just like with collaborative consequences, they have insight into their own minds that you can't have. If they say that listening to Rage Against the Machine as their alarm clock is going to help get them up, as I did when that was my struggle at 16 years old, trust them If it doesn't work, you can always reassess. This is the ultimate power of the win-win mindset in action. When our kids know that we're seeking their flourishing on their terms, that we're ultimately preparing them to be in charge the hero of their own story. They're going to help us do the work of discipline.
Jon @wholeparent:A simple way to do that is to sit down with your child around a problem where everyone is regulated and you've already gone through steps one through four in the method with a pen and a piece of paper and physically write out solutions. When your child sees you writing their solutions out, physically putting them down on paper, it communicates to them that you're involving them in the problem-solving process. If you feel like you need to add a few potential solutions, you can offer those as well. Pro tip here make sure that at least one or two of the solutions that you write have inherent flaws. You'll see why in a second, write down all of their solutions and then this is the most important point you absolutely do not want to start criticizing or judging these potential solutions until you have all of them down on paper. If you do this, it's going to backfire, undermining your child's sense of agency and reinforcing that you are ultimately uninterested in their collaboration. As a result, the solutions you come up with will never be as effective.
Jon @wholeparent:One reason that you want their input is to leverage and exercise their capacity for what researchers call divergent thinking. Divergent thinking for our purposes can be classified essentially as creative problem solving or coming up with new ideas. Convergent thinking, processed in a different part of the brain, is our decision engine, logically considering the plausibility or efficacy of solutions. The overwhelming majority of adults have developed or have been conditioned, depending on which social neuroscientist you ask, to simultaneously use their convergent thinking to critique and shoot down their own divergent thinking as creative ideas occur. This means that most of our best creative ideas will never even make it to our conscious awareness. Your kids, regardless of age, likely still have a higher capacity for creative problem solving and divergent thinking, as well as more information about what's causing the issue for them in the first place. So their ideas, even if they feel strange to you, actually have a much higher likelihood of being effective at solving the problem than you think. Once they're all down on paper, you can talk about the potential issues with them, including those solutions that you offered, highlighting what you like or dislike about them. If your kids are older, they might say something like that doesn't work for me. That's not going to be motivating. Bite your tongue. They're the hero and ultimately they're the one who will suffer the consequences if the solutions fail. Eventually, you'll come up with a collaborative solution that they can get behind that doesn't undermine the boundaries that you put in place for their safety and well-being and the safety of others, win, win.
Jon @wholeparent:Okay, you've probably been wondering where Tina comes into all this. I mentioned at the beginning that she was going to be in our episode. If you don't already know, she endorsed and actually wrote the foreword for my book, punishment-free Parenting. But she also has a new book that comes out this week, a book that just so happens to focus on one particular parenting strategy that is perfect for kids with ADHD. Her book, written with Georgie Wise Vincent, is called the Way of Play, and that's our third and final tip.
Jon @wholeparent:If we have kids who have ADHD, we need to learn how to parent with play. Tina couldn't join us this week because, along with launching her book, which is a ton of work, believe me, she's also been responding quite heroically. I'll add to the devastating wildfires dangerously close to her home and clinic in California. Devastating wildfires dangerously close to her home and clinic in California. She's raised money for victims, opened up her clinic for free support to affected parents and even opened up her home. She has embodied everything that we should aspire to be, not only as parents, but as human beings. That said, she wanted to have input, so she did record something for us. In spite of all that going on, here she is giving us some free advice on why play is such an important tool in parenting kids with ADHD.
Dr. Tina Payne Bryson:The skills that we want kids with ADHD to build are around emotional regulation, impulse control and, primarily, the ability to flexibly regulate their attention, meaning not hyper-focusing so much that they can't hear their parents' instructions or move on to the next transition, and not being unable to focus their attention. So somewhere in the middle or kind of a more sophisticated layering of both of those skills, where we want them to flexibly be able to move their attention toward and away from different stimuli. So we want our kids to be able to move their attention away from what they're doing If something else important is happening, like an instruction being given. Something like that Play provides the reps over and over and over, allowing kids to move their attention toward and away from other things when we are playing with our kids, and this is what I talk about in my new book, the Way of Play, with Georgie Wiz and Vincent.
Dr. Tina Payne Bryson:We talk about these strategies for how to do this. When we play with our children, we are actually following their lead, but we're giving them many, many opportunities to practice emotional vocabulary, emotional regulation, resilience, building the ability to move attention toward in a way. So if your kid's hyper-focused on something but you want them to listen to something else or move on and practice stretching those attentional flexibility muscles, the way that we play with them can help them do that. We also can practice impulse control with silliness, with playfulness and when play is fun enough and it is much more fun for them. When we are playing with them and following their lead, they actually are able to stretch their capacity, which then gives them the reps over and over and over practicing impulse control, attentional flexibility, emotional vocabulary, emotional resilience and resilience overall. So when you play with your kids and we talk about how to do this in the book, your kid will learn all of these strategies giving their brain practice, building the skills that they could really use some growth in.
Jon @wholeparent:Okay, let's just stay here for a moment. What Tina is offering us here is that not only the what of play, but even just the environment of play provides neurodivergent kids with an incredible opportunity to build lagging skills. Where compliance-driven, traditional parenting is met with resistance or outright defiance, play becomes this perfect framework for kids who actually want to practice emotional regulation, empathy and impulse control. That's the real key here, the primary takeaway for this episode. It's what Josh was talking about when I, a person with ADHD, said that I have success with making lists Because I was the one choosing to create that support system for myself, because I had the autonomy, because, in other words, I placed value on improving those lagging skills, I was able to find success. Here it is in a sentence All kids, but especially ADHD kids, learn better when they want to learn.
Jon @wholeparent:I want to end this episode with three practical examples of how we can replace traditional parenting with collaboration and play for kids with ADHD, embodying our three tips. Two come from Tina and one is from Josh. Here they are. I'm going to start with two from Tina, both which come from her new book about play, and sorry for the background noise. She recorded this while she was at LAX.
Dr. Tina Payne Bryson:One of the amazing things about ADHD kids is that they tend to have incredible cognitive skills, but development for all kids is usually not linear and it's usually not synchronous, meaning you might have really strong cognitive development, but your social and emotional development might be lagging a little bit behind and this is especially the case for kids with ADHD. A lot of the time. So they might be incredibly ahead of their peers in terms of their cognition, but when it comes to social and emotional stuff, they need a little more support and some more time for development to unfold. One of the best things we know about the brain is that we can give repeated experiences that help build those skills, and one of the best ways to do that is through play. Here's my strategy for building these emotional skills.
Dr. Tina Payne Bryson:One of the strategies in the book called bring emotions to life, and when we talk about bringing emotions to life, it's where you are playing with the character. Anyway, you're playing and you know following your kids lead. Maybe you are pretending to be a restaurant and as you are playing, you introduce emotions into the character that you're playing. So, for example, your customer, your child, is really demanding. They keep complaining and instead of just, you know, going along with it. You can say, oh, I feel so frustrated, nothing I can do seems to make things go well for you. You're such a demanding customer and you bring those kinds of emotions in If your child is wanting you to be the pirate and you are, you know, on the edge of the ship and someone makes you walk the plank. You're like but I'm scared.
Dr. Tina Payne Bryson:I don't want to go into the water. It's going to be so cold and I've never jumped in the water before. What if there's scary things in the water? So you introduce emotions and as you do this you are building social and emotional skills. You are creating scenarios where your child has to then respond to you and be like don't worry, I'm gonna throw you a life vest. So you are creating reciprocity in your interaction with your kid. But you're also naming emotions, bringing emotions to life. Where they are expanding their emotional vocabulary, they are seeing how you problem-solve and respond to emotions. So one of the ways we help build the social and emotional skills that may be lagging with your kid's amazing cognition development is to play and play with them.
Dr. Tina Payne Bryson:One game you can play that I talk about in detail in the way of play is to dial intensity up and down. This allows your kid to practice the skills of reining in their motor impulses, their emotional impulses, and paying attention to what you need as well. So here's the way it works. Let's say you are goofing around with your kid. Maybe you're sword fighting or you're playing in some way. That's kind of a little bit physical and it starts getting a little too much. You can say that was hard. Let's try medium Okay, now let's try light. Okay, now let's try a little bit harder. And so you're dialing the intensity of their motor activity up and down, based on their ability to regulate their motor states, their impulses and even the emotions that come with those. So try dialing the intensity up and down by practicing hard, medium, soft, a little more, a little softer, a little harder, and you can play with those with better activity.
Jon @wholeparent:Now here's one from Josh. It's actually more than just an example. It's a story about a family who switched from the traditional command-demand approach to their struggling ADHD kid to something more fun actually, with video games.
Dr. Josh Wyner:So I remember many years ago there was a child who was really struggling with homework. I know that's never happened before, but they were really behind, right, they were, I want to say months behind on their schoolwork, failing out of their classes, and the parents were at a loss. They said we do the homework every night. We send them to their classes. And the parents were at a loss. They said we do the homework every night. We send them to their room. We say you can play your video games once you're done with your homework, go to the room for three hours. They come out and they wouldn't do anything. We repeat over and over again and I said well, they like their video games, right, yeah, okay. They like their video games right, yeah, okay.
Dr. Josh Wyner:And with ADHD really with any kid, but especially with ADHD, one of the difficulties is also because of that whole time situation. You can't sit and do something for that long successfully. You've got to do chunking with your time. We do this even with accommodations for adult students. And here's my suggestion instead, do less homework.
Dr. Josh Wyner:This is easy buy-in for the kid, by the way, right, this is only difficult with the parents.
Dr. Josh Wyner:Don't ask them to do as much homework. Instead break it up into maybe 40 minute homework breaks, followed by 20 or 30 minutes of getting to play video games, and then you have to act as the internal or the replacement for the internal structure and you come in, you say, okay, now it's time for another 30, 40 minutes of homework and then repeat, and only do this maybe two, at most three times a night. So you're only doing maybe two 45 minute chunks of homework a night, at most a third one, and let's just see what happens. Right, because the kid is in agreement with this, they like this idea. That's just the collaborative part, and the parent is also letting go of being the one that comes in and just says, hey, everything, my way, comply. They came back two weeks later and the kid had already caught up almost a month on their homework. Such a stark difference, because the kid was able to identify what mattered to them. They wanted to play this game every night and the parent was willing to let go of the compliance.
Jon @wholeparent:If you like this episode of the Whole Parent Podcast, you're going to love my new book Punishment-Free Parenting the Brain-Based Way to Raise Kids Without Raising your Voice. According to Josh, tina and others, this is the perfect book to read if you're a parent who has a kid who has ADHD and good news, it turns out if your kid doesn't have ADHD, it's actually a better and more effective way to parent neurotypical kids too. Find it wherever books are sold on January 28th. And if you're already a podcast fan, chances are you're going to love the audio version, because they let a kid who almost failed junior English, who has ADHD, read it himself. Of course, a special thank you to doctors Josh Weiner and Tina Payne Bryson for lending their voice and expertise to this episode. Links to their social media, as well as to Tina's new book, the Way of Play, can be found in the show notes Until next week. Thanks for listening. This has been the Whole Parent Podcast. Um, I I'm actually just sitting here trying to keep attention on moving our conversation, but I'm just sitting here going. I'm just sitting here going that reflexive, like lying and I do this like to this day and
Jon @wholeparent:I'm like like my wife will be like did you like clean the back room? My, my, my parents are coming and I'm like focused on like trying to do the other things for and I'll just be like, yeah, I did, and I will immediately, within, within a second, I'll go wait, no, I didn't, I don't know why. I just said that. And like she's like what the hell is wrong with you, like what's, why did you just lie? And then just immediately be like, oh, I just lied. Anyway, you should be my relationships therapist.
