How To Parent A Child With ADHD And Autism

Do you want to know how to parent a child with ADHD and autism? I'm Nicolene Peck and I teach parenting and good communication as well as how to build strong family bonds all over the world through the lens of the principle self-government and I have a lot of experience with kids with ADHD and autism. In this video we're going to talk about why it can be difficult to parent a child with ADHD and autism and then I'm going to be sharing with you key things that you can do to help your ADHD autistic child succeed. I have multiple tips for you because I have parented multiple children with ADHD and autism. So I raised four children of my own and they were all neurotypical children but for many years I took in therapeutic treatment care children to do therapeutic treatment foster care and the majority of them had neurodiversities. So there was ADHD, ODD, RAD, FAS, kleptomania, compulsive lying, autism, different ranges on the spectrum, there was sensory issues, personality disorder, bipolar, so many things. The list could go on and on for how many different things that we worked through and most of those children that had those neurodiversities that I was working with they also often had honesty issues which meant that usually there was the kleptomania, compulsive lying, those types of things because I specialized on taking children into my home who also struggled with honesty issues because of their trauma and abuse. So they also were working through trauma and abuse. Everything on this channel, all the videos here will be applicable to working with someone with ADHD and autism. Let me explain. I know it seems like it's super special, it's super different and it is special and it is different than probably how you were raised and they process differently than other people. However, the principles that I teach were designed for people who are neurodiverse. The whole program was designed for the treatment children that I was working with that had the neurodiversities, the trauma, sometimes the learning disabilities, all of those things packaged together. That's who it was created for and then people started asking me if I would teach at churches and schools and parent groups and support groups and stuff like that and I said, okay, I guess, thinking that it would be short-lived and then the BBC made a documentary of our family and brought some teens to stay in our house for eight days and then everything just exploded because people saw the calmness and the change of heart and they saw these teens want to learn self-government and want to be part of our family when at first it looked like they didn't. And everyone said, well, whatever you're doing, we want it. We want it. So I thought I was just doing something to help these treatment children and then I decided to raise my children with it because I saw that it was all principles and skills, so anyone could use it and then everyone wanted it. So that's why I can say to you, everything on this channel can be applicable to your family too, even though you may have someone in your family who's neurodiverse. So what does it look like when you're parenting someone who has ADHD and autism? When somebody is autistic, they get very frustrated when things change. They don't like change. They also sometimes can get very emotional, moody, they're creatures of habit. That is a big part of autism and also sometimes they don't look at you, they don't communicate well, they have maybe some delayed or poor social skills and so we have to help work them through that too. But then what about the ADHD? Well, the ADHD can lead to impulsivity, it can lead to a person feeling, again, moody. So we can have double moody going on sometimes with some people. It's not everybody because as you know, there's a spectrum and as you know, every person is still unique even if it can be classified as ADHD. We can have people who display with ODD tendencies, meaning they don't want to be directed, they don't want to be guided, they don't want to be corrected, they don't want to take responsibility for themselves. That's very common with ADHD. Sometimes honesty issues play in pretty heavily to ADHD because people don't want to take responsibility for themselves. Listen, you know probably what you're dealing with even better than I do because every person in every home life is different. But what I can tell you is one of the key things that you need while working with someone with ADHD and autism is you need predictability and you need a plan. If you've already subscribed to this channel, then you know that I am all about developing that prefrontal cortex and making a plan. The prefrontal cortex handles problem solving and planning for the person. When a person is autistic, they love to know what the plan is and they love to know when they get to follow through with their plan and if something gets in the way, that is very disruptive. They like to follow through with the plan so we want to stick with it. This can mean that the person is not flexible and is maybe not able to adapt very well or doesn't want to adapt very well but we still have to teach them to adapt. That's important because life is not always going to be planned and go exactly their way which means that they still are going to need certain skills for success. But the neat thing is you can use skills that helped with adapting to different circumstances and they will feel like it's okay because they can focus on the steps to the skill and feel like everything is good and fine. Now I know that there could be a variety of ages watching this video. These books here are probably good for ages 12 and under because they're not babyish. They're super relevant. The characters are ages 10 to 4. They're siblings. They're all in every book. These are my children actually. These books each teach one of the four basic skills of self-government. These are going to be your foundational skills. These are adult skills. Everyone needs them and they have steps associated with them. So the four skills that these books teach are following instructions, accepting no answers and criticism, accepting consequences and disagreeing appropriately. Each one of these skills has a skill set. So for instance to follow instructions you look at the person or the situation, keep a calm face, voice and body, say okay or ask to disagree appropriately which is one of our other skills and then you do the task immediately and then check back. Now part of the task may need to have some of its other steps associated with it. You'll have to work through that but then when they do the task and they check back and they go through all five of those steps then there is a three-step process that the parent uses for feedback which is part of the parent's self-government skills. But the child knows how all the feedback is going to happen. They know their four skills, they know mom and dad's five skills, they know how they're going to discuss a problem if it occurs and when the discussions are going to happen because we have certain meetings and certain scripts that we follow every single time. This helps them not only feel more calm because things are more predictable so they have less anxiety but it also helps them take a little bit more ownership over their own behaviors because they have these regular times where they discuss them in ways that feel predictable and healthy and they don't take too long because there's always time limits attached to the meetings that we're going to have when we discuss together as well. By the way you can find these books on my website which is teachingselfgovernment.com. Self-government is being able to determine the cause and effect of any given situation and possessing a knowledge of your own behaviors so that you can control them. So what that means is that you understand how you work and you understand the cause and effect and the system that is around you. So there's a formula, there's a system and then there's what you understand about you. You hook those two pieces of information together, you make plans and you have the best chance of having successful outcomes for yourself. So it's very systematic, this works really well for people with autism. In fact there are multiple autistic websites that help families who have people with autism in them and they actually suggest this type of a method, they suggest my method. There are many family therapists and counselors who work with children with ADHD and autism who will suggest to the parents this system. There are occupational therapists as well who use this type of system in their offices and they're getting it all from here, from teaching self-government because they need concrete things that will actually help with self-analysis too which is beneficial. This particular system of self-government teaches parents and children self-government, not just children. So the parents and the children have to start at the same place which is understanding self. One of the hardest things that a person with ADHD and autism ever learns is how to self-regulate. The skill of self-regulation can be a labor to perfect. In fact let's be honest, even if your neurotypical self-regulation can sometimes be very difficult, children are learning self-regulation anyway as their brains grow and their prefrontal cortex is fully developed and as they come into adulthood. So that's part of their development anyhow but then when they're neurodiverse they have a little bit increased anxiety, they see the world through a little bit different lens. Sometimes they can get some fast tracks to the back brain, they can have some pretty deep ruts in and to try to overcome them can take some practice. So the parents and the children both need to be prepared with a self- regulation plan or a calm plan. Having a calm plan is super important. In the teaching self-government calm plan we understand calmness so we teach about calmness, what it is, what it isn't, how it feels and how to know if you're there. Then we make a plan for how that child is going to get themselves to calmness. We talk about things in their external environment but we also talk about the thoughts and questions that they might pose to themselves inside as well because sometimes they have to challenge what's going on in order to not fall in to that fast track to the back brain. Then we also establish a skill set that parents can use to help their children remember to come to front brain again and again. It does take consistency, it takes some pre-planning but it's absolutely possible to learn what we call the rule of three and how to develop a calm plan for good self-regulation. Now there are other videos on this channel that are going to be very helpful for you at learning self-regulation. There's videos specifically mentioning self-regulation but there is also a video that goes into quite a few of the nuts and bolts of self-government. If you want to get a taste of what maybe the rule of three is like those types of things you can find videos on this channel. There's one in particular that I recommend going to first and that is one called the not so known secret for parenting success. Click on the link to that video now and you'll start learning a lot more about these skills and principles of self-government that I'm talking about.