A small revelation

Forum: Communication with ADHD

I was browsing a board for people with ADHD and came across a post where an ADHD mother was describing an interaction with her 6-year-old son. She described herself as a busy working single mom. There'd been a lot going on and she decided to have "a chill day." Neither of them got dressed, she spent the day scrolling her phone and reading and he apparently played with his toys by himself.

At the end of the day, he said "I hope you're not lazy tomorrow." She was shocked by this. She launched into an explanation about executive dysfunction, why it's not laziness, why calling people lazy is harmful. Then she went online to post about it.

Something really stuck out to me: at no point did she — or anyone else replying to that thread, not a single person — express any curiosity whatsoever about what her very young son was feeling. There must be a reason he said that he hoped things would be different tomorrow, right?

It struck me that he was learning the same thing a lot of us have learned: what we want doesn't matter. When we're unhappy with the way the ADHD person in our lives is showing up for us, it's because there is something wrong with us, our beliefs and our expectations, and that needs to be corrected. What we wanted or why the current state of things is making us unhappy is so irrelevant and unimportant that it isn't even worth acknowledging.

And the thing is, this ADHD mom didn't seem uncaring. She didn't yell at her son. She obviously wanted to have the conversation in a loving way. It's just that she didn't even notice that what he was doing was trying to express an unmet need, not shaming her.

It's a small thing. I don't want to be overly critical. But it's easy to imagine how a young child is repeatedly reoriented from their own feelings about a parent's choices to the parent's feelings, and a sense of responsibility for managing them.

The more I delve into understanding ADHD and the dynamics of my own marriage, the more I feel that at the core of this is a fundamental failure of empathy, and the more I realize that making sure my kids value their feelings is something I must prioritize.