The focus here is to help you juggle the competing demands any parent feels. You want to hold high standards, but you can see how the competition and pressure these standards can produce take their toll on your child. You know it’s best to stay positive, but you want your child to deal with life’s realities and be able to tolerate frustration. You’re committed to advocating for your child, but you worry that being his champion means he won’t take responsibility. This chapter will help you balance all of these competing demands and others.

I’m now going to begin challenging you to start asking a new question. Instead of either high standards or connecting to your child, you will begin to ask, “How can I have both?” Each time you are confronted with one of these dilemmas, push yourself to look for a solution that honors both sides of the tension. In doing so, you will learn the art and science of flexible thinking. Flexible thinking means you realize that in some cases you don’t have to put your chips down on one value over another. Flexible thinking means that you have the ability to find a way to honor seemingly competing demands.

How can you connect deeply with your child and yet still set strict limits? Some of the activities below will guide you toward answers to this question. One of the answers is that the more deeply connected to your child you become, the more you see his side, the more leverage you have to enforce standards and limits. Another piece of the puzzle is that your child will push limits just to get the much-needed attention he is seeking. If you give him what he really wants—someone trying to see from his perspective—he won’t need to push limits to get your attention.

You may be afraid that seeing your child’s side will compel you to always do what he wants. You have the power to work hard to see your child’s perspective while choosing limits and standards that are different from your child’s. But as a parent, you always win by making a great effort to see the world from your child’s viewpoint, whether or not the actions you take cater to that perspective.

Marshmallow juggling

Leonardo da Vinci believed that juggling was one of the best activities for synchronizing the brain and stimulating flexible thinking. While I haven’t found any scientific evidence that proves that, it’s fun enough to make it worth a try.

You and your child can begin to train your minds by practicing juggling marshmallows. Buy a bag of large marshmallows and start out by trying to keep two in the air. Then move to trying to juggle three marshmallows. You might even buy a book for learning how to juggle. There are many kits that often come with a guide and some balls or scarves to begin practicing with. Scarves can be easier to start with since they fall much more slowly. After you practice juggling, you can make it even more of an event by melting some of the remaining marshmallows on a graham cracker with chocolate, making s’mores. If you and your child find this activity fun, you can make it a regular practice, building those brain connections that allow for more complex and flexible thinking.

Driving activity: Thinking inside the box

Parents of kids with ADHD can delight in their child’s creativity and yet fear the child’s difficulty with paying attention to details and following rules. Creativity (one of the biggest gifts of ADHD), by definition, requires breaking existing rules or at least playing with them. Every adult knows that if you don’t pay attention to details and follow the important rules, devastating results can follow. So how do you honor your child’s creativity while still steering him toward the realities of succeeding in the world?

Many parents’ anxiety about how their child will make it in the real, grown-up world provokes them to try to redirect their child’s interests away from music, art, or photography. However, it’s important to honor your child’s artistic gifts while giving him some basic skills in the service of money and business management.

For this activity, you can demonstrate your respect for your child’s creative passion by opening up a discussion with him about how he could earn a living with his creative expression. Egg him on to begin to think about the realities of creating a product, producing it, getting it to people who would be interested in it, taking in money, managing money, saving money, and paying taxes. You don’t have to prepare your child to launch a business in current time, but as you begin to discuss the realities that he will eventually face, you will let him know that even if he does pursue a living following his creative passion, he will still have to navigate real-world complexities. If you have this “in-the-box thinking” conversation with him regularly, you are accomplishing two goals: you will improve your connection with your child while laying the groundwork for his success as an adult.

Playing silly parrot and standard parrot

Kids with ADHD find it almost impossible to listen. This one symptom can create an avalanche of problems leading to some of the most serious impairments in functioning. A fun game you can play that gives your child a chance to build his listening skills while honoring the underlying gift is Silly Parrot and Standard Parrot. The gift underlying a failure to listen is that while he is not paying attention to words, your child is usually highly sensitive to nonverbal cues and unspoken emotions and tensions. ADHD kids may not hear a word you say, but they “have your number,” so to speak. They usually can see right through you, and this distraction prevents them from actually listening to the content of what you and others are saying.

A way to honor both sides of this is to tell your child that you’re going to play the Silly Parrot and Standard Parrot game. Tell him that a standard parrot listens to a person talk and then just repeats back exactly what the person has said. A silly parrot waits until the person is done speaking and then says whatever he feels like saying. Give your child the chance to play silly parrot first: 1) you say a sentence, and 2) he blurts out whatever comes to his mind. Have a good laugh together and then play standard parrot: 1) you say a sentence, and 2) he repeats it back to you exactly as you said it. You can encourage him to play each bird in a squawking “parrot” voice and ham it up. Go back and forth between the silly parrot and the standard parrot. Over time, your child will get the difference between the two styles and gain some basic skills for listening so that he can repeat things back to you as the standard parrot.

excerpt from The Gift of ADHD Activity Book: 101 Ways to Turn Your Child's Problems into Strengths by Lara Honos-Webb Ph.D.