Reply To: Help me – Help my son

[blackdog]

I’m not as polite as sdwa. That doctor is an idiot. And I thought mine was bad. 🙄

I have to be the devil’s advocate here for a minute though. ADD should not be used as an excuse. It is an explanation, as in “Oops, I forgot to set my alarm again. I am having trouble with that and I will have to find a way to fix it.” Not “I forgot to set my alarm again but it’s not my fault, I have ADD, I can’t remember things. It’s not fair to expect me to do it.”

I am not blaming you as a parent. I am sure you did your best. You had a challenging child that you didn’t know how to help. Most parents don’t have a clue what they are doing with, or to, their kids. That’s what keeps therapists, and comedians, in business. 😉

I have been down the “I have ADD and there’s nothing I can do about it” road. Trust me, it’s not a trip your son wants to take. He needs to take control of his life. He will always struggle and there may be some things he will never be able to control. And no matter how hard he tries, he’s going to make mistakes. And those behaviour patterns will keep repeating. But he can learn to manage them better. He can develop strategies that work for him to control the ADD and create more positive patterns of behaviour. He is still young and he has a great opportunity to get on the right track now, before he ends up with half a lifetime of regrets and emotional baggage.

ADHD is a very strange thing. It can be very subtle and affect your life in ways that you don’t see. Because we are all intelligent and capable. It’s not that we don’t know how to do things, it’s that we can’t do them despite knowing how. I am still in the learning process myself. And I still trip over my tongue every time I try to say “I have a disability”. I have never thought of myself as disabled. I didn’t see a lot of the ways ADHD has affected my life until I found this forum and started reading about other people’s experiences. And now I finally know why it is that I just can’t seem to keep the house clean for more than 2 days, why the clutter always creeps back no matter how many times I get rid of it, and why the laundry never gets sorted, or folded, or put away. And why I can’t be on time to save my life. And why I left an open can of soup on the counter again last night.

Now the question is, what do I do with that soup? Is it possibly still safe to eat?…….

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