1. Don’t assume your struggling teen has the right skills but just isn't using them.
As a parent of a teen with attention deficit disorder , ask yourself: When it comes to executive skills, is one of your strengths one of your teen’s weaknesses? You may find it hard to believe that your teen doesn’t have this skill because you easily solve problems that require it. Or if you have a “tough love” parenting style, your child’s missteps may seem like a motivational issue that will be resolved by letting the teen suffer the consequences.
To respond to this more complex world, we can’t leave executive skills development to chance. However, working with teens on these skills is not like working with younger children. They are unlikely to tolerate our telling them, on a day-in, day-out basis, how to organize their belongings or manage their time or emotional reactions. Even if they tolerated this, it would not be in our interest or theirs to make all of their decisions for them. It would undermine their growth and development.
This leaves you with the task of searching for opportunities to encourage the drive for mastery and control in your teen without putting her at significant risk. One way to do this is to work with your teen on accomplishing objectives that are in the teen’s self-interest and that signify increased independence. You could work together to help your teen obtain a driver’s license or purchase a car.
But suppose your child’s weakness is in attention. Given the distractions that teens face, and their lack of experience, driving represents a major risk. While the easy solution might be to not let your teen drive until he’s older, it would threaten his independence and, in a way, keep him tied to home, a result that will likely lead to significant conflict.
There are changes you can make in the environment, the task, or the way you interact with your child. For teens, environmental changes could mean providing an alarm clock or finding a car with a lot of safety features and the capacity for driver monitoring. Changing the task might involve starting with small steps. Instead of room cleaning, putting dirty clothes in the laundry basket could be a first step.
If your teen is not good at a task, break it down into small steps. Start with the first step and proceed forward. Don’t move to another step until your teen has mastered the previous step. Take laundry, for example. Starting at the beginning might mean asking the teen to sort clothes into lights and darks. You praise him for doing a good job and move past the first step when sorting becomes second nature.
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