Do you want to know how to calm a child with ADHD without medication? Well, I'm Nicholeen Peck
and I'm the mother of 4 previous foster parent of many treatment children, many of which had ADHD,
and in this video I'm going to be sharing with you what I did to help them without medication.
First, I'm going to share with you my experiences working with troubled youth who had ADHD and then
I'm going to share with you some principles that you need to help them overcome some of
those tendencies and be the most successful even though they process a little bit differently.
I know that children with ADHD can be different, you know, each one has their different things that
they do and so I know that sometimes it seems like well that may work for that version of ADHD but I
don't think for my child that's gonna work. I can promise you that what I'm sharing with you in this
video will actually work no matter. No matter if your child has ADHD or if they don't. In fact if
you have multiple children and one of them has ADHD and you're trying to help them, I highly
recommend applying all of these principles to everyone in your family because really
in order to change one heart, one set of behaviors, usually an entire environment needs to change and
targeting one person's behavior all the time can really start to feel like a burden after a while
and can make the person shut down to any of the training or helps that you're trying to give them.
So, let's talk about what types of things they need to know that you can tell them to prepare
them to be able to not have as much of a hard time with outburst, anger, frustration. Some of the
things that come with the higher anxiety level associated with ADHD. When I was a young mother,
I decided that I was going to take in treatment children to do foster care, treatment foster care,
in my home. Almost every one of the children that I took into my home over that four year period
of time had ADHD. Now, what this meant was that they were going to have a difficult time staying
focused on things, they were gonna also have a hard time sometimes with lists of things that needed to
be done, they were also going to get frustrated more quickly than other people potentially
so I needed to be ready for that and have some things in place that I could help them calm down.
I took in these youth, I got to know them and then I taught them key things that they needed for
their success. We turned out to be very successful. In fact, there were so many youth that came to me
and shared with me how they didn't think they could overcome some of the thought processes
that they had a habit of going to in their brains. So, if we can remember in our brains that we all
have paths that are well worn. Little ruts that we just fall into when a certain word is said,
we go to that place. When a certain behavior happens from another person, we go to that place.
Well, a person who has ADHD oftentimes has these ruts worn even a little deeper because when you
have higher emotion or anxiety associated with the time that you take that path it becomes even
a stronger path and your brain wants to take it more times. So if we remember that, we can help them
understand that their calmness which is another type of an emotional feeling and their security
about knowing what to do instead of taking that path will be just what they need to not have that
habit anymore, to start to pull themselves away from that habit and create a new more positive
habit for themselves. There was one young woman that came to my home and she was about 15 years
old. She raged, she had a lot of outbursts and anger control issues. She was ADHD, she also had some
other issues that she was working with as well but that ADHD seemed to really fuel a lot of her anger
and her oppositional defiance that she had. So, we worked with her with the things that I'm going to
be sharing with you in the rest of this video and she came to me after being in my home for about
5 months or so and she said Nicholeen, I just have to tell you feel like a different person. I
don't even feel like I have to get mad anymore. In fact, I don't even worry as much like I just feel
so much more calm. So what did we do to help her? Let's get to that. One of the very first
things that I taught all the youth that came to my home was what self-government was. So, I am known
all over the world for teaching families parents and children how to have self-government in their
relationships with each other and with other people so that they can have more happiness joy
unity, connection and love in their relationships. I needed to teach these foster children that were
coming into my home what self-government was so that they could truly think of themselves
as the person that needed to be in control of them. I told them I can't control you. I can set
up an environment that will help you decide to govern yourself, regulate yourself, try to overcome
some of the habits and conquer some of the issues that you're working on but I can't do
any of it for you what you are going to have to do is you are going to have to learn self-government.
Now, self-government is different than just self-control. Self-control is like pulling back and
just not showing almost hiding behind a wall but self-regulation is when you know what's going on
inside and you make the best healthiest decisions for yourself so that you can have the most optimal
success. The definition of 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 this means I needed to teach all of these youth cause and effect in their relationships, in
their communications. I also needed to teach them that it was healthy and okay for them
to examine themselves and determine when they needed to make a change and not. Now, this meant
I was going to need to do regular assessment for them at first so that they could learn
when and how to assess and correct themselves afterward as they prepared for adult life. So,
what does self-government look like? Let's talk about some of these other principles. Before
I share my next principles with you, hit that subscribe button. There is a lot of great content
on this channel and new videos come out all the time related to improving your relationships, your
communications and improving unity in your home as well. An important thing that your child needs
to understand is the tone of your home. What you want the tone to feel like versus what the tone is,
right? They need to be able to assess what feels good and calm and what feels like it's fueling
anger and contention and power struggle. It is up to us to point out the different tones or feelings
that exist and label them. Oh, that feels very loving, doesn't it or that feels really
united we feel bonded to each other right now. Look at this good communication that we're having.
Do you feel calmness? A person cannot learn self-government unless they know how to get
themselves calm. We are wondering how to calm down a person with ADHD, right? Well, we have to teach
them how to calm themselves. This is vital and at the end of this video, I'm going to be sharing with
you a free gift that you can have so that you can teach them calmness and your self-calmness
even more than what I'm sharing here in this video right now. But to understand calmness, calmness is
power. Calmness is a person who's ready to be focused in an instant to meet any crisis.
You need to teach your child when you are calm that means you've decided you can adapt, you can
stop, you can take a look you can see how do I relate to this situation or to this person?
You can ask yourselves questions before you will jump into reactions. When a person is calm,
they give themselves a plan for how to do that. I share that plan in my calm parenting toolkit
which I'm going to teach you how to get at the end of this video. The next things that
you'll teach your child are skills. Skills that they need for communication success, There are
4 basic skills that I teach in my teaching self-government parenting course. Those 4
basic skills are following instructions, accepting "no" answers and criticism, accepting consequences
and disagreeing appropriately. Each one of those 4 basic skills has a skill set attached to
it. For instance, to accept "no" answers or criticism, there's a 4-step process. You look at the person,
keep a calm face, voice and body say okay or ask to disagree appropriately and then you drop
the subject. When a person knows those 4 steps to that one skill, they can analyze what parts they
did, what parts they didn't do so that they know where to improve. So, if we just expect a child
to have good behavior, they don't know what that is. Good behavior is actually kind of vague. In fact, it
can even be subjective. It can even be something that if that pleases me, it's good. If it doesn't
please me, it's bad which makes it so that the person doesn't really know what good and bad
even is except for to follow what another person's emotions are, that's not solid teaching. So what I
decided for my foster children and my own children and now people have done all over the world
is that I would proactively teach them the skills that they needed for success so that they could
use those skills to analyze where they've fallen short and how they can improve. So, teach your
children the skills that they need so that they can communicate with you and handle some of those
more anxious situations that they might encounter. The next principle is consistency. So, you want your
child with ADHD to be able to come to a place of calmness on their own, right, because you can't
force a person to be calm. In fact if you force a person, it eliminates trust and to establish
calmness, there has to be a feeling of trust so it would actually ruin the calmness. You can't make
a person feel so much fear that they get calm. In fact inside they'll always be boiling and bubbling
and having problems. What you have to do is you have to establish a habit with them so that they
can get to a place where they can calm themselves. So, how do you do that it requires consistency?
Consistent teaching. This means when they are calm, then you praise them. This also means when it seems
like they're going to lose it, that you pre-teach them about what they need to do to have calmness
in this communication. Maybe you remind them of the skill that they need like how to accept
consequences or how to disagree appropriately with you so that they don't jump to that emotional
place. So, this type of teaching is vital. If we consistently pre-teach, praise and correct when
things don't go right, then our child sees cause and effect and they get the opportunity to see
I did something that needs to be corrected and that's okay. If the tone is calmness from you,
it feels safe to them then they are able to calmly assess what's going on and fix things for the
future. Now, I've got a little bit of a warning here for you. If you have a child with ADHD, they
have a really well worn path in their brain. It's going to take time. There is no magic pill for a
person with ADHD. If you give them medication, it can shut down some of their activity in their
brain but in the end, they didn't learn anything from it. All of the youth that came to my home
came on medication for their ADHD but by the time they were done, almost every one of them left not
needing any medication. Because they learned the skills for success, they learned to examine
themselves and they learned how to correct their own behavior. It was empowering for them and they
knew they didn't need to be on a certain drug for their whole life. Now that said, there were
one or two that did have to keep some of their medications just because their chemical levels on
many different issues that they were dealing with were kind of off. So, it's not a bad thing per se if
a person's on medication but I wanted them to know they could live a regular life without it if they
needed to and I was willing to take on everything with them and not have that medication be their
crutch . So instead they would have skills that they could rely on and they would have habits that they
had formed. When you correct your children, you want to make sure that you do so the same every single
time. A child who has ADHD has usually higher levels of anxiety, that means if you change it up,
if they earn different negative consequences every single time that they do something, then they're
going to feel like it's just a manipulation, it's just a power struggle. Rhat will take them to the
rut of their brain that's about anger and power struggling and anxiety. So, what you need to do
if you want your child to have the most success with the corrections is make sure the words are
the same. There's a 7 step process that I teach in my teaching self-government parenting course
that you can use that will help your child know that every single word that you will say every
time. This increases the predictability, decreases the anxiety which means more success. Working with
children with ADHD and helping them get to a place of calmness is absolutely possible but I
would like to give you a free gift that is going to give you even more help with your calmness.
In fact, it will give you some of the words that you need to have success. It is my calm
parenting toolkit. In order to get this toolkit for free, go to the description below this video
and there is a link that says calm tool kit or calm parenting toolkit. It's one of the first
links toward the top of that description. Click that link to the calm parenting toolkit
and go and get it completely for free. It is a course. It's a mini course that you can have and go
through quickly and it should transform yourself and your child and give you more fuel to be able
to bring yourselves and your family to calmness. Click on that link now, I will see you there.