Hi, I'm Nicholeen Peck. I'm a parenting expert and I have had a lot of experience working with
kids with ADHD. And in this video, we're going to talk about how to discipline a kid with ADHD.
I have 4 children of my own. And for years, I did treatment foster care for youth ages 12 to
18. The majority of the youth that came to my home for treatment care had adhd. They also had other
things sometimes attached to the adhd like ocd, odd, rad, different autism spectrum, kleptomania,
compulsive lying, fill in the blank. We had a lot of things that we were working with. And we knew
exactly what we needed to do to help them have a change of behavior and a change of heart. And
I want to talk to you today about what you can do to help a child that you know that has adhd
have a change of behavior and change of heart too. Since children with adhd lose focus so easily,
then it's important that your method of discipline and teaching to your adhd child is simple,
focused, predictable, and non-emotional. So, how do we keep it simple, predictable, focused, and
non-emotional? Truly, that is the hardest one for most people. How do we make an environment that is
like that for our children when we have habits, we have things that annoy us and frustrate us.
We sometimes lose our cool and so do they. Well, the type of environment you need to create has
skills for them and skills for you. Because what I've found over the years is that the majority of
people, they want to be good and consistent in their correcting. They don't want to get angry,
they don't want to get emotional, they certainly don't want their child to go that direction
either. But what they're lacking is not desire, they have that. They're lacking skill development.
So, if you learn skills and your children learn skills for how to communicate, then you have
predictable focused communication and it's even better if that communication and those skills is
non-emotional which they can be. I'm known for teaching self-government all over the world. In
fact, that's what my parenting company is called. It's called Teaching Self-Government. And you can
find more information about that parenting company by clicking some of the links below
or by going to teachingselfgovernment.com. This parenting method that I teach
is based upon skill development and calm communication. The skills that we teach children
are 4 basic skills. We teach them how to follow instructions, accept no answers and criticism,
accept consequences, and disagree appropriately. Those 4 basic skills take care of 99%
of all of the behavior problems that they might encounter. And I know because I've worked with
troubled youth and every single issue that they dealt with, I was able to fix by utilizing these
4 basic skills. Now, you might wonder how could those 4 skills solve a problem like lying or not
eating your dinner or something like that. But they do. Because each one of those skills has a
skill set attached to it. That means they have steps. So, to follow instructions for instance,
you look at the person, keep a calm face, voice, and body. Say, okay or ask to disagree
appropriately which is another one of those skills. Do the task immediately and then check
back. Now, if a child is given an instruction, say to clean their room and they say "Okay", but
they don't do it, then they're not doing the task immediately. I don't start talking about the room.
I just talk about the fact that they're not doing the task immediately. And my child knows what it
means to not do the task immediately. So, because these steps are attached to each of the skills
that we teach the children, then the children know where to focus next. Okay, wait. Mom's talking to
me. So, first, I look at her and then I focus, "Am I calm?" And mom can even help a child with adhd
do that focus by saying something like, "Okay. Look at me. Great. You're doing step number 1.
Okay, now, check yourself. Are you calm? Do you have a calm face voice and body? Okay,
wonderful. Alright. Here's your instruction. Now, remember you can say okay or ask to
disagree appropriately. I need you to clean your room." Then the child looks at the parent and says
okay or they ask to disagree appropriately. I'm not going to cover how to handle that situation
in this video. That would take too much time. But just know that most of the time they actually end
up saying okay when you teach them the skill. So, then the parent would say to a child with adhd who
maybe has a hard time remembering especially at first where to focus "great job at saying okay.
Keeping calm. Looking at me. You've done the first 3 steps of following instructions. So, now,
let's do the fourth step. The fourth step is to do the task immediately. So, go to the room and put
the things in the toy box. Put your clothes in the dirty clothes. And then remember to come and check
back." So, it keeps it very simple. And it really isn't about the room because when we're parenting,
let's be honest. It's not about the clean room or the made bed. It's about the child being able to
master themselves. The child being able to direct themselves forward. It's about self-government.
Not only do you need skills to teach them but you've got to have skills for yourself too.
In fact, they need to know their skills and your skills. And you need to know your skills and their
skills. You can learn all the skills that you need in the teaching self-government parenting course.
There are five skills that parents need. 4 skills that children need. Well,
parents need those 4 basic skills too to be happy adults. There's meetings that we talk about and
there's ways that I teach how to help them problem solve and take ownership of their own behaviors.
So, check that out on teachingselfgovernment.com or click one of the links below in the description
part of this video. One of the skills that parents always want to know is how do I correct my child
with calmness? Because that's essential. When you have a child who has adhd, they have more anxiety
than other children anyway. So, any type of an emotional thing that comes flying at them is going
to derail them. It derails most people anyway. But when you have adhd, it just throws you off course
even faster. In fact, if they go to the emotional part of their brain which is mid or back brain,
they have a terrible time trying to stay focused on that front part of the brain that's going to
keep them focused on what it is they need to be doing with that instruction or that correction
that you're giving. When you correct your children properly and you do it with heart
and you do it with calmness but also firmness and consistency which is what we teach in the
teaching self-government program, then you will feel closer to your child during and after a
correction than you even did before. I know that doesn't seem like it's possible but it absolutely
is. In fact, if there's one bit of feedback I get from people, it's, "Nicholeen, I never knew that
I could correct my children and not have it be an emotional mess. I didn't know it could feel this
good, this happy, and this uniting to correct my child for something that needed to be improved."
And it can. So, if you have calmness then your corrections will be a completely different
experience. When we use the discipline skills for correcting negative behaviors or pre-teaching how
things should have happened and start practicing doing things the right way, the words that we use
are the same every time. So, I might say to a child, just now, I gave you an instruction
and you looked at me but you did not keep a calm face, voice, and body. What you should have done
was you should have kept a calm face, voice, and body. Keeping a calm face, voice, and body
is the second step in following an instruction." And then i'm going to go on from there I'm going
to tell them what negative consequence they earned and so forth. And we'll talk about consequences
here in just a second. But what I want you to know is the predictability of that language.
If they know the words that you will say, that will keep your adhd child focused. And if they
do lose focus for a minute, they won't get anxious about it. When they come back to where you're at,
they'll be fine because they know what words you're using. This is key. So, this is a slam
dunk for adhd parenting. This is what I used for treatment for all of these youth for so many years
and they were so successful. It's super important if a person is going to learn to govern themselves
that they get the opportunity to earn a negative consequence. Because this teaches them cause and
effect. Good should equal good, bad should equal bad. They need to know when adjustment needs to
be made. And they need the opportunity to accept that negative consequence or they won't ever learn
to govern themselves. If they don't get to accept a consequence, if you just take things away from
them, then you are manipulating them and it always turns into a battle between you and them. Instead
of between them and them. Which is what it really is when they are learning to control themselves.
When they want to be rude or selfish but they shouldn't be, it's a battle that they have going
on inside themselves. When a person self-governs themselves, what they do is they decide which
voice inside that they want to listen to. It's all about them versus them. Not them versus you. So,
the consequences that they earn have to also be about them learning to control them.
And the best thing I have found for negative consequences is extra chores. Also, extra chores
are non-emotional. It's not trying to push a power button that you have over somebody else's
emotions. Taking something away that someone is attached to is just emotionally manipulative. Now,
sometimes something does need to be removed. If my child is viewing things on a computer
or a phone that they shouldn't be, then I know they're not ready to have that device.
That's a different video though for a different day how I handle situations like that.
Just know that the principle is we don't just go taking things away to try to create pain. When
our child needs to earn a negative consequence, it needs to be predictable. If you tell them they'll
always earn an extra chore, even if you don't know what the chore is at the minute, they do know they
will earn an extra chore. And because they've done extra chores before, they also know it's not going
to take them that long. You're not going to give them something that takes an entire hour to do.
That would be called a major maintenance. Now, that's something else we could talk about. What's
the difference? The big difference is the amount of time the chore takes. If it's a small amount
of time, that's just an extra chore. If it's a big amount of time, then it's a major maintenance. he
other benefits to using extra chores is it's quick recovery time. So, when your adhd child has done
something wrong and they need to be corrected, it shouldn't have to follow them around the
whole day. You know, they're going to get off task all the time. So, let's do quick chores,
get them over with, leave it in the past. We can leave it behind, they can leave it behind.
They just do that extra chore and they're done. And then they also get the opportunity during this
extra chore time to focus. It's a great practice time for focusing in short spurts. So, if you know
the child can focus for 3 minutes or for five minutes then you have them do a 3-minute chore
or a 5 minute chore. Maybe even a 10 second chore if that's all the focus time they've got right
then. But they see they can focus on that extra chore, they can get something accomplished if they
stick to it. And that's valuable for them because they're learning for how to accomplish things and
how to stay focused is much more incremental than it is for people who don't struggle
with an adhd processing difficulty. We could talk about parenting forever. And there is another
video that I think is going to help you next. Click on the video how to teach problem-solving
skills to children to get more information about how you can help your adhd child or the ones that
don't have adhd learn how to better problem solve and take responsibility for themselves.