Do You Have a Teenager with ADD/ADHD?

Now there is help for the teenager with ADD/ADHD. First, you need to recognize the symptoms.

Question: How do you diagnose if you are the parent of a teenager with ADD/ADHD?

Answer: YOU are the control center of your child’s brain!

If you find yourself a parent of a teenager with:

• A messy room
• Backpacks full of undone homework
• Failing grades
• Broken promises
• Misplaced possessions
• Undone chores
• A seemingly inability to hear your voice

If you find yourself:

• Yelling at your child
• Doing your child’s homework
• Emailing teacher daily
• Searching through lockers for undone homework
• Calling other mothers to find out your child missed
• Cleaning your child’s room
• Keeping your child’s daily assignment planner
• Negotiating with teachers for extra time to complete assignments
• Cancelling own plans to stand over your child while they meet his owe responsibilities
• Scheduling your child’s community services
• Feeding your child’s pets

YOU are your child’s prefrontal cortex!!!

The teenager with ADD/ADHD has always been a charming, baffling and sometimes infuriating species. Now we know the reason why—the pre-frontal cortex of their brains are immature. Through the courtesy of functional brain imaging, we’ve discovered that the prefrontal cortex of the brain does not fully mature until 25 years of age. This is why insurance companies assign the highest premium payments to teenage drivers.

In teenagers with attention deficit disorder, they may suffer even more dramatic problems with attention, sustained concentration, memory, planning, organizational skills, judgment, and inhabitation of inappropriate behavior than the average teen. However, through aggressive brain exercise training, maturing the prefrontal cortex can be targeted for intervention. Attention and concentration, as well as planning and organization, can be taught skills in the brain and respond with structural neuroplastic rewiring thus resulting in dramatic improvements in executive function.

Sometimes the first step is educating your teenager with ADD/ADHD about their brain and how it works. As a parent, this requires acknowledging that the immature brain will make more mistakes than the non-ADD/ADHD teen. One of the most helpful ways a parent can help their teen to make good decisions is to encourage them to always take an extra 60 seconds before taking any action or making any decision and think about the possible outcomes of that decision, both good and bad. Explain to your teen that they are literally buying their brain an extra 60 seconds of time for their pre-frontal cortex to process the information, predict the consequences and apply the brakes they deem it necessary. What is important is to teach them to use their own brakes, not for the parent to be the brakes. Learning to apply their own brakes to make their own choices to go forward or abort an action is one of your teen’s most important developmental tasks.

A non-threatening way to do this is to share an evaluation of the behavior choices of other teens and adults. Or, you may even want to let your guard down to let your teen know about one of the things you did wrong as a teenager, and ask him or her how they would have responded in a similar circumstance. Please limit your honesty as to not shock your child or make them lose respect for you. Even the mildest tell-all story can be effective. Choose wisely.