Flexibly structured discipline emphasizes your child or teen’s strengths while calmly and firmly addressing her need for self control. For example, your child’s “strong will” can easily be reframed as the strength determination, and you can use your child’s determination to improve her self-discipline.

Parents quickly realize that the discipline strategies that work for other kids do not work for their children with ADHD. When parents learn how to bring out the best in their ADHD child, they discover incredible possibilities for disciplining her.

Determined ADHD children do not want to take control away from their parents. Just like other children, they look to their parents to set and maintain healthy limits and boundaries. In contrast, the determined child doesn’t want to lose whatever limited control she has.  Problems occur when the parent limits the determined ADHD child’s already limited control by saying phrases like, “You must…” or “Do this right now…” At this point, the determined child uses the only control she has left and she impulsively disobeys.

It’s important for parents understand that 99% of the time when faced with a power-struggle, their determined child will impulsively disobey or say the wrong thing at the wrong time.  Because impulsivity is one of the core features of ADHD, it is best to start to flexibly teach her how to stop and think before acting instead of getting caught up in the moment and authoritatively sending her to time-out for a week because of her in-born inability to inhibit her responses. Parents often have to develop tough “Teflon-type” feelings in order to let the child’s impulsive words and actions roll off them, stay calm, and correct their child without getting caught up in the drama of the moment. With regard to impulsivity, you already know that the word, “STOP!” doesn’t work, so try the suggestions outlined in my previous posts about impulsivity.

When parents motivate, inspire, and cheer their determined ADHD child on to success, they find that the battles over control decrease dramatically. Saying, for example, “When you have finished mowing the lawn, then you may go swimming!” works a lot better than, “Don’t even think about going swimming until you have finished mowing the lawn!” The statement, “Get down here right now and eat your breakfast!” can be restated as “A hot yummy breakfast is being served in 2 minutes: come on down and enjoy it!”  Get creative and take advantage of your child’s determination by saying, “Let’s race to get in the car” instead of “Get in this car right this minute!”

When parents develop and maintain flexibly structured discipline and a resilient relationship with their determined ADHD child, the child will diligently try to cooperate and keep her parents happy. In contrast, if the determined child sees her parents as spending the majority of their time making demands and yelling at her, she thinks, “Why bother, they’re just going to yell at me anyway.”  She comes to realize that negative attention is better than no attention!

Once your child is convinced of the strength of your love for her, she is more motivated to protect her relationship with you through obedience.  Isn’t that what self control is all about?

Keep reading to learn how to start building your child’s self discipline today!

©2012, Monte W Davenport, PhD

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