ADHD Treatment
chapters first free online read chapters
first free online read chapters first free online read
Homework Help Hell
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Helping kids with their homework is a difficult struggle for ADHD children and their families. The ongoing conflict over homework help can be the source of more general family disruption. Many parents I work with describe homework help sessions in emotionally wrenching terms. Though completing assignments should be part of any child’s normal daily routine, when homework help becomes a point of contention between children and parents, it can trigger escalating emotions including anger, cussing, yelling, stomping, breaking things, physical violence, and running away. This, in turn, precipitates more pressure by parents and thus more arousal and less attention in the child. Parents’ efforts to get the homework done, though well meant, often backfire.
This emotional intensity is driven by an emotional feedback loop between parent and child. As the child becomes upset, this triggers emotions in the parent, which in turn triggers more negative feelings in the child. Night after night, the same pattern is repeated. In spite of best efforts and intense emotions, often few assignments are completed and parents feel helpless, angry and frustrated; and the child often receives poor grades.
This ongoing conflict can be detrimental to other family members as well. The other children may feel neglected because of all the attention that the child commands. In order to compete for parental attention, siblings may emulate the child’s behavior. Parents often argue about the appropriate way to deal with the child, which may cause marital stress and conflict. A once happy family may become a distressed family.
Missing the Emotions that Makes Homework Help into Hell
Because the efforts to break the cycle focus on the child's academic skills and completing specific homework assignments, rather than the emotional interaction between parent and child, the process continues to escalate. Until the emotions involved in this interaction are dealt with, efforts at skill development and task completion are likely to be counter productive.
The negative feelings triggered in the child by the setting and process of doing homework can make attending to it impossible. For many kids, just the thought of doing homework gets them agitated, angry, worried, anxious, bored and upset. These intense feelings arise at just the thought of homework, and they have not even begun to actually work on it. In this state of intense emotional arousal it is impossible to think effectively.
Their experience is very much like an experience that is familiar to many of us. We have been in an argument and not felt we said the right things. Then an hour after the argument, we think of things we should have said in the argument to have been more successful. The question is, why are we so much more brilliant an hour after the argument then we were during the argument? We have the same facts and the same brain.
The difference is that during the argument, we were emotionally aroused. Our feelings overwhelmed our rational abilities. Later, when our heart beat had slowed down, we could think clearly and generate good arguments. This is exactly the same situation that many kids are in when trying to do homework. Their emotional arousal blocks access the intellectual knowledge and skill necessary to do assignments.
Continued with: What "bored" really means
Learning to Avoid
Homework Help