In Which ADHD Looks a Lot Like Irresponsibility

Mr. Engineer and I had a parenting disagreement last night, and the root of it lay in the fact that I have personal insight into the way that Squirrelboy's brain works and he doesn't. It can be difficult and frustrating to explain to your neurotypical spouse why you understand your kid's ADHD brain because yours works similarly. Especially when he seems to willfully not understand that it could possibly be the way the kid's brain works and must simply stem from a lack of discipline. I'm sure Mr. Engineer's position seems difficult to him too. I'm not trying to demonize him. However, the only perspective I can fully understand is my own.

So what happened last night? Squirrelboy likes to listen to books while he falls asleep (not calming books, just whatever he's listening to at the time, which can range from murder mysteries to nonfiction books about racial justice). His accesses these books via an app on his phone. Due to an incident earlier this year his phone charges in our room at night, but he has a bluetooth speaker that can play something from the phone even while it's across the hall in our room.

Last night at bedtime Mr. Engineer noticed Squirrelboy holding his bluetooth headphones instead of his speaker as he set up his book. He asked why Squirrelboy wasn't using the speaker. Squirrelboy explained that his speaker was dead and he wasn't going to wear the headphones but rather set them on the shelf above his head on their loudest setting. 

Mr. Engineer was not pleased. He told Squirrelboy that he shouldn't listen to a book if he wasn't responsible enough to charge his speaker. I intervened and told Squirrelboy that he could use the headphones.

Mr. Engineer then asked me something along the lines of, "So, you want to reward his irresponsibility?" He's gotten even more serious than ever lately at wanting to make sure Squirrelboy has the skills to survive as an adult now that he's less than three years away from legal adulthood. I saw the situation differently and replied, "No, what I want to do is not punish him for having a disorderly brain."

What Mr. Engineer saw as a clear indication of irresponsibility I saw as a clear indication of an ADHD brain. If I don't stick exactly to the scaffolding I've built for myself or I haven't built scaffolding for that particular task, I do exactly the same types of things that Squirrelboy does. This is despite the fact that I will soon turn 44 and I've managed to earn two college degrees, hold down a full time job for awhile, and (now) run a household. I like to think I'm a responsible adult, but that hasn't changed the fact that, without serious effort, I make exactly the same types of mistakes that Squirrelboy makes.

I had no idea at the time that this was an indication of ADHD, but an example of the scaffolding I set up for myself early on can be seen in my experience in summer school in high school (FTR, I was taking summer school because my three foreign languages didn't leave room in my schedule for American History and Communications, not because I failed something :)). Summer school started late enough in the morning that both of my parents had left for work before I left the house, in contrast to the school year. Because of this, I forgot to bring my lunch with me three days out of five for the first two weeks. I'd realize it when I was about halfway to the school, turn around to get it, and screech into the school parking lot about a minute before my class started. I knew this was untenable. It would result in me getting a speeding ticket, incurring some kind of penalty for tardiness, or both. So I set up scaffolding for myself. I taped a note to the steering wheel of my car that read REMEMBER TO BRING YOUR LUNCH. I never forgot my lunch for the rest of summer school.

I had to do the lunch note thing again in graduate school after my roommate got tired of driving to campus to bring my lunch at least twice a week (she had a job and worked second shift). It did not occur to me at the time that I was doing something people with ADHD often have to do. I just thought I was unusually forgetful.

I could give you other examples of scaffolding I've set up for myself. Every once in awhile I think to set it up before something goes wrong, but most often it's resulted from many incidents of failure - like establishing one and only one place to keep my keys after losing them nearly every day for years. I still haven't set up scaffolding for keeping track of my phone. I still have to call it using the home phone to find it at least three times a week, sometimes even more than once in a day. It really sucks when I realize I've left it on vibrate.

This probably should have occurred to me earlier, but recently I realized I need to start setting up scaffolding for Squirrelboy and teaching him to do it himself. Maybe if he learns this early on he can prevent himself from, for instance, losing his keys EVERY.SINGLE.DAY for the first two decades of adulthood. Not that I did that ;). Step one today was agreeing with Squirrelboy last night that he should plug in his speaker to charge this morning and every morning so that it would never be dead a bedtime again. I wrote a note on the board, and included taking his medicine, since we both forgot about that yesterday and school was harder for him than it should be. We'll see if this helps.