agency

Are You Enabling or Empowering Your Child?

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Empower don't enableWe all want our children to grow up to be responsible, successful members of society. Isn’t that what you want for your child? So, we “help” them at every turn so that they can make it to school on time, complete their homework perfectly, and get good grades.

But are you really helping or are you harming them?

Let me explain. If your child or teen has ADHD then you know that they struggle with routines, focus and remembering what they need to do as well as, doing what they know they need to do. You may feel that if you don’t remind your teen then they would never get out the door in the morning or finish their homework. And you may be right.

However, providing them with the information they need before they have had time to consider what comes next, does not help them develop the necessary skills to become independent instead it makes them dependent.

Think about these questions:

    1.  Are you helping your son or daughter create a routine to get out the door (with everything they need) or are you telling them what to do each day? (Ex. get your shoes on, did you brush your  teeth,  do you have your homework? And on and on.)
    2.  Are you empathizing and really trying to understand what they are feeling or are you just trying to solve their problem by telling them what they “should” do?
    3.  Are you checking their homework and making them correct it so that the teacher doesn’t know that they are struggling with it?
    4.  Are you reminding them of everything they have to do so that they don’t have to remember on their own?
    5.  Are you waking them up in the morning?

If you answered “yes” to even one of these questions, please keep reading because although you may think you are helping your children, in reality you are not. When you take away your child’s opportunity to problem solve by either telling them what they should do, or by doing it for them, not only do you handicap them from learning the skills but, you are chipping away at their self-esteem and self-confidence and fostering their dependence rather than independence.

For those with ADHD, learning routines and habits can take a bit longer than it does for those without ADHD (66 times). So it is important to start building the skills early so that by the time they get to high school, you have done your job and your teen is pretty independent. You want to feel confident that they can make it on their own at college. On the other hand, if you wait until they are a senior to start “letting go” and just drop the support you have been providing all along, they may not have the skills they need to succeed in college.

So, how can you empower them instead?

    1. Work on one thing at a time. Together decide what it will be. Empower your teen to come up with their own solutions just be sure to include how they want you to “support” them in this new process.
    2. Instead of saying you “should”…..try asking questions that lead to your teen figuring out their own solutions. Ex. “What do you think you could do to figure that out?” “How can you prevent that from happening again?”
    3. Learn about Executive Function skills so that you and your teen can better pinpoint which skill is weak. Is it getting started on things (task initiation), remembering (working memory) or finishing things (task completion) etc.? Weaknesses can occur in several executive functions but often there are EFs that are strengths as well. What looks like several areas of weakness could be the same EF showing up in a different context. How can you use the strengths to help compensate for the weaknesses?
    4. Change comes from within but here are three questions to ask that can help. Can the environment be changed to better accommodate for the weakness? Can the task be broken down into more manageable steps so that it is not so overwhelming? Does there need to be a system or a routine created to assist in solving this?
    5. Lastly, consider whether or not you are too close to the situation to really be able to help, or if you are finding it difficult to remain nonjudgmental then it may be time to find an Executive Function Coach or Counselor to work with your teen.

Jodi Sleeper-Triplett said this in her book Empowering Youth with ADHD:

…empowerment is about much more than helping the young person with ADHD accomplish goals: It’s about helping the young person identify strengths and resources; practice thinking about how to solve problems and meet goals; build skills; develop a positive self-image; and ultimately, lay a foundation for long-term success in the days, months and years to come. (p35)

And who doesn’t want that for their teen?

Developing Agency Leads to Independence

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Celebrating agency up high on a mountainThe word “agency” keeps popping up in articles I read or podcasts I listen to so I thought I would look a bit deeper into it. Hope you find it helpful.

Agency is defined by the Cambridge Dictionary as “the ability to take action or to choose what action to take.” It is the belief that you have control over your choices and can affect change through the choices you make. How often do you feel that you have an impact on your life through the decisions and choices you make? So, what is agency?

Without Agency

  • Unclear goals
  • Emotions drive beliefs (whether true or not)
  • Indecision
  • Fear of Failure
  • Lack of confidence in your abilities

With Agency

  • Growth mindset (you believe you can do it, maybe just not “yet”)
  • Metacognition (you think about your thinking)
  • See learning as a process and yourself as a learner
  • Self-efficacy (belief in your abilities)
  • Ask open ended questions to problem solve

Agency isn’t just important for adults, but also for children to develop. Students have been through a lot of changes over the last three years and most of them adapted quite well. Some did not do well with the challenges and the constant changes. What do you think makes the difference, between a student who is resilient and adapts quickly and those that become more needy and less capable? Is it fear of failure, lack of confidence, or learned helplessness that interferes with a child’s development of agency?

Opportunities to problem solve and figure out what steps to take next have been replaced with the answers and solutions in order to save time (Ex. Study guides instead of study skills). Think about it, when was the last time your child came to you with a problem and you told them what to do? You may have missed an opportunity to help them develop agency and confidence in their own abilities.

I was surprised to read this article that discussed the increase in a child’s anxieties when you constantly solve their problems for them or make accommodations to diminish their fears. This line jumped out at me. “Kids look to their parents to see who they are, Dr. Leibowitz notes. So, when parents reflect back to them that they are helpless in the face of anxiety, and need to be protected, that’s what kids learn to feel about themselves.” That goes for problem solving too. They question their own abilities and instead rely on a parent or teacher to “save” them.

Learning is a Process

  • It takes time
  • Start small and scaffold with help
  • Focus on the process not the outcome
  • Allow choices – develops ownership
  • Self-reflection leads to metacognition
  • Growth mindset (capable with effort)
  • Leads to self-efficacy (belief in your abilities)
  • Which then leads to agency – knowing you can impact your life through the decisions and choices you make

Encouraging your children to problem solve with your help and building on their confidence develops agency. Isn’t the goal to raise lifelong learners with the confidence to handle anything that comes their way (depending on age of course)?

As an adult, you know yourself best and should keep that in mind when solving a problem or developing a strategy that will work for the way you think. We can’t always predict what success will look like so designing an “experiment” gives an opportunity to try things out without fear of failure. Make sure to think about what could get in the way of your success. Thinking about possible obstacles and then creating a plan for them, helps ensure greater success of your experiment. Each experiment provides more data (more clues as to what will work) even if you don’t get there on the first try.

Each experiment whether successful or not helps you learn more about who you are and who you want to be. It builds on your strengths and helps you find strategies you can use in other instances. This builds your “toolbox” that you can use in other situations. In the end, we don’t set the goals or do the tasks for the “fun” of crossing them off the list, we do them to show ourselves we are capable and in control of ourselves and our actions – and that develops agency.

If you’d like to learn more about helping your children develop agency, then join our Thriving with ADHD in the Family Parent Class starting Thursday, April 27th, 2023 at 7pm ET via Zoom.