How to Explain ADHD in Positive, Empowering Terms

One of the greatest gifts you can give your child is a strong understanding of their ADHD brain. The more your child understands about their brain wiring and systems for internal and external information, the greater their self-awareness, confidence, and self-advocacy skills.

Use the examples below to help you explain ADHD to your child in easy-to-understand language that diminishes shame and accentuates strengths.

Our brains are like busy airports with control towers that guide the airplanes of executive function — planning, prioritizing, organizing, managing time, and other skills that help us get through everyday life — to take off and land smoothly.

Except the ADHD brain’s control tower isn’t always well-staffed. It often feels like you’re the only one who showed up to work! You scurry around ensuring that airplanes take off and land without incident — a feat that requires enormous amounts of energy. Sometimes, airplanes become delayed in their take off, or fail to take off altogether.

This is called executive dysfunction. It’s why an ordinary day at school feels so exhausting for you, and why some things may seem harder for you than for your classmates.

How to Support Executive Function Skills: Next Steps

• Read: Your Child’s 7 Executive Functions — and How to Boost Them
• Read: How to Sharpen Executive Functions — Activities to Hone Brain Skills
• Free Download: Common Executive Function Challenges — and Solutions

Do you sometimes feel absolutely stuck, unable to get started on your homework even though everyone tells you to “just do it?” Does it ever feel difficult to wind down and get to sleep?

If you answered yes, your brain’s volume control may be stuck or off kilter. The volume dials in our brains help us regulate and moderate energy, emotions, appetite, sleep, and activity levels. In ADHD brains, the volume control sometimes gets jammed, or it develops a mind of its own, tuning to sound levels that don’t match your commands.

You know your volume dial is at zero when it feels impossible to get anything done. It looks like a lack of motivation and procrastination. Maybe you have no appetite, and you struggle to get out of bed.

Sometimes, for no reason in particular, your brain’s volume will ramp up to 100. Big feelings will flood your brain, your appetite will surge, and it will feel impossible to stop scrolling through social media or to turn off your video game. Even falling asleep will be difficult with a mind that is going full blast.

Self-Regulation: Next Steps

• Read: How to Teach Emotional Regulation Skills
• Read: How to Motivate an Unmotivated Teenager
• Read: Why Task Switching is Difficult for ADHD Brains — and 7 Ways to Smooth Transitions

Every minute of every day, our brains filter through sensory input from inside and outside of our bodies. But the filters in ADHD brains are sometimes unreliable — allowing too much or too little information to break through. Often, every little input is received and processed in your brain, making you ultra-sensitive to things like how clothes feel on your body, the intensity of certain smells, the lighting in your classroom, and other sensations. Everything competes for your attention.

This is why hanging out with friends can feel so tiring sometimes. It’s not that you don’t like spending time with them, it’s just that your brain heightens the sensations of everything around you, draining you of your energy as you try to handle competing stimuli.

Sensory Sensitivities: Next Steps

• Read: What Is Your Child’s Sensory Profile?
• Read: Too Loud, Too Bright, Too Sticky!
• Free Download: Sensory Issues — Triggers, Symptoms & Types of SPD

We all have bad days. To move past challenges, you rely on your brain’s gearbox to shift out of negative thinking and cruise into a lighter perspective. If you find that you’re stuck in loops of negative, toxic thoughts, it’s because your gearbox is sticking — a common problem in ADHD due to emotional dysregulation. Cognitive behavioral therapy can be incredibly helpful in getting ADHD brains unstuck.

How to Shift to Healthier Thoughts: Next Steps

• Read: How Do I Teach My Teen to Manage Emotions?
• Read: When Your Child Wants to Give Up
• Read: How Can I Help My Teen Adopt a Growth Mindset?

• Free Download: 5 Ways to Build Self-Advocacy Skills
• Read: Your Brain Is a Ferrari
• Read: How Do You Talk to Your Child About ADHD? Advice from Fellow Parents
• Read: Your Brain Is Amazing! 5 Things All Neurodivergent Teens Need to Hear

The content for this article was derived, in part, from the ADDitude ADHD Experts webinar titled, “The Emotional Lives of Girls with ADHD [Video Replay & Podcast #488]" with Lotta Borg Skoglund, M.D., Ph.D., which was broadcast on January 23, 2024.

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