Eight Principles to Manage ADHD Children - Practice Forgiveness with ADHD Children

Written by Russell A. Barkley, Ph.D.

8. Practice Forgiveness

This is the most important but often the most difficult guideline to implement consistently in daily life.

First, each day after the children are put to bed, parents should take just a moment to review the day and forgive the children for their transgressions. Let go of the anger, resentment, disappointment, or other personally destructive emotions that have arisen that day due to the children's misconduct or disruptions. Forgive them, for they are disabled and cannot always control what they do. Do not misunderstand this essential point. It does not mean the children should not be held accountable for their misdeeds or be taught to make amends with others they have harmed, for they should. Teachers can practice this at the end of the school day, once the children have left their class. Teachers should stop, take a cleansing breath, and upon exhaling let go of the day's conflicts with the ADHD child.

Second, parents should concentrate on forgiving others that day who may have misunderstood their children's inappropriate behavior, acted in ways offensive to them and their children, or simply dismissed their children as lazy or morally bereft. Such people are often ignorant of the true nature of ADHD, typically blaming the parents and family of the ADHD child for all of the child's difficulties, when such is clearly not the case. This in no way means that parents should continue permitting others to mistreat their ADHD children or misunderstand them. Corrective action and advocacy for these children are critical to seeing that such misunderstandings or maltreatment by others does not occur again. It does mean having parents learn to go beyond the hurt, anger, and resentment such instances may have effected in the parents. This may be much less necessary for teachers who are less personally invested in the ADHD child than are parents. Even so, truly empathic teachers may also feel ashamed that they cannot control an ADHD child when in the presence of other teachers, who may deride them for their management problems. Such teachers may also need to practice this aspect of forgiveness.

Finally, caregivers must learn to practice forgiving themselves for their own mistakes in the management of ADHD children that day. ADHD children have the capacity at times to bring out the worst in adults, which frequently results in those adults feeling guilty over their own errors in handling the children's behavior. This does not mean that parents or teachers should not strive to improve their management or to evaluate how successfully they have approached and managed the child's problem behaviors. Forgiveness does not mean granting oneself license to repeatedly make the same errors without consequence. It does mean letting go of the self-deprecation, shame, humiliation, resentment, or anger that accompanies such acts of self-evaluation, replacing them with a frank evaluation of one's performance as a caregiver that day, identifying areas to improve, and making a personal commitment to strive to get it right the next day.

Forgiveness is, admittedly, a tall order for humanity. Caregivers will find this principle the hardest to adhere to, but the most fundamental of all the principles reviewed here as to the art of effective, and peaceful, management of ADHD children.

SOURCES: The ADHD Report Volume 1, Number 2, April 1993, published bimonthly by Guilford Publications, Inc.

About the author: Russell A. Barkley, Ph.D., is an internationally recognized authority on attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in children and adults. Dr. Barkley has specialized in ADHD for more than 30 years and is currently a Research Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the SUNY Upstate Medical University in Syracuse, New York

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