Your Teen with ADHD has BRAIN FREEZE!

You have got a child and they have ADHD. You've got a teen and they suffer from what I call freeze brain.

So, I'm Ivan Hardcastle. I'm a parent coach for parents who have children with ADHD ages 11 to 16. I'm looking at those prime teenage years.

I want to tell you about my daughter and explain this freeze brain thing. I'm also an occupational therapist. I've been doing this for close to two decades.

Freeze brain.

So, here's the story. We just took my daughter to college. Now, she's 18 and she has this new apartment. She has all this the shopping that needs to be done. We take her down to college and she is overwhelmed. She has ADHD and it was just hard for her to do things. (Starting activities or tasks is what's called initiation.)

When you have ADHD, especially girls (because ADHD looks different in boys and girls), you can have difficulty in starting something and that really puts things in a in a bind and you may start thinking, "What is going on with my child? They have ADHD and usually they're jumping around. Usually their brain is going all sorts of different ways. They've got this fantastic superpower." But one of the challenges that you will see is that they literally have difficulty in initiation.

So, back to my story: we take her down to college and she's excited. She's nervous. We are taking boxes up to her apartment and now we have all these boxes and she needs to set up her room and she doesn't know what to do.

Now, there's a couple ways that you could try to help with this. You could do it for her, which was one thing that that my wife was trying to do. And that in the long run was a fantastic thing to do. It it helped get the ball rolling so that she could then rearrange and fine-tune and and tweak it later.

One thing that I did for her is that I actually stopped her because she was getting overwhelmed and she was shutting down and she could not make any decisions anymore. We just sat down and we did something else for 15 20 minutes. We just turned on a little show and just watched a single episode and just relaxed because she was getting overwhelmed.

It wasn't just the the setting up a room that we were dealing with because we also took her through shopping and we needed to get food and we needed to get all these supplies and that in itself was overwhelming.

You have a store. You have new classes. You have a new area. You have a new apartment. You have a new setting. You have a new bedroom. You have a new bathroom. You have a new kitchen. You have new roommates. New new new.

And when you do this to a child with ADHD, this becomes hard for them to process.

It could be you at home getting your child to go to school. It could be you trying to help your child to clean their room. It could be you sitting down with your child for them to be able to eat dinner.

I may be picking on my daughter a little bit. She has a hard time sitting down to eat. She wants to sit down, but then she's chatting and she's paying attention to this and she's listening to another person and it is hard for her to eat.

There's too much information for them to sort through. So, they just freeze. It's homework, it's dinner, whatever it is, is to sit in there and co-regulate with them, co-initiate with them. One tool to use is just having a buddy that will sit there with them to start them to start the ball rolling. When she was cleaning her room and we were getting her ready to move,  I went downstairs with her. I'm on my laptop. All I'm  doing is working on some things for my coaching program to help other people.

Me just being in there gave her that momentum to get her going.

Sometimes her sisters will jump in there. Her brother will jump in there also, even at meal times. Sometimes it's just: "Hey, here's a remember to take a bite of food." I'm taking a bite of food. She's taking a bite of food.

She's a teenager, and you may be thinking, "This sounds like a sounds like a toddler", but this is a very different scenario. It isn't an encouragement thing. It is simply to get the ball rolling.

Time to go to school?. Hey, you know what? If you have somebody that is getting ready at the same time,  or if you as a parent can slow down and pay attention to your child, they can be more successful. They have a superpower. They have ADHD. It's fantastic. There's ways that they succeed and they excel that you will never succeed and excel in that way. But you need to know how to be able to work with them to help them excel.

So, help the freeze brain of ADHD. Help with initiation.

You have got this. I am excited to hear back. Reach out to me.

You can reach me through my Facebook (Ivan Hardcastle) or at www.castlewinfalls.com.

-Ivan