Your Child's ADHD Team (And why they need to work together)

The ADHD Team and Why it Matters

Your child's ADHD team is all of the professionals including your family, medical staff, psychiatric staff, and teachers/school helpers that work with your child. All these people work best when they're in-sync, but it's essentially been like pulling teeth to get permissions for them to talk to each other. Not only that, but I only had a vague understanding of what my son's school was doing in his OT and Speech therapy sessions. It made it frustrating when everyone was asking me questions about what everyone else was doing and my ADHD brain couldn't remember all the details, or I just didn't know. I have binders filled with all sorts of paperwork that made the school's head spin when I presented it all to them. So many different types of evaluations and medical paperwork. But no one reads all of that, and when you're dealing with psychological things it's an every evolving process.

We had lots of different people who had totally different plans and goals for G, and it was hard to keep the tools straight. It was to the point where I had picked one or two things and then was having him do things with each person separately. It wasn't working well for me, and it wasn't working well for G, because he only used certain tools once a week, or once every two weeks, and none of them really went together. Most of the tools were great, but I needed guidance and education to implement them at home, and an actual plan to have all these random pieces of information guide my son toward better executive functioning. I kept asking people for help on his team and everyone gave me tools, but we didn't have a good way to organize them. I didn't know how to interrupt a behavior without escalating my son, and neither did anyone else, because everyone was on different pages or even on an entirely different book in the series.

Coach Mom and Dad

I had finally realized that this team was basically a little league baseball team, and there was no coach. I had to be that coach, and I was failing at it. This failure was leading to me not being able to help my son as he was regressing from the pandemic. We weren't having meltdowns any more, but now we were. These had originally gone away with meds, but having this regression made me realize that he didn't have the coping skills I thought he had developed. So, I had to make a plan. I checked in with everyone on his team individually about my son's emotional regulation and found out that he had a system at school that I had never learned. It was a big part of the reason that he was doing better in school, but since I didn't know about it, I couldn't use it and I couldn't tell anyone else about it. This was a big problem, but it was also a big piece of the puzzle that I needed to make a plan.

Getting Everyone Together

When I finally had a framework, I was able to make a plan that was universal across everyone his team. I made a list of all the tools we had and found a way to piece them together in a way that made sense and was easy for G and I to work through without having to rely on my faulty working memory. I made the plan on a document and tagged everyone in his team so we could finally have a real plan. (More on this in an upcoming post!) Suggestions were no longer repeated and complimented the existing plan. When my son had problems with one of the steps in the plan, I had someone who could jump in and give us another tool that worked with it. Even though they weren't talking to each other, we were starting to be able to move together toward the goals we needed to reach and everything my son was working on (behaviorally) was starting to make sense to him. All these tidbits weren't random anymore.

Working as a Team

Now my son's various sessions are looking different. Yes, everyone still has their specialty, as it should be, but since we have a clear plan on how these bits fit together we can fix problems that need collaboration or give advice that touches into a different area. It means that many of the tools that we have could be moved into a simple chart that G and I could understand and hand out to family, as well as babysitters and teachers.