Creating A Safe Environment
How would you describe your home environment? Is there a grounded and loving presence in your home?
Let’s be honest… that is easier said than done! Especially when we are stressed out, frustrated, and overwhelmed. If that is how you are feeling then this post is for you!
Dr. Mary Wilde is a pediatric physician focusing on children with ADHD and anxiety. She is also a mother to eight boys! Dr. Wild owns a practice, Imagine Pediatrics Behavioral Health and Wellness, in St. George, Utah. She also has a strong online presence with her podcast, Compassionate Parenting, several ebooks, and an online parenting course that can be found at drmarywilde.com.
We are so excited to have had her as a guest speaker on our podcast, Winning With ADHD. She brings so much value to the conversation about parenting a child with ADHD. Read on to see some snippets about creating a healthy, safe, and loving home environment, and how she strives to show support to all parents as they navigate all things ADHD:
You as the parents, you're the frontline workers. You are the ones who are having to be there at the crossroads, the sidelines, and the front lines as their homework is being completed. You are there as the emotions are being dealt with and as the relationships are being ferreted out. As the parent you're the one who, as exhausting as it might be, who actually enacts most of the intervention.
Dr. Wilde’s first tip for creating and navigating a safe home environment is to work on yourself and the way you show up as a parent. Developing this state of grounded and loving presence can set you up to be steady yourself and help your kids weather the storms that are coming. As parents we try to get our kids to be successful, we try to get them in the right activities, and try to help them learn life skills.
It is about working from within. Develop a grounding and loving presence yourself. When we're trying to work from the outside in, we're just in caught in this “spin and scramble”. However, when we start from the inside and work out, there's this solidness, this peacefulness. The other things just naturally fall into place much more easily, not necessarily automatically, but you're in a state where you can handle things where you have good perspective and where you're in the right frame of mind to make wise decisions as a parent. That's much different from survival mode or reactive parenting, which is a place most of us get caught in at times.
It is also critical to be really aware of matched and mismatched environments. Kids with ADHD often are put in situations where they're asked to do things that do not necessarily come easily for them. They are put in the position of feeling like they're failing and feeling in trouble over and over again. Over time that really can wear down our kids’ sense of self-efficacy and self- worth. We need to be sure our kids are also in places where they're celebrated, places where they feel like they are winning. We need to be aware of their wins and be sure to celebrate them.
Want more? Be sure to check out the full podcast here: Winning With ADHD Podcast