How to deal with your ADHD child #4 Tough Love well practised

I've already posted a few chapters of my coming book, "How to deal with your ADHD child."
You can read them here:

Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3

And now for chapter 4:

On this blog I brought a post in April 2012 with the title “How to spank your wife” This post is by far the most read on my blog and the reason is obviously that provoking title. The aim of it was to bring some perspective on a term, we’ve heard again and again as parents: “Tough Love.”

As is the case with most terms and phrases when they become popular, “Tough Love” has, in my opinion, been subject to quite a bit of misunderstanding and misinterpretation.

Basically, “Tough Love” is the notion that for anyone to truly show their love for others, sometimes it is necessary to act in a way that could seem heartless, but are done anyway, because in the end, these actions inflict less pain on the person you love than if you had acted differently.

The challenge is to understand what tough love should be if it is to be a successful tool in bringing up our children and specifically when it comes to children with ADHD.

Tough Love is a strong tool, but in many cases this term has been used as an excuse to continue feeding patterns, which are really very unhealthy for all parties involved. If Tough Love is used based on a wrong understanding of what it really is, it will have a bad influence on your child and you risk ruining their self esteem.

All this applies for every child, but having children with ADHD, it becomes even more important. Children with ADHD usually have lower self esteem than other children, because their lack of understanding social norms makes them act in ways that are sometimes inappropriate. The natural outcome is that for a child with ADHD, verbal abuse, not only from other children, but unfortunately also from adults in their lives, is the order of their world. They get emotionally beaten every day and of course their self esteem is worn down.

As a parent or an adult working with children with ADHD, you have a special responsibility to try building up that self esteem and the above mentioned issues do not only count in regards to physical abuse, but stretches out to verbal and emotional abuse as well.
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Read Chapter 5

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