ADHD Affects How Kids See The World

ADHD is biologically based, it’s a brain that is different both structurally and chemically. ADHD is NOT caused by parenting, too much TV, or technology...in fact, this neurology is almost as heritable as height! Because of the neurological differences in brains with ADHD, many feelings are felt with greater intensity than average. This fact affects your child’s perception of the world in a complex way.

The way a brain filters sensory stimuli is how we “see” the world around us, it’s what creates our perception. Our perception has a strong influence on how we feel about our life experiences. How the brain captures the range of different sensory stimuli in the environment and links them together to form our perception is called sensory integration. 

Because perception is reality, the key to successfully parenting kids with ADHD is to understand exactly how their ADHD symptoms are influencing their perception of the world.

Imagine that your eyes need glasses to see well but you don’t know that. As you go about your life everything you see is blurry and out of focus, but it’s always been that way and you don’t know any different. One day you meet a stranger in a park who says, “Hey, check out that beautiful bird over there! It has such lovely detail in the purple and blue stripes of its wings.”. You look over in the direction the stranger is pointing and what you see looks like a grey furry rodent. “That’s not a bird,” you reply. The stranger looks at you strangely and says, “Of course it’s a bird, are you stupid? Look at its wings and the perfect color of its stripes, how their color changes in the light.”. You look again and try very hard, but still can only see a grey lump in the distance without any definition at all. 

In the same way that eyes can see the world differently, brains with ADHD filter environmental stimuli differently. 

Kids with ADHD live in a state of emotional arousal that fluctuates between too much and too little and this difference affects how their brain interprets environmental stimuli. Too much arousal leads to very strong reactions to events that seem relatively minor. Too little arousal looks like laziness or a simple problem of lacking “willpower.”

Asking our kids to stop over-reacting or under-reacting to how they perceive their environment is very much the same as asking someone who needs glasses to “try harder” to see well.

It’s neurologically impossible to turn down the sensory volume in an over-aroused brain. But it’s totally possible for parents to understand why this happens and learn what to do about it.

Imagine you are sitting in the park with that stranger again…

He keeps insisting that the rodent is a beautiful bird. You try to see it from his perspective but still, all you see is a blurry grey lump. You can tell by his insistence that he’s not going to agree with what you see, so what do you do?

Option 1: Walk away and forget this ever happened..

Option 2: Agree with him and pretend that you can see the beautiful colorful stripes.

Option 3: Yell at him, tell him he’s the one who is stupid, and kick him in the leg before stomping off.

Now, let’s imagine that the stranger noticed your effort at trying to see the bird, and he asks if you wear glasses. “Glasses, what is that?”  you reply. The stranger explains that not all eyes see the same and he suggests that you walk closer to the bird to see if it comes into focus. You walk closer and surprisingly, you can see the wings and the beautiful colors. 

How might you respond to the stranger now? More importantly, how do you FEEL now?

Brains with ADHD don’t filter environmental stimuli well and when we react to this sensory difference by explaining why it’s wrong we unintentionally invalidate our child’s internal experience EVERY. SINGLE. TIME. 

Whenever we ask our kids to “calm down” we are communicating that how they feel is unacceptable or wrong. This steady denial of feelings, unintentional as it may be, confuses and enrages kids (and adults too!) and teaches them to minimize or hide their feelings which can lead to a pattern of more and more explosive reacting or worse, learning to direct their intensity inward. 

There is a direct connection between how kids feel and how they behave. This is why learning how to see the world through their experience so we can validate their experience is the most important thing we can do to ensure their future success and happiness. 

It’s totally possible to learn how to tolerate strong feelings. But we must know how to teach it. 

It begins with acknowledging strong emotions in the moment to validate them.