Answering Parents' Questions

In this episode, we're answering more of your questions about real life ADHD parenting challenges. From when a school recommends a therapeutic classroom, to handling politics with a curious preteen, to helping kids eat, shower, and focus without constant reminders. We'll also talk about lying and exaggeration in the teens. Finally, we'll talk about what it really means for their executive function growth. Lots of practical takeaways in this one. Let's get started. Welcome to the ADHD Parenting Podcast with Mike McLeod of Grow Now ADHD and Ryan Wetzelblatt of ADHD Dude. Learn about parenting kids with ADHD from a licensed clinical social worker and speech-language pathologist who specializes in ADHD. No fluffy parenting advice, only practical information that will equip you to help your child with ADHD effectively. Welcome to the ADHD Parenting Podcast. Today, Mike and I are going to be answering parents' questions because we get a lot of them and we feel it's important to answer the questions that you send us. So if you have a question you would like us to answer in a future episode, you can email us at theadhdparentingpodcastatgmail.com. With your question, please keep it brief and please make sure to include your child's age. And if they're on any medication regimen or if they're not on medication as well, in exchange for answering your question, we'll ask you if you could please leave a short positive review on the Apple Podcast page or the Spotify Podcast page and just send us a screenshot along with your question and we'll be happy to answer it in a future episode. All right, so Mike, we ready to jump in? Let's do it. All right. This is from a mom of an eight-year-old. She said, my eight-year-old son was diagnosed with ADHD back in May. We started him on Guamphaseen and this seems to help with his impulsivity. The real problems arise at school when he's presented with non-preferred work. Most times he shuts down verbally and in some cases can resort to tearing apart the classroom or hitting a teacher aid with a long drawn-out recovery before moving on. He attends a Spanish immersion public school. Half his day is in Spanish. The other half is in English. His IQ is exceptionally high and his academics haven't been affected much. He says he wants to be there and at the end of last year was granted a one-on-one aid. The aid and everyone else on the IEP team accommodates him like crazy. If he doesn't want to participate, he doesn't have to for fear of how he might react. At our most recent IEP meeting, I was told that their recommendation is to move him to a therapeutic behavior intervention class because they think his academics will eventually catch up with him. Do you know much about these programs? There is little to zero information online and the two people I know with this program tell me to avoid it at all costs. For fear of how I have a scarlet letter for the rest of his schooling career. Thank you in advance. So, Mike, let me just start with this one because my son, when he was younger, had to attend an out-of-district school because of his behavior, which sounds very similar to the program they're suggesting to her that he should attend. So, I guess the first thing I want to say is that in regards to him attending there, number one, that is false that he will have some kind of red flag or scarlet letter for the rest of his school career that's completely inaccurate. Number one, okay, number two, you know, I have to say, unfortunately, this decision is going to be a little bit out of your hands because if he attends a, you know, public school, they can say, look, we can't provide for his needs here and this is what we're recommending and they might give you an option of a few different schools to look at like the ones that I used to work at. But at the end of the day, they might say we just can't provide for him here. So, I just want you to be ready for that. Yeah, and absolutely, if it comes to this, again, this is not going to affect him for the rest of his life. There's not going to be any kind of red flag on his, you know, school records. Will it say he attended there? Yes. But, you know, schools know that kids improve and they mature. So, I wouldn't worry about that. Mike, the last thing I want to address is the medication piece. So, always have to preface this by saying I'm not a doctor. I can't give medical advice. What I'm doing is sharing what I know from my education on medication, what I've seen with other families. While guanfacine can help with impulsivity, I rarely see that be effective on its own. One of the things also to keep in mind is that if a guanfacine or clonidine dose is a little high, it can cause, even if it's not a little high, it can cause irritability in some kids because those meds, what are called alpha agonists, are actually blood pressure medications. They can lower your blood pressure. Well, they do lower your blood pressure and that can cause some irritability in some kids. So, my suggestion is speak with your prescriber about this and if he's aggressive, we know because research shows us that stimulants do help with aggression. So, I just wanted to mention that. Mike, before you answer this, can I say what I would like you to address first? Sure, please. What do you think I want you to address first with this question? The accommodating? No. I want you to address the one-on-one aid first. Oh, of course. Yes. So, him having a one-on-one aid leads to that accommodating. So, what I see here is number one, the behaviors have escalated into a safety issue. So, schools need to protect all of the students within the class. So, obviously the behaviors have escalated where other kids' safety and their education is being affected by the big behaviors, trashing the classroom, attacking people and those sorts of things. They bring in an aid which then brings more attention, more scapability, more ability to get negative attention seeking behaviors from that aid. So, that's going to backfire. But really, this is the tell-tale story I hear every single day are these schools that are under-resourced, under-financed, and teachers and workers that are incredibly burnt out and have very little resources where now it's gotten to the point where these behaviors are so significant in such a safety issue that it seems like the entire school and the staff are walking on eggshells around this child and accommodating him to do whatever they can to make sure he does not blow up, which is obviously making it worse. And it's teaching him that these behaviors work, that when I scare the adults around me, I'm able to avoid things I don't want to do. So, really, if you look at big picture here in long-term predictors of success, this is not the right environment for him because this environment does not have the resources, does not have the staff that is trained to work directly with him in his neurodiverse brain and these behaviors that you're having. So, you want him to be in a place that teaches him frustration, tolerance, self-regulation through non-preferred tasks, does not have him as the one child with an aid in the class, and they're able to diminish these behaviors and get him to be able to complete work because in the current environment, he's learning, if my behaviors are big enough, I don't have to do what I don't want to do. Mike, why don't you also explain why having a one-on-one aid would not benefit him over the long term? Because it's not realistic. He's going to get to the certain age where having an aid is going to affect him socially. Like, you're worried about this program being a scarlet letter on him. The aid is more of a scarlet letter on him. Yeah, so that's really the biggest problem. Him having a one-on-one aid is going to create, why does he have an aid? That's someone who's a little, you know, that's probably someone I shouldn't associate myself with. So, it's alienating him from his peers. Right. Okay, moving on to our next question. This is from the mom of a 12-year-old. My son is 12 and is medicated with Vyvance. He is diagnosed with both components of ADHD as well as generalized anxiety. He has no smartphone, iPad or social media. Limited TV is the only screen he has for leisure time. I wanted to ask about parenting him during this political climate. Politics today are one dopamine hit after another for a drama-seeking anxious ADHD preteen. I am concerned with my son's ability to bring to the event or story compassion and critical thinking skills. Normally politics are something I would not be concerned with regarding a kid, but unfortunately there is no hiding from it in today's world. It's argued amongst his classmates and there are too many breaking news stories on the radio news to keep up with it. I don't think 12-year-olds listen to the radio, but I am worried about something he isn't capable of managing yet or are there steps we can take for him to gain critical thinking skills that overcome his impulse control issues and instant gratification wired mind? This is a fantastic question. I am so glad that someone was able to put this down into writing and submit this, because this is really something that I've seen. Being in so many different schools, kids now, especially over the past five, six years, get into more political conversations than any other time I've been in a school observing students. What kids tend to do is take very extreme sides of the spectrum and use it as sort of like shock value with their peers. Whether they're right or left, they'll make very shocking statements about being on either side when they just don't fully understand. These are kids that are not taxpayers, that don't vote, it's all higher level stuff that they really don't need to be concerning themselves with. These are young kids that are still figuring out who they are, their identity, they're going through puberty, they're going through school, they're still worried about popularity and relationships and all these different things that in the scheme of things don't really matter. We can't, in so many ways, we've taken away childhood and adolescence with screens and video games and social media and ed tech and all of these things, and we've stolen play and boredom and all of these things. The last thing we want to do is replace it with politics. We live in a world now where we are more divided than ever on both sides of the spectrum and the last people we need to get dragged into this are our kids and our teens. I think it's a great thing that this mom put this into writing and submitted this question and I would sit down with your child and have that conversation to just not get involved with politics. Wait until you're old enough to vote where you can start to have a voice and start form an opinion of your own, make sure you're not watching the news where he can hear it or watch it with you, keep him off of social media, keep him away from information that he's going to get, keep him off of things like Twitter and X where anything can pop up and any crazy video can pop up. That was a big problem a couple of weeks ago where kids were seeing a very scary video that was circling all over X that they shouldn't have seen. And keep him away from it. Keep him away from it as much as you possibly can and teach him that politics are an adult mess and something that he can deal with the rest of his life but not right now. And what I wanted to add to this was that at 12, the way kids discuss politics is at a 12-year-old level. And respectfully, I want to point to this mom, I think you're applying your adult perspective on it and thinking that they're discussing things at this adult level and your son's just not there yet. The rest of the kids he's discussing this with are also at his level. And to Mike's point, they're not discussing it in some sophisticated way that adults are. They're discussing it in a 12-year-old way. And guess what? They move on and then go and discuss Roblox or whatever the game they're playing or videos they're watching. So I guess what I'm saying is that try not to apply your adult perspective to this and think that he is getting this information as adult and processing it that way because he's not. He's not there developmentally. In terms of your question of are there steps we can take for him to gain critical thinking skills that overcome his impulse control issues and instant gratification wired mind. You're kind of comparing apples to oranges here. What critical thinking is really it's abstract thinking skills. Abstract thinking skills are something that develop over time. They really start to develop around 12 or 13 and kind of go from there. So that's something that has to happen naturally to help him. You know what you can do is you can, you know, when you talk about different things, you know, you can ask him questions that challenge him. That will help him develop his abstract thinking skills. You can help him understand two sides of an issue that will also help him. But this has nothing to do with impulsivity at all. Hey, impulsivity has to do with self-regulation and that's an executive function issue. And as we talk about ADHD is an executive function developmental delay. So for somebody with a more impulsive profile of ADHD, their impulse control is going to be delayed. Teaching them critical thinking skills has nothing to do with that whatsoever. The two things that research shows us help with impulsivity are brain maturity and medication. Okay, that's it. And I know somebody's going to say, well, what about mindfulness pain and all that? You can try anything you want. I'm just telling you what the research shows. Not against any of those things, but nothing else shows long term improvement except medication and brain maturity. So anything you want to add to that? Yeah, and I would just say as the parent, focus on what you control. You don't control the topics of conversations that are going to happen. Neurotypical boys talk about ridiculous things. Neurotypical girls talk about ridiculous things. It's part of being a kid. You talk about things that just don't make sense. But you do control the content they have access to when they live in your home on your Wi-Fi or the phone that you're paying for them. So if you want to keep them away from those wide ends of the spectrum, those scary pieces of news, try to find other talents to replace it with. Get them more involved in music and sports and various other topics of conversation. Kids talk about a lot more than just politics, video games and videos. They talk about a lot of ridiculously random things all throughout the day. So don't worry about the topics. Don't worry about it affecting him socially, but you do control the media that he has access to. So take it one step at a time and focus more on overall quality of life than just one very specific thing. But I do agree with you. It's a very tough time to be a parent because of today's political climate amongst other things. All right, Mike, the next one is about prompt dependence. So it says, hello, Mike and Ryan. Thank you for creating your podcast and your various programs. I subscribe to Ryan's class and my husband and I are learning a lot. Thank you. I realize this is long. I appreciate anything you were able to address. Our son is six years old and he's a twin. He started 18 milligrams of methylphenidate in June. He just started first grade. How can we reduce prompt dependence at meal and shower time? Eating a meal requires constant reminders to eat. He doesn't finish his food in school and it causes crankiness during his after school program and when he gets home. We have a 504 plan meeting coming up and we'll ask for an aid to prompt him at lunchtime. He talks a lot while at the dinner table and gets up from his seat. Showering is something similar. I fear that he is learning to be helpless. He gets in and it's like he doesn't know what to do. There will be one small spot of shampoo on his head that doesn't get spread around. He doesn't rinse it out. Body parts won't get cleaned. I tell him to call me when his body is so big so I can make sure he got everything. The only thing he will clean is his belly. Sometimes he just stands there playing in the water. We tried drawing a stick figure on the wall and telling him to erase the body part after he cleans them on his body. I'm resorting to asking him to do his best. Then I follow up with a proper cleaning. My initial instinct is we are bringing too much attention to what your child is not doing. At dinner it seems like there's a lot of attention towards sit down, sit down, sit down, finish your food, eat your food, eat your food. What we have to realize is that when you have an ADHD child and you give them a verbal directive, sit down and eat your food. What's more stimulating to the ADHD brain? Sitting down and eating their food or not sitting down, running around the house and having more attention on you. So obviously doing the opposite of what's being asked of you gives you more dopamine and more conflict seeking behaviors. So if you are constant, so this, the topic of this email is about prompt dependence. What you are doing as the parent is you are using too much language. You are prompting too much. Focus more on modeling, showing. Kids learn by watching you, not by hearing you. So the less attention you bring to sitting down, finishing your meal. I would not have a lunch aid prompt him at lunch in front of his peers. I would definitely not do that. And all of the attention that he's not going to draw a stick figure. He's not going to call you up and say, look at my soapy body. He's not going to do any of those things. So we have to fade back support and allow him to figure these things out over time through prompting and maybe, you know, adding in some consequences afterwards, whatever it may be. But the verbal prompting in the moment is pushing him towards doing the opposite of what you're asking him to do. I'm going to take a little different approach here and I'm going to address some of the things. So the thing you mentioned about him getting irritable because he's not eating lunch, that's a normal thing for kids who are on stimulants. What I would suggest is have a snack in his bag that he really likes. He can have at the after school program. They might give them snack, but have something he really likes because he has to compensate for the calories he missed during lunch. OK, so that's number one and getting an aid to prompt him at lunchtime. Sure, that's that's OK. But if he's not hungry because of the meds, it is what it is. You know, there's only so much you can do about that. That's why I'm saying to get him a snack that he really likes for the after school program. And then also what I teach parents is, you know, sometimes if they're hungry after dinner and maybe not at his age, because they tend to not have as much as an appetite, but let them eat after dinner if they're hungry. OK, because again, they have to make up for those calories they missed during the day. The other thing is I want to say, I think your expectations here for him being independent might be a little bit above his developmental level. So if we're talking about a six year old who's turning seven, his executive functioning age is close to four year old. So what I would ask you is, do we expect a four year old to get in the shower, completely clean themselves and everything and do a good job? I've known 12 year olds who don't do that. OK, so I wouldn't expect a four year old or a six year old to do that. So he needs some more scaffolding with this. And I think your idea of the stick figure was good, but I think that just creates a distraction. So if there was a stick figure in the shower, I would just be playing with it or drawing or whatever. And he's not going to remember to do it. He's not going to remember to sit there and cross off a body. And it's kind of hard for a stick figure to stay on the wall throughout an entire bath. So good intention, but he needs some more support with shower time. And I don't think that that's enabling learned helplessness at all, because at that point, if he's taking a shower at night, there's a warm off and the situation just is what it is. He just needs some more support right now with this. It might for a while still. So yeah, that's what I would say. Yeah, and I would just add, he's six turning seven overall. There's so many other things to be focused on in terms of play, face to face social interactions. How's he doing at school? What activities is he involved in? Does he play outside? you know, sitting down and eating and finishing meals as well as getting every single, you know, every single area cleaned in the shower are going to continue to be non-preferred tasks for quite some time. This is not something you're going to solve at six or at seven. You know, he's a boy, a young boy that has other things on his mind and those things are more adult-directed activities in terms of sitting down and formally eating and showering sort of to perfection. So I absolutely agree with that in terms of lowering expectations and really meeting him where he's at in terms of his executive age. One thing I just wanted to add, I forgot about. So my son, when he was younger, he used to be very slow about eating because he was, you know, distracted. He would play with his food. So I want to tell you one thing I did. We had an analog clock on the table and he knew that at a certain time, you know, on the clock that, you know, dinner was over and he had to be finished by then. And that did help because, you know, like most kids with ADHD, he just can't sense the passage of time. So that did help, but it's really important that's an analog clock, not a digital clock, not a timer, not the Rick countdown timer, because the way you learn to sense the passage of time is through unit volume and analog clocks show time in unit volume. Digital clocks do not do that. Timers do not do that. The other thing is in terms of him, you know, sitting at meals, what I would say is have an expectation that, you know, you're to sit here, you know, for the 15 or 20 minutes we have dinner, understanding that more than 20 minutes might be pushing it. With that, what I would also tell you, and what I tell parents of younger elementary schoolers is he might need some sensory input. So what you can try is, you know, order from Amazon a core strengthening pillow for kids. The reason I tell people to order it from Amazon is because then if it, you know, if it doesn't help, then they can always return it. So a core strengthening pillow is something that you sit on at it, you know, helps your core muscles and they can give that sensory input. So I would try that. I would also try one of those big rubber bands that goes around the legs of a chair. The brand name for him is TheraBand. So that's something he can put his foot on. And those are things that can help younger kids, you know, regulate themselves better when they have to sit for extended periods like mealtime. So yeah. All right. My next question is from the parent of an eight-year-old. She said, my eight-year-old daughter has been diagnosed with ADHD. We have started a lot of things that you guys have suggested and it has helped so much. She gets a lot of time outside playing, no screens, and is on dexamethalphenidate, but she says she still gets overwhelmed in school and then struggles to focus toward the end of class. She comes home very frustrated because she can't remember anything she learned that day. So we do a lot of homework. I make up to help reinforce what was taught in school that day. I feel like I am homeschooling her after school. I don't mind doing that, but I feel like there's a lot of school without much free time for her. But also, if I lay off homework, I have seen her grade slip. What should I do? How can I help her? So is this all student-directed report that at the end of the day things are falling off and, you know, doesn't need to be a little bit of, you know, looking at the medication there in terms of medication wearing off later in the afternoon is always a possibility. But I have the teachers also cooperated that report that things tend to be slipping at the end of the day. That would be my first question because that is, you know, one of the first signs of sort of learned helplessness of, you know, things complaining about things being too hard or things being too frustrated and those kinds of things. And then you coming in to sort of save the day and step in and do homework with your hand in hand, maybe that's a good way to get you to pull you in and have you do homework with her side by side by sort of sympathy seeking and negative attention seeking by saying how hard school is at the end of the day so that you're doing the majority of homework with her next to her instead of her having to be independent with it. So I would definitely speak to the teachers to see if they also see what the student is reporting. You didn't mention what her dosage was of dexmouth affinity, but one of the things is if she's on the low dosage and just with her metabolism she might be running forward quickly. So she might need what's called an afternoon booster dose, which is something that can be taken at lunch. Sometimes it's taken in the afternoon. And what that is, it just kind of helps you get through the day. So one of the things I want people to understand about stimulants are stimulants are not necessarily based on weight. What they're really based on is how quickly you metabolize them. Okay, so you know, an eight year old can need, I'm just going to give an example, an eight year old can need, you know, 36 milligrams of methyl phenidate, whereas, you know, a 17 year old might only need 16 milligrams. So there's no way to kind of predict this and you know, genetic panel testing, let me just explain to people, does not help with understanding what stimulant work best with your child and only helps with knowing dosage. So just keep that in mind because I see so much misinformation in Facebook, parent ADHD groups about genetic panel testing. So I would speak to the prescriber about possibly an afternoon booster, but I think to Mike's point, the most important thing is get feedback from the teacher first. The last thing I'm going to say is I would not worry about her grades, okay, grades are not important in second grade. And what I always say is you don't want to toxify your relationship over homework. And it doesn't sound like that's happening. But you know, and there's nothing wrong with you reviewing things with her, but your whole relationship at home during the week should not center around, you know, re teaching her material. So just keep that in mind. And yeah, grades are not priority in second grade. Absolutely, do not step in and try to be the assistant teacher or the homework secretary, especially for a second grader. You talk about how she has no screen. So you've done an incredible job parenting and not introducing screens in her life and recognizing that would be a total mess if you did lots of outdoor play and doing outdoor play every day after school is going to be a heck of a lot more healthy for her brain and her body than sitting and reviewing work with you. All right, we have one more question for today. This is from the mom of a 15 year old daughter. She said, my 15 year old daughter has a problem with lying. She is getting better at home, but with her peers, she embellishes things dramatically and with new contacts, she makes up wild stories to seem more interesting, I think. I've spoken to her about it, but she brushes it off. She has suffered the consequence of a broken friendship and alienation with some of her friend group, but she doesn't seem to learn from it. So she didn't mention about if she's on medication or not, which could be a variable on this, but might not be a huge variable. One of the things I want to start off by saying is this is a very common behavior I've seen in adolescent girls with ADHD is the lying and embellishing things and also talking a lot about themselves and not showing interest in others. So I'm wondering if part of this is, is she making up stories that just sound ridiculous or is she talking at her peers so much that it's uncomfortable for them and they don't want to have a one-sided conversation with her. So one of the things is for kids with ADHD who struggle socially, the core, what I call social executive function skill they struggle with is perspective taking. So understanding others' thoughts and understanding how you're coming across to others. So I'm not sure how you've addressed this with her, but for instance, in my socially smarter course, what I teach is we have to break this down into pause and effect. So we look at number one, the context of the situation, because all social interactions are context dependent. They vary based on who or with and so on. And that's why I say role playing does not work to help with social skills because you can't role play every context of a social situation. But what we can do is help her with cause and effect understand what her words were. What were other kids' thoughts about that? How did other kids respond to her as a result of that? And then how did she feel about herself based on how they responded to her? And I actually have it downloadable to help with this to help lay this out because I think it's more helpful to see it on paper. But really, this is what it comes down to is helping her understand others' thoughts and their thoughts and their feelings about how she's coming across to them and why it's not helpful for her. Mike, I think one of the things I'd like for you to address with this one is one of you talk about the episodic memory piece here and about why she might not be learning from her past experiences with this. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. So first of all, exactly as Ryan said, if there was a list of the top five symptoms of ADHD in adolescent girls, this lying and exaggerating stories is probably in the top five. So this is incredibly common. So obviously, we talk about this all the time. The number all executive functioning starts with nonverbal working memory, which is the visual imagery system of the brain, which presents itself in two specific ways, visual imagery hindsight of your past and visual imagery foresight of your future for future thinking skills, planning, prioritizing, problem solving. Part of that nonverbal visual imagery hindsight is a very important skill known as episodic memory, which is your own autobiographical memory of how the past sort of played out in various experiences. So you can think of something like a birthday party and a generic definition of what a birthday party is. But your episodic memory of a birthday party is, oh, we went to this laser tag place, we all had pizza, we did this, and it's your own personal autobiographical experience of something in the past. So with this, the lack of episodic memory combined with the lack of perspective taking that Ryan has broke down so beautifully is causing this behavior to continue, which is negatively impacting her relationships. Instead of learning from the first time, hey, I embellished, they caught on to it, it was embarrassed, I didn't feel good about it. I was so embarrassed, it made me feel bad, I was embarrassed instead of apologizing and cleaning it up and never doing it again, I kept on doing it. And now, because of that lack of episodic memory, I've now developed a reputation for embellishing and creating fake stories that are not true. So that's one of the biggest, that's one of the real heartbreaks of the lack of social executive functioning in ADHD kids is the lack of self-evaluation, episodic memory, and just repeating these same embarrassing, hard, struggling things because they're not learning from past experiences. So to add on to that, for this mom, number one, please make sure this girl is not on social media because that could be a big cause for the embellishment of watching other people living their extravagant social media lives, causing a negative self-image and wanting to embellish your life. So keep her off of social media, keep her off of screens, and have her focus on real social experiences. Teaching her to be a little bit more of a listener, standing back and observing, building that situational awareness, hearing how other people talk about themselves and their experiences, and recognizing that it's okay for people to like you for who you truly are as a person. So figuring that out through your own self-worth and self-image along with that social executive functioning. Mike, one of the last things I want to say about this, and that was a perfect explanation, sometimes what I find with adolescent girls is that even if we constantly work on this, it still doesn't register with them. It just is going to be two things that either ask to get to a tipping point where they realize, as Mike pointed out, oh, this has happened so many times and I don't feel good when I get isolated or when other kids kind of cut me off. So they have to learn this on their own and decide to make that change, or it just comes with maturity. So I just want to make that point because I think this man is really trying and just want to say, as much as you try with this, improving social executive function skills is an extremely slow process. At parents, get very impatient, they want to know how long will this take? Like they wanted definitive answer. What we have to say is we can't tell you because there is no way to predict that. And we don't have any research chain in Glick's this long because, number one, every kid is different and there's so many variables involved. And this is why I find parents often give up on working on this because they think that things are not improving. But one of the things I learned early on from Michelle Garcia-Winner who created social thinking is that improvement comes slowly and sometimes it's extremely slow. So just keep that in mind. And that's all executive functions. This is a common question I get when parents call to learn about grown-out services is, oh, how long until you typically see progress? What's your success rate? Parents need to understand it would be so incredibly unethical to even answer that question, especially before we've even met your child. Success is a subjective term that means something unique to each individual person. And for me to say, oh, your kid's 13, well, we've worked this many 13-year-olds and they've been in the program for this amount of time, that's not helpful. That's not helpful for you to know. The only thing that's helpful is finding someone who understands executive functions doesn't focus on further pathologizing your child and focusing on client retention and intensive parent training. So the parents now have the tools and you're no longer needed. And for parents to learn about social executive functions through a parent trainer, like following Ryan, socially smarter or working with a grown-out coach, whatever it may be, to learn about social executive functions, because this is not a commonly understood topic. People think that social skills is eye contact, topic maintenance, circles of communication, all of that nonsense. Social executive functions are slow to develop, but they are so incredibly important. These kids need real face-to-face, real social relationships outside of the family. So one of the pieces of advice I would give this mom is if you're within the walls of the home, the privacy of the family, and you hear her embellishing a story, you need to call her out on it. It's better for her to hear it from you as the mom than for her to go and do it again with peers. So call her out on it in the moment of, you know, I think you're making this up, you're embellishing, you're trying to make me have different thoughts about you than what are really true and what are really accurate. So stop that. Every time you hear it happening, put a stop to it and be very, very clear that she is embellishing, she is making something up. Get to the bottom of it in that moment, because it's better for her to hear it from you than from peers. And this mom didn't ask this, but I think Mike, it's important that we mention, because somebody might wonder about this. And, you know, there is no evidence that social skills groups help kids with ADHD. Okay? Yeah. Actually, the research is clear. It makes it worse. Yeah. Well, the research is clear that office clinic-based social skills groups offer no benefit for kids with ADHD. Okay. So if you're wondering if that's going to help her, no, it won't. And people might often have a hard time with this because they're so, you know, I mean, look, just in the Philadelphia area where you are, there's 500 social skills groups, right? Well, every corner, every corner, right. But if you want to see the evidence on this, you can go to effectivechildtherapy.org, type in ADHD, and you'll see the evidence-based treatments and what works, what doesn't work. So just wanted to leave it at that. All right. If you have a question you would like us to answer in a future episode, email us at the ADHDParentingPodcast at gmail.com. Make sure to include your child's age, medication regimen, or if you're not medicated, please keep your question brief. And if you could send us a screenshot of the positive review you left for us on Apple Podcast or Spotify, we would really appreciate it. So thanks so much for listening and we will talk to you soon. Take care. Thank you, everyone. Take care. Thanks for listening. To learn more about Mike's practice, Grow Now ADHD, please visit his website, grownowadhd.com. To learn about the services Ryan provides, please visit adhddude.com. You can find Mike on Instagram at grownowadhd and Ryan on the ADHD Dude YouTube channel. We'd love to hear your feedback or questions, so feel free to contact us at the ADHD Parenting Podcast at gmail.com. The ADHD Parenting Podcast and content posted by Grow Now ADHD or ADHD Dude are presented solely for general information and educational purposes. Our goal is to provide valuable insights and knowledge, not to replace professional services. Mike and Ryan cannot provide clinical consultation or free advice through social media or other forms of communication. The information on this podcast is not a substitute for professional advice. If you or your child have any medical or mental health concerns, please consult your healthcare professionals.