parenting ADHD Archives - Growing In Grace

Tips for Growing Organizing Skills in your ADHD homeschool

November 2, 2022Tracy

Growing and cultivating takes time and patience. Nothing grows overnight. You can’t plop a plant in your garden and hope to pluck the first fruit tomorrow. Growing organizing skills and time management, particularly in a child with ADHD, takes time and patience. There is no “miracle-gro” for these executive functioning skills, and progress looks different for each child. With all that said, I want to walk you through some of the “baby steps” along the way that have helped us in growing organizing skills in our kids and give you an honest look at where each of them are today.

Tips for Growing Organizing Skills in your ADHD homeschool

Organizing the ADHD family with weekly planning

October 26, 2022Tracy

Our family is ADHD multiple times over, which translates to lots of distraction and forgetfulness and miscommunication if we aren’t proactive. As our kids get older and add more to their schedules, it becomes increasingly difficult for my husband and I to keep track of everything we have going and everywhere we need to be, especially when one or more of us forgets to mention an activity or commitment until just before we need to be there. One of the ways we stay on the same page as a family and teach self-management skills for our kids is to have weekly family planning meetings as part of our regular routines. Organizing the ADHD family is not simple, but these weekly meetings have helped to simplify some of the chaos.

Parenting ADHD: Appreciating your child when you can’t enjoy the moment

June 12, 2019Tracy

There are moments in parenting that are amazing, that fill you with admiration for your child and with wonder that you have the privilege to be in his or her little life. There are sweet, cuddly moments filled with all the warm fuzzies we mommies dream of. And then there are other moments, moments when parenting is hard, moments that make you question everything in your life. Parenting ADHD, much less multiple children with ADHD, is filled with both moments. In one moment, I am in awe at the imagination, energy, and innovation of my kids, absolutely stunned by the 50+ million thoughts a day that pour out of their brains. And then there are moments that rock my world, that shake the core of all by beliefs, and I’m left in the ruins of impulsivity and emotional dysregulation. Parenting ADHD is awesome! And parenting ADHD is stinking hard.

Then comes the sage advice to “enjoy the moment” because they grow up so fast. But honestly, there are some parenting moments that I just can’t enjoy. Some moments, honestly, we just survive. So how do you appreciate your child, even when you can’t enjoy the moment?

5 Ways to Appreciate Your Child When You Can’t Enjoy the Moment

Ideas for a Skills-based Summer

July 6, 2018Tracy

Over the years, we’ve done a variety of things during our summer homeschool months. Kids with ADHD need structure, and while I’ve usually offered a break from our core subjects, we usually do something over those summer months to provide a structure. Some summers, we’ve focused on those subjects and activities we didn’t have time for during the school year: hands-on science, music appreciation, art, and nature study. But another fun option is to focus on skills. A skills-based summer can look different for each family and each child based on their ages and interests. The goal is to evaluate what sets of skills you want to work on and create a structure to help you strengthen those skills.