Using CBT to Improve ADHD Parenting

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) has many applications for mental health wellness.  This solution-focused methodology deprioritizes emotions in the therapy room; sessions tend to focus instead on the thought processes that cause the emotions.  According to CBT, our automatic negative thoughts are behind many of our negative emotions.  By deprogramming distorted thinking, we set ourselves up to feel happier and react less anxiously.  

In my work as an ADHD parenting therapist, I have found CBT to be the most effective methodology to enact tangible change in parenting styles and reactivity.  Here’s why:

1. In CBT therapy, parents create a list of their frustration triggers.  

When we force ourselves to identify and document our triggers, we can discover patterns.  Many ADHD parents learn that their main “triggers” with their children are actually manifestations of their child’s natural ADHD traits!  

Parents get frustrated with forgetfulness, the tendency to create messes, lack of sense of time, and hyperactivity.  From the ADHD childs’ perspective, it often feels like the parent is getting angry out of nowhere.  From a parents’ perspective, their ADHDers behavior can feel like “groundhog day”: recurring triggering situations that they can’t seem to escape or improve.  

CBT therapy forces parents to confront the inherent unfairness of many of their triggers.  Children, while possessing many wonderful traits, routinely get in “trouble” for their ADHD behaviors.  Parents, believing that their child could just improve with more parenting, continue to dig in and try to “solve” their triggering situations.  

CBT teaches us that just because something triggers us, does not mean it HAS to trigger us.  We dissect the “why” of the trigger and work to debunk some of the negative thinking behind our reactivity.  CBT shows us that we don’t have to fix all of our child’s triggering behaviors -- sometimes we can just find acceptance.  

2.  CBT helps identify the “core fear” behind an anxious parenting reaction.  

Some ADHD parents struggle to calm their nervous systems after a long period with their children.  This is because ADHD parenting often translates into anxious parenting.  ADHD kids can be accident-prone, impulsive, more emotionally reactive, and in some cases, hyperactive.  Parents can become hyper-vigilant to counteract what they experience as unpredictability in their home.   

CBT does not question this parenting anxiety, but rather, it asks parents to discover what lies beneath.  What is the catastrophic outcome that we most fear? What is the actual threat to our children? What is our true fear, and how likely is it to come true?

These questions seem terrifying, but having an honest conversation about our deepest fears can be freeing.  Usually, core fears are simmering below the surface, causing parental outbursts of anxiety.  CBT therapy invites the core fear to the light of day.  

When spoken out loud and analyzed, our core fears lose their power.  Core fears are often improbable and illogical.  It is unhealthy for the slim possibility of a catastrophic outcome to torture us with constant anxiety.  

3.  CBT teaches us that we view the world through our own mental filters.  

In addition to the common CBT distortions, I have added one of my own: the neurotypical distortion.  Non-ADHD parents of ADHD kiddos are probably judging their children with a neurotypical lens.  In other words, they expect their child’s brain to work like theirs.  If an ADHD kid drops a coat on the ground, a non-ADHD parent might think “lazy,” “sloppy,” or “disobedient.”  An ADHDer sees that same action and knows how difficult it can be to hang up a coat during the distracted first few seconds of arriving at home.  The neurotypical distortion can manifest in less empathy and damage the parent/child bond.  

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In sum, CBT teaches us that thoughts, especially anxious thoughts, can be unraveled and examined.  Just because you feel something, does not mean it is real.  As parents, we can grow and adapt to our neurodiverse kids and learn to bend rather than buckle under the daily stressors of ADHD parenting.