One popular wish of parents who have a child with ADHD is that their child would listen. Sometimes it may appear that your child is either unaware of what you are saying or that they have heard you but they don’t care to respond. It can be extremely frustrating to talk to your child, knowing that you may be ignored. But there are many things you can do to increase your child’s attentiveness to you and also to increase their responsiveness. How you talk to your child is of great importance in how well your child will respond. My purpose in writing this post is to give you some strategies you can implement right now to get your child to listen.
One of the first questions you may ask yourself is, “Why is my child not listening?” The answers may be important in how you deal with their behavior. Don’t always assume that your child just wants to push your buttons. There may be other things going on that you need to be aware of. Your child’s lack of attention and responsiveness to you may be due to varied reasons including:
• They may have a slow response time due to poor processing capabilities. ADDitude Magazine discusses what this means to have slow processing speed: “It means that he takes a bit longer than other kids his age to make sense of the information he takes in. He might have trouble assimilating written or spoken information, or take longer to answer questions or finish tests.” Basically your child may need a longer time to figure out what you are saying and to respond.
• They may not be able to tune out distractions in the environment. Are you trying to talk to your child from across the room? Is the TV blaring? Are they playing a video game? Is it a noisy environment? Your child with ADHD is less likely to be able to pay attention to you when there are other things going on in their sensory environment to capture their interest.
• Are you yelling? If you end up raising your voice to get your child to listen, this strategy quite often backfires. Here is more about Why Yelling Doesn’t Work.
• Is your child frequently defiant? There are some children with ADHD who consistently react to requests by being negative and non-compliant. Here is an article describing how to help your defiant child.
How do I talk so that my child will listen?
• One of the first things I learned when I went to graduate school for special education was to stop phrasing commands as requests. If you want your child to do something, stop asking long winded questions such as, “When you get the chance could you please take out the trash because it is overflowing and the last time it spilled all over the floor?” If you want your child to do something you need to be precise and short as in, “I want you to take out the trash right now.” If it is not a choice don’t ask a question. Cut the chatter and be specific.
