In the Driver’s Seat with Enzo!

Now that my ADHD teen has the keys to the car, he's borrowing the keys to my blog.

Life in the Fast Brain | by Donald Caven | posted by Kristen Caven

I’ve been driving in one way or another for about ten years now. When I was seven, I got my first Mario Kart game on my hand-me-down GameCube. I played that endlessly, not aware that there was anything more to cars and driving, until one day, at around age ten, I borrowed Need for Speed from my neighbor, and everything changed. I started with my first car, a bright red Mazda, and went nuts. I beat all the races, I bought all the cars, and my knowledge of automobiles grew.

When I drive by myself, there’s no self-esteem ding when I make a mistake. Which I do — I'm new at this.

Fast forward seven years to today, and I’m now in my second month as a licensed driver. Yes, a licensed driver on real roads, the kind that that require driving with an actual car. Actual roads are strikingly different from the world I speed around in on my Xbox. I can’t “press Y to rewind,” I can’t participate in underground street races down at the shipyards without my parents disowning me (or going to actual real-life jail), and I can’t win races or buy my dream Lamborghini. Driving in real life is slower and easier, and a lot more fun in some ways. But still, it’s got its share of new challenges.

In my eyes, driving in video games has a few key advantages over driving in real life. Fancy cars like Bentleys and Porsches and Ferraris are commonplace, and everyone is driving one. In real life, though, I’m constantly distracted by these luxury sports cars that appear every once in a while going the other way down the highway. Every time I see one of these, I point it out to share the marvels of automotive technology to my passengers, but...“ENZO! KEEP YOUR EYES ON THE ROAD!”

I admit I can be a distracted driver when I’m surrounded by exotic cars. But what is harder is when my parents criticize something about my driving, be it nit-picking or an actual, legitimate concern. Fortunately, one of the ways around both problems is to drive by myself. When I drive by myself not only is there no audience to excitedly point out cars for; there’s no self-esteem ding when I make a mistake. Which I do — I'm new at this.

Possibly the most stressful part of driving with ADD is having back seat (and front seat) drivers. My wonderful mother and father are great to drive with—one at a time. However, on occasions where the three of us are all in the car, things can get hectic. Sometimes one of them starts to give directions, and the other chimes in to correct them. Often, the opposing set of directions will result in us getting to the same place in the same amount of time, but no matter which set of directions I follow, I end up in the middle of the tension. Then I have to do my best to tune out the arguing and try to listen for directions from my choice of parents. It makes me miss driving in a virtual world, where the only people yelling in my ear are my friends, who I can more easily ignore than my parents.

Here are a few suggestions — okay, Mom, requests — for helping a young ADD driver:

• Be kind. We get it, even if we still seem a little bit distracted.

• If we mess up, we understand that we’re messing up. We have ADD and we’re rebellious teenagers and we're learning; we’re not doing it to bother you!

• One set of directions is enough. We finally made a rule in our family that only the person in the passenger seat is allowed to direct the driver. (Certain people — I’m not mentioning names here — sometimes have trouble following this rule...)

• Be a good role model. If we do something, and get snapped at for it, it’s hard to keep our eyes from rolling when we see you doing it when you’re driving!

The Forklift of Love

Getting a sleepy ADHD teenager out of bed calls for heavy machinery — and a lot of patience from the crew at home.

Until we learned about ADD, it was always a mystery why our little guy couldn’t sleep. Even though Enzo, as a small child, was more than once called “The Thing That Would Not Sleep” by his exhausted-to-the-point-of-a-horror-movie parents, he was a blessedly solid sleeper once he was down. Yet, he surprised us all (as teenagers do) by growing up to be “The Thing that Would Not Move.”

Sleeping past nine! Oh, how we reveled in those luxurious summer mornings! It was like being newlyweds again!

Baby Enzo was better than an alarm clock. Even before he was born, I could never stay in bed past 6 AM. During his first decade, those bright little eyes would fly open at six…fricking.…AM. Even on weekends.

Later, when school days became a grind, he’d sleep in until seven. But on weekends, when there was so much more to look forward to, the son would still rise with the sun. "I've got a lot to do today," he'd say when we stumbled into the Lego jungle.

We were so proud the summer before eighth grade, when he took up a new hobby: sleeping past nine! Oh, how we reveled in those luxurious summer mornings! It was like being newlyweds again!

Now that he’s pushing seventeen, the novelty of that has also worn off. On weekends we don’t see him until noon. And on school mornings, trying to get both that brain and body working takes nothing short of heroics.

Trying to wake up a teenager on a school day is not easy for anyone. Trying to wake one with ADD is like trying to get a pig to fly, according to his father, "Dave." ("It's a waste of time, and it annoys the pig.")

His first alarm goes off at 6:15. It’s a song, or rather some electronic song clip, that he has chosen the night before, and it is set on repeat on the iPod that rests in the speaker on his headboard. At 6:30, his clock alarm starts beeping, and now there is a funky rhythmic jam going on in his room. At this point, his dad starts grumbling: “I could always get myself out of bed. This is nonsense.” (Dad has learned to go to work early to save his sanity.) A few minutes later, the radio goes off.

By 6:45, if Enzo has not crawled out to turn off the beeping yet, I go into his room and start shaking his loft bed. Sometimes it takes an earthquake. When he was little and we needed him to move, we’d just bring on “the forklift of love” and lift him out. That became an impossibility after he reached the hundred-pound mark.

Half the time — and I swore I would never do this — I get angry. I start shrieking things like, “Oh, my God! It’s 7:30 already!” Or I get snotty. "Okay, I'm driving you to school without you." But I hate to go this route. While others might respond to the stress in my normally calm voice with a shot of adrenaline, Enzo doesn’t seem to have been built with this response. For him, motivation must come from within. Nagging backfires. In the mornings, the higher-pitched my voice goes, the more he shuts down.

But what goes on in that brain? When I was younger, I remember having just as much trouble getting out of bed, especially after a night of brain-racing. There are stages you have to work through in that transition between the sleep state and the awake state, which, according to the experts from the sleep study Enzo participated in, are constantly at war for our time. “I am working things out,” he mumbles. He’s still achieving the mystical tasks his dream set out for him.

On a good day, he’s up to kiss his dad goodbye. He gets dressed quickly...and then lies down for a pre-breakfast nap.

The Thing That Would Not Sleep

Enzo's busy brain kept him up and active even as a baby. We had to develop guerilla tactics to ease him into sleep.

We used to dread bedtimes. Once the novelty of being born wore off, once he rested up from that exhausting ordeal, Enzo just could never see the point in sleeping. He just didn’t want to miss a thing. If I wasn’t able to nurse him down, his dad, "Dave," would carry him around the house and the yard showing him how the birds were asleep, the animals were asleep, all his friends were asleep, his toys were asleep, and daddy was, well, dead on his feet.

Once the novelty of being born wore off, Enzo just could never see the point in sleeping.

— Kristen Caven, ADDitude blogger

We always thought we were bad parents. His little friends would just put their heads down and close their eyes when they were sleepy. It was probably because of the pacifier that he never learned to self-soothe. It was probably the co-sleeping. And then, after two or three years of that, when he took up combat sleeping, it was probably because we didn’t have the guts to let him cry it out past 2 or 3 AM.

The ADD diagnosis turned out to be a sweet victory. See? He’s neurologically different. He’s got thoughts in his brain. All night long.Thoughts, do you hear me, interesting thoughts! Hah! to you doubters!

Beyond the typically prescribed bedtime baths, off-buttons on TVs, rigid routines (hard to keep when you have ADD, too), and ban on Coke at dinner, we had to work hard to find remedies that worked. When I was a baby, the only thing that would put me to sleep was a drive around the block in the Volkswagon Bug. That never worked for little Enzo — cars, as you know by now, are way too interesting to him.

These things did:

>> A Positive Attitude. Knowing that I was the adult helped me “dominate” my toddler into taking a nap when he needed it. Sometime around age 7, I looked at my husband and said, “You know, even though it hasn’t seemed like it, he has actually gone to sleep every night of his life.”

>> Homeopathics. We discovered these tiny little sugar pills that dissolve on a child’s tongue when the teeth started coming in. They were lifesavers so many times, when dealing with everything from sniffles to stomach aches. Guess what, the right ones can help with racing brains, too! Bach Flower Remedies are also wonderful non-drugs, and always help bring on the Zzzzs.

>> Company. Although a child “should” be left alone to sleep in peace, having a big person there to model being quiet and calm helped Enzo relax. When self-regulation is difficult, having a body with a restful heartbeat and slow breathing nearby provides a neurological pattern to follow. Controlling conversation is the challenge...

>> The “Broken Record” trick helped keep me from being drawn into conversation. I would only permit myself to say, “Today is over, it’s time to sleep.”

>> Touch. Backrubs helped Enzo get in touch with his body. A story about the backrub helped him focus and relax. Favorites were the Weather Report (taught by Dr. Louise Hart), and the one about the cat that walked out and made tracks in the snow.

>> Story Tapes. He listened to a recording of Winnie the Pooh (read by Peter Dennis) over and over and over again. It was long and calming and interesting but a little boring. We found one that worked, and he listened to it every night for four years!

Eventually I developed Mom’s Guaranteed Sleep System with Magic Stories™ that could both hold his interest and bore him to sleep. (Send $99 and two box tops in.)

And then one day he found late night radio and a talk show podcast that allegedly did the same thing. I love you but now get out of my room, Mom and Dad!

As a teenager, Enzo participated in a sleep study and got some sleep coaching, plus he's gotten to know himself a little better. For example, he has also become a writer, and can relax better after doing a brain dump. But whatever he ends up doing with his busy brain, he may always be a night owl, wired to rev up when the rest of us are revving down.

Squeedle!!!

How I discovered my son’s distraction reflex is part of a hunter’s nature. Or a golden retriever’s.

A few summers ago we were on a road trip down south. The highway stretched out before us, cruise-control was on, and my husband and I were three-deep into our game of “top five Bruce Springsteen songs.” Suddenly there was a shout from the back seat, where we thought our tween son had dozed off with his nose in a Foxtrot collection.