Muddling Through the Action Shots

You never know when to push and when to let them take the lead.

Life in the Fast Brain | posted by Kristen Caven

As a parent, there is a transition one begins to make when your child hits middle school, no matter what kind of child you have. At one point we manage our kids; in adulthood, they manage themselves. In that in-between time of the ’tween and teen years, there is an awkward dance in which one does not know the rhythm.

It’s like they ask for the car keys and get in the front seat, but never start the motor up.

— Kristen Caven

The best parents make the effort at this time to take the transitional role of a coach. But navigating that line can be extra maddening if your kid is attention-challenged. It’s like they ask for the car keys and get in the front seat, but never start the motor up.

In my son’s senior year of high school, there were many scary moments when it seemed the transition from Mom in the driver’s seat to Enzo in the driver’s seat would not be a calm one. This is true, I’ve discovered, for many parents of ADHD teens. Instead of giving Enzo the keys and letting him take over his life when the time was right, it often felt more like a stunt scene in a movie where the passenger crawls into the driver’s seat at high speed on the highway.

It’s mostly because of one thing: that form the school district sends out, saying you, the parent, are responsible for your child’s attendance.

If it had really been up to him, he’d miss a lot of classes. There is some chemical in his brain that makes waking up harder for him than for other kids. It runs in the family. When we were college-age, I was the only person in the world who could wake up my brother. (To be fair, I could do it only with the antics of one certain teddy bear.) I can’t do that anymore. Stuffed animals are powerless against the Morning Sleep of Enzo.

It’s not just sleep, either. It’s getting to appointments. It’s keeping commitments. It’s sticking to a schedule and remembering what his goals are. Sometimes Enzo was great at these things, an example to us all, but you know what they say, the hallmark of ADHD is inconsistency. The possibility of him missing something crucial (like which school to show up to for the untimed ACT you fought so hard for him to be able to take) might actualize just when we thought everything was under control. (Yeah, that.)

When Enzo was a year away from college, we still didn’t know if he would go. All of the parents were baffled by the efforts we, and our kids, had to undertake. It wasn’t this complicated when we were kids; we got ourselves into school and didn’t come out a hundred grand in debt. There are so many marks to hit: tests, applications, interviews, plus all the schoolwork. We struggled to find the fine line between helicopter mode and missing deadlines.

I had a funny conversation at that time with the father of Enzo’s gal pal, Bizy. We laughed at how both of our ADHD kids did fine when you put the work in front of them, but they couldn’t get themselves started. He and I both have ADHD, and joked about "taking meth," I mean, about the sort of pressure we had to put on ourselves to get started. He laughed and misquoted Flannery O’Connor: “She would of been a good woman if someone had held a gun to her head every minute of her life.” We both realized that, as parents, that gun was a GPA. That gun was a test score.

This is how we muddle through the action shots.

Kristen Caven is a mother and a writer, a mover and a shaker, and a creative force in her community. To her, ADHD stands for “Awesomeness Development & Happiness Directive.” Learn more at www.kristencaven.com.

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The Fast Lane Towards the Future

I've gotten us lost, I've made us late, and I can't stop tearing up. We're visiting colleges with our son, and it's bringing up big feelings.

Life in the Fast Brain | posted by Kristen Caven

Enzo’s in the driver’s seat. I’m next to him and his dad, “Dave,” is in the back, relaxing, reading a book. We are weaving in and out of the fast lane on our way to visit a college in L.A.

Tears are leaking out my eyes, and I want to hide them — except I lost my sunglasses two weeks ago.

— Kristen Caven

I planned ahead for this trip. I put in hours of researching, building a Google Map and printing out parking passes, scheduling several school visits per day and a trip to Disneyland in the middle to celebrate his last high school summer vacation. This morning, however, we were late to the first tour, since I had everything packed but my glasses…and we had to turn around and go back.

Without wifi, I can’t access the Google Map I made. We’re trying to use Waze to avoid heavy traffic. Leaving the first school, I program the name of the second into the car’s GPS, and between one road map and another, I soon manage to navigate us onto side streets where we go more than 7 miles per hour…but stop at every light. Now we’re late for the second school tour, too.

When we pull up in front of the building the car’s GPS brought us to, twenty minutes late for the tour, we are confused by our surroundings. Turns out the car found us a satellite campus. I look at the college map I printed out, which has no relation to this place we are in, and notice the address under the logo. I program that into the car instead, and we turn around and go back the way we came.

The breezy chatter we’d been enjoying all morning has stopped. My mind is now going in loops, bargaining with the executive misjudgments I’ve made in the last few hours. I'm wondering if it’s ADD or anxiety or just this… this feeling that is welling up inside of me, subconsciously sabotaging my well-laid plans, this feeling that we are driving to what might be Enzo’s new home a year from now, far away from our family.

Tears are leaking out of my eyes, and I want to hide them — except I lost my sunglasses two weeks ago.

I hold back my sobs, because I don’t want to distract Enzo from the amazing job he’s doing driving on this trip. He’s got his license now. He’s getting his life together. He’s less afraid of being on his own than he should be, knowing what I know about what he doesn’t know aboutthe demanding world he’s growing into. He hasn’t noticed I’m taking notes at all these talks because he isn’t — because neither of us will remember all the details and dates of this crucial information. But I don’t want to shake his beautiful faith in himself.

We pull up to the right campus and see a group of students gathered around a fountain in the distance. I make Enzo pull over and jump out with his dad. Shaky, I get in the driver’s seat and go find a parking spot to have a little cry and pull myself together. Because somehow — and I don’t know how but it always does — this is all going to work out just right.

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!

Electronic Attention Suckers

Every family struggles with ways to manage this generation’s darn distracting devices. Here’s our best trick for keeping video games from taking over our son's life.

When we got Enzo his first handheld video game, he was too young in my opinion, but still much older than most kids these days are when they are handed their first Electronic Attention Sucker (E.A.S.). We had held off as long as we could for several reasons:

My husband still teases me about my 1996 Mardi Gras Tetris-and-chocolate-cake-binge.

1. He had plenty of toys already that he could never find enough time for: Legos, paper airplanes, and, um, trains.

2. He already didn’t spend enough time outside, and every minute you are in front of a screen is a minute you could be spending doing something usefully dangerous—like building forts, or burning things with magnifying glasses.

3. We knew the power of a screen to suck away one’s life force.

Because it had happened to us. My husband, who I shall call “Dave” in this blog, has for years made a daily hour or two of collecting rings, battling bad guys, or building civilizations part of his life. And “Dave” still teases me about my 1996 Mardi Gras Tetris-and-chocolate-cake-binge before I gave both up for Lent.

It had also happened to people we care about. Enzo’s talented Uncle Art, for example, lost four years of his adult life gaming in every free moment before he chose to spend every possible moment painting and building a career.

The thing is, video games are actually designed for addiction. The tasks are stimulating and challenging. There is always a level to beat, and when you beat it, your reward is to start another level. There is no such thing as a game that will come to a satisfying end just before dinner time. Even game creators are now realizing they have done damage to childhood, and telling kids to go outside more.

It was only fair that Enzo would get his own Electronic Attention Suckers though. We did not want to deprive him of the adrenaline and dopamine-fueled pleasures of his generation. But before we let him put his twitching thumbs on the thing, we set up a Video Game Agreement that said things like he could play age-appropriate games for two hours on a weekend, if he asked first, and so forth. The deal was: if he couldn’t play by the rules, he would have to turn the game off, period.

The best rule on the list was this one, an idea from a friend: When we call your name, you need to pause and look up. The fact that he would lose privileges for 24 hours if he did not hear us and respond motivated him learn how to shift his attention gears, make good eye contact, and mind his manners — all things that can be incredibly difficult for hyperfocused ADDers. But the immediate reward of getting more dopamine helped train his brain in a good way.

View post on ADDitude.

Not Behind the Wheel…Yet!

You can’t get into the fast lane if you don’t have a license — and we're still waiting for our ADHD teen to show us he has the drive to get one.

Today my son Enzo turned sixteen. To a kid like him who can’t think of much else than cars, we figured this day would be a big one! Since he was ten, he's always dreamed of the scene from Transformers, where Sam Witwicki’s dad drives him to a used car shop and gives him a budget of double what he'd saved on his own.