21 Resources For The Mom Who is Parenting an ADHD Teenager
ADHD brains are different from neurotypical ones. Take an adolescent ADHD brain that is simultaneously navigating its ADHD complexities while feverishly forming its frontal lobe, and we have a recipe for some challenging waters.
If you find yourself parenting in the midst of these challenging waters, we want you to know that you are not alone. If you feel like you’re tiptoeing around landmines (and occasionally getting blown to bits), know there is a community of moms in this work together.
The job of parenting a teen with ADHD is fraught with difficulties and societal push-backs and academic trials and perhaps a bunch of yelling. It is also one of the most rewarding jobs you’ll ever have, this thing of helping your teen cope with their ADHD challenges and also encouraging them to see their ADHD giftedness.
Below are just a few resources we’ve discovered to help you navigate the waters you’re in.
Books, Workbooks, Audiobooks, and Magazines
Driven to Distraction (Revised): Recognizing and Coping with Attention Deficit Disorder
Through vivid stories and case histories of patients—both adults and children—Hallowell and Ratey explore the varied forms ADHD takes, from hyperactivity to daydreaming.
Parenting ADHD Now!: Easy Intervention Strategies to Empower Kids with ADHD
In Parenting ADHD Now! Diane and Elaine combine their practical know-how and professional expertise to offer immediate, actionable strategies you can use to guide and support your ADHD child compassionately and effectively.
Thriving with ADHD Workbook for Teens: Improve Focus, Get Organized, and Succeed
Thriving with ADHD Workbook for Teens gives you the tools to understand how ADHD works within your body, and actionable ways that you can use it to your advantage. Learn about some of your untapped strengths and see how you can channel your newly identified talents at school, in sports, and with friends.
The Explosive Child: A New Approach for Understanding and Parenting Easily Frustrated, Chronically Inflexible Children(Sixth Edition)
What Your ADHD Child Wishes You Knew: Working Together to Empower Kids for Success in School and Life
What if you could work with your child, motivating and engaging them in the process, to create positive change once and for all? In this insightful and practical book, veteran psychologist Sharon Saline shares the words and inner struggles of children and teens living with ADHD—and a blueprint for achieving lasting success by working together.
ADHD 2.0: New Science and Essential Strategies for Thriving with Distraction – from Childhood Through Adulthood
A revolutionary new approach to ADD/ADHD featuring cutting-edge research and strategies to help listeners thrive, by the best-selling authors of the seminal books Driven to Distraction and Delivered from Distraction.
Smart but Scattered Teens: The “Executive Skills” Program for Helping Teens Reach Their Potential
This positive guide provides a science-based program for promoting teens’ independence by building their executive skills–the fundamental brain-based abilities needed to get organized, stay focused, and control impulses and emotions. Executive skills experts Drs. Richard Guare and Peg Dawson are joined by Colin Guare, a young adult who has successfully faced these issues himself.
Thriving with ADHD Workbook: Guide to Stop Losing Focus, Impulse Control and Disorganization Through a Mind Process for a New Life
This book will show you ways in which you can enhance your concentration power and stay focused on the task at hand. Establishing healthier habits and doing them on a regular basis can be really challenging in ADHD patients, but it is not impossible. All you need is a game plan, and by the time you reach the end of this book, you will have one.
Attention! Magazine
Published every other month by CHADD, the magazine is for both adults with ADHD and parents of children with ADHD. It provides practical information, clinical insights, and evidence-based strategies for managing ADHD.
ADDitude: Strategies and Support for ADHD and LD
Published quarterly, ADDitude is billed as “the magazine for living well with attention deficit and learning disabilities.” The magazine is both for adults with ADHD and parents of children with ADHD and covers topics like ADHD and learning disabilities, medication, therapies, and parenting children with ADHD.
Coaching and Support:
Russell Coaching
Russell Coaching specializes in relational coaching for complex students, particularly those with learning differences such as ADHD. The Russell Coaching techniques combine science, positive youth development, a team, and multimodal approach, and data to meet students at their present level of development and facilitate their growth in executive functioning, learning and study skills, social and emotional well-being, and mental health.
Local Children and Adults with ADHD (CHADD) Chapters
CHADD is the largest national support organization for ADHD, a nonprofit organization that supports children and adults with ADHD with programs, conferences, and resources.
CHADD offers a variety of awesome resources, education and advocacy including support groups. You can even search to find one closest to you! The organization also offers a resource directory where you can search for professionals in your area.
ADDitude Magazine Website
ADDitude is a magazine’s forum where you can receive validation and answers from other people around the world about the challenges and successes of ADHD.. There are specific threads for adults, women and girls, as well as one for teens and young adults.
ADHD Online
As a solution to the sometimes lengthy and cost-prohibitive nature of the path to an ADHD diagnosis, ADHD Online developed a simpler, faster way to seek answers. The process begins with a comprehensive online assessment that leads to certified results (typically in three days’ time). From there, a treatment management plan is put into place, which may involve medication and/or teletherapy.
Seth Perler
Seth Perler specializes in helping outside-the-box learners with their executive functioning skills, a key piece to the puzzle for ADHD students. If a child of any age struggles with motivation, focus, homework, getting started, follow through, organization, planning, procrastination, distractibility, remembering details, prioritizing the important things, decision making, responsibility, overwhelm, or underachievement, then demystifying “Executive Function” is critical if we want to help. Seth Perler is a go-to resource for how to help struggling students learn to thrive.
And here are some of our Moms of Tweens and Teens blog posts about parenting tweens and teens with ADHD:
9 Teacher Approved Fidgets to Help With Anxiety, ADHD, and More
How Do You Deal With an Underachiever?
What ADHD and Anxiety Feel Like From a Teen Who Suffered, and What You Can Do For Your Child
Getting Through Middle School (Mostly) Unscathed
Here’s to You Mom – Parenting a Teen With Learning Disabilities
Dear Teen Who Tries and Tries and Still Feels Like a Failure
Many days it can feel discouraging, overwhelming, and exhausting raising a teen with ADHD. Perhaps you’re arguing about homework and chores or you’re sick and tired of bad grades, or you’re feeling worn out by the task at hand and have no idea what to do.
We are here to support you. And we want to remind and affirm you – you are reading this and seeking answers to support your kid. They are blessed to have a Mom who loves them and is willing to fight the good fight on their behalf and do the work you are doing. Give yourself some grace around the taxing nature of this job; it’s not an easy one. And remember, remember, remember: You are not alone.
We are in this together and we appreciate YOU!
