What to Expect When You're Not Expecting ADHD by Penny Williams

Other traits of ADHD that parents deal with in their growing child are distractibility and disorganization. And while you shouldn’t tolerate rudeness, patience becomes more of a virtue than you will ever know. But at one point, you have to take into account that your adult child’s unique brain does not process things the way yours does. As a parent, it’s hard not to take these things personally, since we rarely have to make such allowances for others in our lives. After a few years of painful self-discovery neither one of us “saved” her from, our daughter eventually founded her own online business and has learned to apply her lightening-fast thumb-typing speed and unique creativity skills to better her life. And neither of us do well in anything but incentive-based, commission, contract, or freelance work. Why? Because I have a degree of scattered focus myself, as does her father. “Otherwise, you’ll end up being unhappy and you’ll just keep moving from job to job.” Somehow I knew.

“Look for something you can do where you are your own boss,” I told her when she was in high school. But I also knew I could not shield her from the choices she would have to make in her life as she neared adulthood. This made my quest to place her in small-class settings with stimulating activities what seemed like a never-ending cause. For my daughter, it translated into knowing without a doubt that she was smart, but being bored stiff when having to perform routine tasks in everyday endeavors most people barely give second thoughts to. Having parented a now-grown child with ADHD, I learned in the process that the disorder arises in people whose brains partially block the reception of dopamine – the “feel good” chemical.

What to Expect When You're Not Expecting ADHD by Penny Williams