Project Parenthood

Is my ADHD kid deliberately uncooperative and ungrateful?

Episode Summary

811. When your ADHD child is struggling, do you worry they’re acting out on purpose? In this episode, Dr. Nanika Coor unpacks the concept of executive function deficits in young people, and how shifting your perspective from "won't" to "can't" can help you respond to big emotions and challenging routines with more compassion and connection.

Episode Notes

Related Project Parenthood Episodes:

Should you punish your ADHD child?

How to reduce parental stress with mindfulness

Brain Boosters: powering up your child's executive functioning

Dr. Coor’s Related Blog:

Crush Your Parenting Overwhelm: Better Communication With The People You Love

Find a transcript here.

Have a parenting question? Email Dr. Coor at parenthood@quickanddirtytips.com or leave a voicemail at 646-926-3243.

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Episode Transcription

After a long day of invisible labor organizing, reminding, and regulating for your ADHD child - scaffolding their world and smoothing their way, you’re already all wrung out. You ask your child for a simple thing: to turn off their screen and brush their teeth, and instead of cooperation, you get an explosion. You feel your chest start to tighten, and your jaw set as irritated thoughts fly through your mind: “After all I do for this kid, this is how ungrateful they’re gonna be?” You tell yourself you’re being taken for granted, and your hurt, disappointment, anger and worry drop you into the familiar dark depths of shame and blame. Before you know it, the nightly tween-bedtime-family-meltdown is underway. Yet another night where everyone crashes into bed depleted and disconnected.

Welcome back to Project Parenthood, I’m your host, Dr. Nanika Coor. Each week I’ll help you raise kids in ways that are compassionate, respectful, anti-oppressive, and grounded in connection and community. Today I’m unpacking that feeling of being caught between your own need for ease and your child’s neurodivergence-fueled intense resistance, particularly around challenging transitions like the end of screen time or bedtime and how you can move from reactive rage to calmer, more connected transitions.

Before I dive in, take a moment to notice your body as you anticipate this episode topic. Maybe your shoulders are tense, or you feel a familiar heat in your chest. Just welcome any sensation or emotion that shows up in this present moment. There's no right or wrong way to feel; simply acknowledge it with open, benevolent, and curious awareness, without needing to fix or judge it.

Let’s get into it.

The Struggle

When your ADHD 10-to-12-year-old throws a huge emotional wrench into the evening routine, it’s easy to focus on their upsetting behaviors: the loud complaints and criticisms, the refusal to put on pajamas, the passive-aggressive destruction of their own room. These actions look like defiance, and they trigger a reactive response in you—a desire for immediate control and compliance. Your internal reaction might sound something like, "How long do we have to do this?! They should know better by this age!" Or, "If they could just be obedient, I could finally get some rest."

If you’re raising a Black or Brown neurodivergent kid who has to navigate racism, classism, xenophobia or transphobia as well as ableism, their behaviors when escalated can generate even greater anxiety, since you might fear that non-compliance out in the world will lead to harsher outcomes for them.

You wrestle with constant worry that your immature child is being left behind socially, that they don’t appreciate everything you do for them, and that must be because you’re failing as a parent. Your worry and frustration at the evening chaos and at your child’s lack of gratitude looms large. That belief you hold that “they should know better by now” underlies your angry, shaming, blaming words when you reach your last straw and lash out at your child in retaliation. Your disappointment and your exasperation lands inside them as self-criticism, humiliation and a feeling of not-belonging to you and to the family. The nightly cycle of conflict is emotionally draining and exhausting for all involved, leaving you and your child feeling misunderstood, unsafe, unloved and stuck.

Contributing Factors

What’s happening beneath the mutual parent-child explosions isn’t your child’s deficits in gratitude, but an impairment in their executive functioning, the brain skills needed to plan, organize, manage time, and self-regulate emotions. When a child has ADHD, they’re not just choosing to be difficult; they are operating with a significant developmental lag in these critical areas.

Think of it this way: the age on your child’s birth certificate tells you their chronological age, but their executive functioning may be years behind. This means:

They Live in the Now: They struggle to connect their present actions to past lessons or future consequences. Like when they are enjoying a screen, they can struggle to plan, shift, stop, and transition from the high-stimulation screen to a low-stimulation bedtime. Their brain is wired differently.
Difficulty with Transitions: Moving from the high-interest activity like TV to a low-interest task like teeth brushing requires a massive amount of executive energy, which is already depleted by the end of a long day of life-demands. This is why a countdown doesn’t always work, because it demands an immediate, self-regulated stop. Also, when there’s a sense of control being taken from them, strong emotions can erupt especially when transitions aren’t scaffolded in soothing ways.
Emotional Intensity: And - when their brain feels flooded or asked to do something it can’t manage, a "meltdown" isn’t a choice, but their nervous system's explosive way of signaling overwhelm. Anger and grief over the loss of control, plus dopamine withdrawal when screen time ends, means a big expression of upset because their skills to process and regulate strong emotions are quite small.
Parental Stress and Reactivity: You’re carrying not only invisible labor, but possibly also: racialised stress, trauma baggage, and maybe lessons from your own upbringing about obedience, shame, and perfectionism. When you hit your own limit, your nervous system triggers you into fight or flight, and you react.
The Connection Gap: Your child’s repeated experiences of being pushed to comply, and being seen as difficult rather than held compassionately in their discomfort, means they’ve likely internalized messages like: “I’m not good enough” or “My obedience is more important to my parent than my feelings - which are inconvenient” or “I’m only loveable when I’m “easy” for my parent to deal with.” They’re not being met where they are.

To foster the cooperation you hope to see with your ADHD tween, you need to shift your lenses from seeing your child as giving you a hard time to understanding your child as having a hard time, and adjust your expectations to their actual, present developmental capacity.

Your Parenting Toolkit

To move toward connection and collaboration, you must first tend to your own nervous system, then meet your child where they are developmentally—which is often in the present moment, unable to plan or process big demands.

Here are some tools for parenting ADHD kids in high stress moments:

Down-regulate your system before problem-solving: Your primary job is to be the calm you want to create. As soon as you feel the first rushes of tension or anger, take a physical pause. This is your cue to set an internal limit on yourself: “I am too dysregulated to be helpful right now.” Step away briefly and communicate your need simply: “I need a two-minute breather. I’ll be right back to help you with the screen.” This models emotional regulation for your child and prevents you from saying things you regret. You can also model calmly speaking your truth (which is what you want your ADHDer to learn to do!) “When screens stay on past time, I feel overwhelmed and tired. I need us to make a plan together.”
Offload the Executive Functioning: If verbal reminders and countdowns aren’t effective, use external, physical scaffolding to mark the transition. Use a visual timer or a designated power-down song that signals the end of screen time without you having to be the sole enforcer. Don’t expect your child to remember all the steps of a task, but also don’t list off all the steps at once - they won’t hold those in mind. Give instructions that use less than ten words, and help them get started on the tasks involved: "TV off now, here’s your toothbrush.”
Acknowledge Grief With Compassion: When you hold the boundary—screen time is over—you are creating a necessary moment of loss for your child. Instead of dismissing or talking them out of their big feelings, make space for the sadness and anger over what they can’t have. You can hold the limit and be compassionate about their disappointment at the same time. Try saying, "It's so hard to turn off the TV when you're in the middle of a show. I hear you. It's a huge bummer," while still gently removing the device. Be a calm, accepting presence as they move through the futility of not getting what they want.
Connection Before Transition: ADHD kids can hyperfocus on screens. To “unhook” them, try asking about what they’re watching or doing. Ask about the plot of the show they’re watching or who a character is. Ask what the goal of their video game is or what they are trying to accomplish on the level they’re playing. This interrupts their hyperfocus in a less jarring way than just turning off the screen. They’ll need to focus slightly less on the screen to answer your questions, while still remaining engaged with the screen content. From that shared-attention-on-the-screen space, you can gently introduce reality: “Hey, in 5 minutes it’ll be time for brushing teeth. Can you manage that yourself, or do you need my help?”
Focus on the Present-Moment Needs: When conflict arises, drop all talk about the past or the future—no lectures about yesterday's bad behavior or tomorrow morning’s need for a good night’s sleep. Focus only on the right now. State your feelings and needs: "I’m feeling frustrated because I need more cooperation right now," and then guess at your child's need: "Maybe you’re annoyed and want more freedom?" Then, ask for one tiny, immediate action they can do: "Can we take a deep breath and start over?" Your ability to be present and respond to current feelings and needs are powerful tools for positive change.

Reflection

What’s alive in your body after listening to these ideas? What physical or emotional reactions are you having? What about your own history with big feelings or demands for obedience come up for you? Notice whatever comes up with kindness and curiosity; you don't need to change it right now, only accept its presence.

It’s really hard to dismantle a lifetime of conditioning that’s taught you that a parent’s worth is tied to a child’s obedience. Feelings about your ADHD child being ungrateful comes down to a belief that your love and labor should be repaid with compliance. But respectful, anti-oppressive parenting isn’t transactional; it's a commitment to seeing your child’s wholeness, including their struggles, and offering unconditional acceptance. Instead of trying to raise a compliant soldier who’ll fit seamlessly into a broken system, try raising a thinking, feeling, connected human whose nervous system knows it’s safe to be its true, complicated self with you.

If you’ve found this episode helpful, I’d love it if you shared it with a friend who might also be locked in nightly bedtime or screen time battles with their ADHD tween. Remember that you’re not the only one. Parenting wasn’t meant to be a solo project happening in isolated little boxes. Your fellow listeners are all learning, unlearning, and reimagining what parenting can be - building relational care that reaches beyond the home and into community.

How are you shifting your perspective of your child from "won't" to "can't"? I’d love to hear about your reflections! You can tell me about it on Instagram @bkparents or email me at parenthood@quickanddirtytips.com. And if you want to feel a little more supported in your parenting journey, visit brooklynparenttherapy.com where you can join my newsletter for updates about upcoming community events. I’m Dr. Nanika Coor. Thanks for listening. I’ll catch you next week.

Project Parenthood is a Quick and Dirty Tips podcast. Thanks to the team: audio-engineer Dan Feierabend; Holly Hutchings, director of podcasts; advertising operations specialist Morgan Christianson; marketing manager, Rebekah Sebastian and thanks also to your contractor, Nat Hoopes.