The Dangerous Truth About Denying Your Child’s Success

Why rejecting their passions might lock them into failure forever…

If we want our ADHD children to be successful in later life, a great starting point is to help them experience actual success as kids. This story was shared with me a few decades ago when I ran the ADD Forum on CompuServe, but it’s as important and meaningful today as it was then.

This story is from Sandra, the mother of a teenager in Southern California:

I hate the current teenage skateboard culture. They wear baggy pants, engage in a dangerous sport, have weird haircuts, and listen to music that seems, to me, obscene.

On the other hand, they’re kids. When I was a teenager, I remember that I and most of my friends rebelled. So I’m assuming that this skateboarding stuff is really just a form of teenage rebellion. It’s part of a child becoming an adult: carving out for themselves a separate identity in the world. This is an early experiment at that, but I seriously doubt my son will be a skater permanently.

Another mother I know has reacted to her kid wearing baggy pants and all by trying to whip him into line. She punishes him, berates him, makes fun of him and his friends, and does everything she can to get him to stop. His response has been to talk back to his parents in a vulgar and rude fashion and to ignore his schoolwork, which further infuriates his parents, and, ultimately, to run away from home.

I figured, though, that this teenage rebellion could be an opportu­nity. My son has struggled with ADD all his life, although it was only diagnosed last year. Therefore, he has a lifetime of failure experiences and frustrations. But he’s good at skating, and he thinks he looks good in those idiotic clothes.

So I encourage him. I listen to his stories of doing double 180 flips, and tell him how coordinated that means he is. It also shows that he has good concentration and learning skills: skateboarding is not easy.

I allow him to keep his self-respect intact by not criticizing his clothes or appearance, and will even occasionally compliment his appearance when he’s dressed in a bit less radical fashion.

The result of this is that he and I have become closer, and he’s improving in other areas of his life. He tells me intimate stories about his other friends: I know which kids in the neighborhood are using drugs, who’s having sex, who’s flunking out of school, and who’s being beaten by his father.

He tells me about what he’s doing, within limits (of course, I realize there are some things that no teenager will ever tell a parent). When I think he’s making bad choices I tell him in a non-critical way, framing it in the context of how it will effect his future.

This has, I believe, given him a basis for feeling like he can do things competently. After two years of skating (and my gritting my teeth and smiling), he now has a part-time job.

His grades in school have improved, and he’s thinking about college and careers. And he’s more often than not dressing normally. He only skates on the weekends now, and has even commented to me a few times about how some of the skater kids he once thought were so cool and such great role models are really losers.

And the other kids in the neighborhood? What I see is that those kids who are successful at skating, but whose parents are denying or denigrating or dismissing that success, are working even harder at it. Their hair and clothes get weirder and weirder, and they’re taking greater and greater chances in their skateboarding.

In my opinion, what’s hap­pened is that they’re experiencing success, and they know it intuitively, even though their parents and most of the rest of society doesn’t acknowledge it. And that feeling of success is such a good and empow­ering feeling that they want more and more of it.

But they’re locked into skating as the only source of their success, because their parents haven’t taken the opportunity to acknowledge it and then use that as a reference point or metaphor to show them that they can be successful in other areas.

I was watching one of those daytime talk shows the other day where they have weird guests, and they had on some guys who were career criminals. They’d killed people, robbed them, mugged them, and all sorts of things. But they seemed proud of themselves: they were successful.

I’m not a psychologist, but I think that success is a very important thing to people. If the only success somebody can experience is as a break-in artist, they’ll latch onto that for the rest of their lives.

So, for my children, anyway, I’m trying to use their unconventional successes as a way to talk about all kinds of success, it’s a tool to give them the self-confidence to try to become successful at things like school where they’ve had trouble before. And so far it’s working.