ADHD Environments

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I've wondered if ADHD (or ADHD-type issues) might be worsened by particular parental behaviors. The ones I'm thinking of aren't immoral at all and might even be quite common.

((As a background, I was diagnosed with severe ADHD as a child and Aspergers as an adult. At my adult evaluation, I was said to have "mild ADHD". From my perspective, my attention is more like that of an ASD attention (perseverative), but can look like inattention to people who are trying to control it. However, I do have what I consider clinically significant impulse control issues. It is largely impulse control issues that I wanted to talk about here.))

For instance, most people in my closet extended family were either formally diagnosed with ADHD sometime in their life or self-identify with it.

When this family gets together, everyone talks over each other. It's maddening. So...what came first? A family who doesn't inhibit one's speech and consequently doesn't teach their children that it is important to do so...or is everyone simply incapable of doing it?

What I'm trying to say is: how much of impulse control is a learned behavior? (Or lack thereof...in that everyone else is teaching this to their children and families like mine aren't.)



**I'm not proposing that families are the origin or a serious neurological disorder. I *am* wondering if these habits played into my experience. The reason I want the answer is so that I can be a better parent myself.

That is an interesting question. I think that it is probably both. What I mean is that I think it can be both nature and nurture. If a person's impulse control issues are strong, that will override social conditioning/consequences. If a person's role models have impulse control issues and blurt out things and talk over each other then that is likely to mitigate whatever social lessons are being taught elsewhere regarding that type of self-restraint, even for kids capable of it.

I do think that if a person is motivated by social consequences and is capable of controlling his/her impulses that the lesson is probably absorbed and followed eventually even if not reinforced in the home environment.

My Dad had ADHD and I have also wondered if I got some of my poor social skills from him and his anger but then I realized if that were the case, then my brothers would have been mimicking him too. I think we all tend to blame our kids behavior or our own on the environment. I think it's a form of denial because we are questioning ourselves or our kids diagnoses and wondering if it could just be learned behavior than a disorder. I am also the person who copies people so I could have copied my father thinking it was normal behavior. But I used to nail him for inappropriate behavior such as for cussing for example or for being gross or repeating something over and over so maybe not.

My DH and MIL have ADHD. So do a couple of my cousins and my uncle (not biologically related).

I have learned bad habits (or unlearned good ones) dealing with them. I don't wait my turn to talk, because I will never get one. I do not stop talking when interrupted, because I will never be permitted to finish a thought. I am trying not to exercise a whole lot of impulse control with judgments and criticisms, because they don't, and I end up feeling like the story of my life is to "put up and shut up." It makes for a lot of resentment.

In the same breath, I'm trying to teach my ADHD son not to act like that. But the fact is that, if you try to keep ADHD behaviors under control in an ADHD family, you will end up dying in silence, with footprints on your face.

Impulse control is a learned skill. But the ability to learn and conditions of best learning are genetically and environmentally influenced. So it is harder for your family members to learn. Because your family members tend to have less advanced skills they will also tend to teach less. But they also could understand the best way to teach you.

I haven't heard of 'parents interrupting each other' as a cause of ADHD, but it's true that ADHD is often caused by the psychological environment (mostly poverty and other kinds of adversity) as well as by genetics.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC315489/