Jamie DeLong :
I don’t know if you’ll ever read this, but I hope you do. I have two kids who used to have huge meltdowns too. Fighting, screaming, tantrums… all of it. Like yours, they’re both diagnosed with ADHD. Looking back, though, I realized the biggest issue wasn’t just their behavior. It was that my husband and I weren’t consistent. We’d be in the store, a meltdown would start, and we’d eventually give in because we were embarrassed or just wanted it to stop. We’d say things like, “If you don’t stop, you’re losing your phone for two weeks,” but then we’d give it back after a few minutes once they calmed down. What they learned wasn’t how to regulate their behavior. They learned ours. They learned that if they held out long enough, we’d eventually give in. When you said, “It’s almost like she wants to get in trouble,” that really stood out to me because, in a way, she might. Even negative attention is still attention. I finally sat down with my husband, and we created a behavior binder. We decided ahead of time which consequences went with which behaviors and wrote them all down. We intentionally chose consequences we knew we could consistently follow through with, like losing phone time for an hour instead of making unrealistic threats we’d never keep. We also gave each child two daily responsibilities with predetermined consequences if they weren’t completed. Before we started, we sat down with the kids and explained exactly what was changing so there were no surprises. I’m not going to lie…it got worse before it got better. For about a month, they pushed back hard. They tested every boundary because they were used to us eventually giving in. But we committed to staying calm, following through every single time, and not changing the consequence because they were upset. Eventually, their behavior changed because ours had changed. They learned they could trust us to mean what we said, and they stopped wasting energy testing the limits.
It’s definitely not perfect, but it’s honestly 100% better than it used to be. I know every child is different, but I wanted to share what made such a huge difference for our family in case any part of it is helpful.
2026-07-19 02:25:43