133: Little Jolt of Joy – More Is Caught Than Taught – ADHD Parenting Concerns

More Is Caught Than Taught

This isn’t a parenting podcast, but a lot of my audience are moms carrying real worry that their own scatteredness might somehow harm their kids. I’m not a parenting expert, just a mom of four, a former teacher, and someone watching my own kids grow into young adults with a bit of hindsight now. Here’s what I’ve come to believe.

Your kids are their own creations

You shape them, you guide them, but you don’t fully determine who they become. They may end up messy because of you, messy in spite of you, or messy simply because that’s how they’re wired. Read the bios of professional organizers sometime, nine out of ten will say they were naturally organized from childhood, wired that way from the start. Being raised by a chaotic parent doesn’t guarantee a chaotic kid, and being raised by an organized one doesn’t guarantee an organized one either. If you’re worried about passing something down the family line, it’s worth looking up the line too. A lot of ADHD traits appear to be genetic, plenty of parents who raised kids decades ago were likely undiagnosed themselves.

Quit worrying about what you can’t shape, and focus on what you can

I moved to the South as a northerner, and manners here are almost drilled in like please and thank you, yes ma’am, no sir. I never explicitly taught my kids that phrasing. When my son went alone to senior pictures after a rough, grumbling morning, his photographer later told me how polite and lovely he’d been. He never said “ma’am” to her as far as I know, but politeness itself had clearly been caught somewhere along the way, modeled by his parents without needing the exact words attached to it.

What actually gets caught in your home

If your kids are going to catch something rather than be explicitly taught it, I’d rather it be less about how the house looks and more about how it feels to keep trying. Are you generally upbeat about your efforts? Do you stay undiscouraged when something doesn’t work and try again anyway? Are you modeling that mistakes don’t break you, that you often learn more from failure than success? Those are the things worth catching, far more than whether the house was always spotless.

The memories that actually hurt

Growing up with a home you weren’t allowed to relax in, that had to stay perfectly clean, rooms you couldn’t get comfortable in, those aren’t the memories you want to leave behind either. But the one that stings most, I think, is a kid who never invited friends over because they were embarrassed by how the house looked. If there’s one place to focus real energy, it’s the common spaces, the rooms your kids actually walk friends through. Whatever Monica’s closets you’re keeping behind closed doors, that’s fine, keep the door shut. Your kid isn’t going to invite friends in to see that room anyway if it’s something they’d rather keep private themselves.

They won’t catch a clean room. They’ll catch how you feel about things

That’s really the whole spirit behind calling this a joy loving home. Be joyful in it, be joyful through the mess and the effort alike, and show them that love matters more than stuff. It’ll be okay.

A parenting tip worth passing along

One of the best pieces of parenting advice I ever received: don’t ask your kid a question if you already know the answer you want. Use a statement instead. I watched another parent at a playground once say simply, “it’s time to leave, slide down one more time,” full stop, no question mark, and their kid did exactly that, no fight, no negotiation, likely because it had been modeled consistently as a statement, not an open invitation to debate. I started using that early on, and it worked far more often than not. For moments where I did want to let them exercise choice, I’d offer two options I was equally fine with, “would you like the red shirt or the blue one,” rather than an open-ended “what do you want to wear,” letting them build a real decision-making muscle within boundaries I’d already set.

Until next time, continue to choose joy.