A Summer to Remember: How to Set Behavioral Boundaries That Unlock Fun (with Dave Anderson, Ph.D.)

Added: 2026-05-18

[00:00:01]Hi everyone. I'm Carol Fleck and on behalf of the attitude team, I'm delighted to welcome you to today's ADHD experts presentation titled A Summer Summer to Remember: How to Set Behavioral Boundaries That Unlock Fun.

[00:00:17]Leading today's presentation is Dr. Dave Anderson. Dr. Anderson is a senior psychologist at the ADHD and Behavior Disorder Center at the Child Mind Institute. He's also the vice president, public engagement and educator at the center. His expertise includes cognitive behavioral therapy, behavioral parent training, and classroom behavioral support.

[00:00:43]For most, if not all of us, school's out. The long- aaited summer break is finally here. And that means no more nightly homework or studying for tests or waking up early. Summer means freedom. It means sunny pool days and sleeping in and reading treasure books.

[00:01:01]It means freedom from routine. Or does it? Just how much freedom should kids have? Do they still need structure and support even during the lazy days of summer? Today's webinar features an extended Q&A with Dr. Anderson, more time for your questions, and more expert advice to help your child enjoy a healthy, fun summer without being glued to their screens.

[00:01:25]We'd like to begin today's webinar by asking this poll question to our live audience. What are your biggest challenges in managing your kids over the summer? Please provide your answers and comment in the text box under the video player to tell us more. For answers to common webinar questions about slides, transcripts, and certificates of attendance, click on the FAQ tab of your webinar screen. Of course, we're talking about the summer season today, but our team at Attitude Magazine is hard at work on the fall issue. It's our annual success at school issue. Our experts offer practical advice about getting homework done, and building executive function skills, but they also explain the importance of teaching children self-awareness, problem solving, conflict resolution, and how to support one another. It's called social emotional learning and it's what kids need to feel safe and assured in order to learn. Read about it by subscribing to Attitude magazine today. Sign up for yourself or to share with a teacher or a loved one who could benefit from greater ADHD understanding.

[00:02:38]And today we have an exclusive subscription offer just for webinar participants. Sign up for Attitude magazine and enjoy 15% off your order, plus a free copy of the ebook, How the ADHD Brain Works, an $8.95 value. Click the link on your screen to get 15% off Attitude and your free ebook now.

[00:03:01]So, without further ado, I'm so pleased to welcome Dr. Dave Anderson. Thank you so much for joining us today and for leading this discussion.

[00:03:10]Thank you, Carol. Um, I'm hoping to just, you know, have that moment of panic where like your microphone might not be working or something like that, but it looks like everything's going.

[00:03:18]So, I'm going to switch to I have no disclosures. I'm going to switch to my uh initial slide here. So, you know, just for those of you who are just joining us or who were joining during Carol's introduction, the the focus of the the, you know, webcast today is about 20 minutes of setting some uh, you know, basic talking points related to summer boundaries and some of the main questions that we at the Child Mind Institute get from parents about how to best set summer boundaries. And then what we wanted to do is kind of do an AMA for those of you who know that term an ask me anything where we not only have presubmitted questions from attendees but we also have uh questions you're submitting live right now that Carol is uh going through and choosing so that she can moderate that discussion you know about 1:25 p.m. East Coast. So just to give you kind of the framing for a talk like this and the kinds of discussions that we have with families as we embark on the summer. Uh my first note is on the workshop title. You know, we like this workshop title as how to set up behavioral boundaries to unlock fun. Uh only because it it seems kind of contradictory in the sense that most of the time when you know, we think of fun or especially when your kids think of fun, it is rare that they would say, you know, how I have fun, it's when my parent sets up a certain amount of structure or boundaries. Often times kids are thinking it's more about freedom and a lack of structure. But that's the essence of, you know, what we want to set up for our kids over the summer. And it's the essence of also attachment models based around authoritative parenting. It's how do we get parents thinking in certain ways about how they're going to set boundaries so that those boundaries are there when they need them, but the baseline is more about nurturance rather than structure. You're not sitting there the entire summer ruminating about how your kids are doing things you don't want them to be doing or wishing they were doing something else. and instead thinking about how, you know, you can love on them, you can enjoy some of the activities with them, you can get some stuff done that you need to get done, you can feel like they're checking off certain boxes, and you can feel like they're maybe not spending as much time in activities you otherwise would not like them to be spending time doing. So, the fleeting ideal in a summer is we're trying to say to parents, we want to give you a framework that allows you to, you know, to quote from the world of online infomercials, set it and forget it. Think about what your boundaries are. set up that expectation in advance and say, "Let me see how this works."

[00:05:41]Understanding that as parents, we're always tinkering even after we have the best laid plans and boundaries set up.

[00:05:47]We want to give you an opportunity to think about the summer in moments and not as an entire summer where you'd give yourself a global verdict. That the more you can set these boundaries such that you don't have to worry about them or ruminate about them consistently, but instead can perhaps focus on bringing your best self to your kids for certain moments of the day. None of us as parents uh my wife and I have an eight and 5-year-old can bring our best self to our kids at every single moment. we focus on, you know, conserving our energy, bringing it in the moments that we can. And then lastly, once you've set these boundaries, once you've thought about how you bring yourself in the way you'd like to to your kids over the summer, there's got to be some room for thinking about how you care for yourself. Some level of self-compassion that you have for yourself as a parent.

[00:06:33]And it doesn't mean that, you know, you're able to do yoga every single day.

[00:06:36]That's unrealistic for most parents.

[00:06:38]It's more that we're thinking about that balance of caring for ourselves, bringing our best selves to our kids in moments rather than, you know, judging ourselves globally and thinking about boundaries that once we set them into place, maybe they're there to be tinkered with, but you don't feel like you're pressing a reset button on every single day. So, I come at this through the lens of behavioral science that, you know, humans, and I I say this with great love toward humans, we were built for evolution. We weren't necessarily built for managing behavior or optimization, you know, and parenting.

[00:07:13]Uh we were built to notice in our offspring when they're doing things that are socially acceptable, when they're doing things that might cause them injury or cause them to have a lowered chance of survival or when they're doing things perhaps to injure other people or decrease our standing within our communities. And it makes sense that where parents would be paying the most attention would be those moments when your kids's about to hurt themselves, when they might be about to hurt somebody else, when they might be doing something where you're like, "No, no, we're not doing that in front of the neighbors." Or, "No, no, you don't speak to adults that way." Or, "This is not how you treat your sister at the playground." The issue with that is that while that helps to ensure our survival as a species and the bonds of community that ensure our survival, you know, being stronger together um than we are apart, uh it doesn't necessarily involve the best science for shaping behavior because more often than not, we're kind of programmed to catch our kids being bad, not necessarily catch our kids being good. And the essence of shaping behavior when we think about what we want to see for our kids is thinking ahead of time, how do I want to set the stage for success? What boundaries do I want to put in place? And then how can I present those in a kind of like matterof fact way to children of all ages that like this is going to be how we do these routines? then how do I kind of, you know, ignore what we call the extinction bursts, which is when you introduce new boundaries or expectations to kids, they almost always winge and whine to a certain degree, no matter if they're toddlers or teenagers, uh, about the fact that you're putting in place this strategy, but we're not really paying attention to that. We want to instead see what happens when the structure is actually in place and whether it gets us where we need to go. Once we've set up that structure and done what we can to kind of manage the environment so that we feel like we're promoting the activities we'd like to see from our kids, our next job is how do we walk into a room and give ourselves the automatic thought of how do I catch them doing something that I think is a positive? How do I catch them being good? Even before I tell them, hey, by the way, I want to remind you that you got to do this or by the way, you know, let me tell you about the what's going to happen tonight, your nighttime routines, we'll remind them about how something went not so great the day before. And so a lot of times when we're working through issues with parents and we'll zero in on a few of these through the questions that Carol will ask me starting about 15 minutes when we're working through things a lot of times when parents say well my focus in the summer is I want to set a boundary around this and I want to promote say good sibling interactions and a parent will say how do I make it so that in the moment that one sibling hits another sibling they don't do that again and we'll say it's a whole system first and foremost we're going to think about how we structure the time the sibling are are spending together, what activities do you propose to them that they do together? What activities are kind of okay for them to do? What are the ones you want to set up up front or maybe not okay for them to do? Then when the siblings are playing nicely, how do you go against what is parental instinct and say, "I'm going to catch them being good. I'm going to walk into the room and let them know that it's great they agreed on a TV show or it's great that I noticed that they were at least talking to each other in nice tones versus waiting for screaming or waiting for a fight or waiting for somebody to throw something at somebody before you kind of go in. Then how do you give good directions in the moment to say here's what I'd like to see from you guys? And then again the essence of giving good directions is catching people following through on those directions. And then lastly, we say to parents, we know the original question you were asking, which is, 'What do you do when the siblings do get violent with each other? Or what do you do when they start throwing all the popcorn at each other because they can't agree on a TV show? And in those particular cases, we will talk about a consequence that helps to set a boundary and let the kids know that behavior was, you know, uh something that we would not uh want to be allowing. But at the same time, we still want to consider how the rest of that uh you know, kind of landscape still continues to foster positive sibling interactions beyond just giving a consequence when negative behavior happens. So to get to the notion of kind of setting the stage and this notion of setting boundaries, before I became a psychologist, I was a summer camp director. And one of the wonderful things that you can see as you know you look at the psychology of youth uh you know kids and teens and summer camp is that summer camp schedules whether it was intentional or just years and decades of evolution uh of summer camp schedules are in fact highly developmentally appropriate for kids in terms of how you structure unstructured time when kids are not in school. So just to give you a sense of like what the typical summer camp schedule is, the schedule that I've included in the kind of lefth hand side of the slide is what a typical schedule looks like in say a sleepa away camp day that we might structure. We're getting the kids up and we're feeding them right off the bat.

[00:12:07]Breakfast then what we know is right after the the time that the kids are are fed at least for breakfast and in the early part of the day that's going to put a lot of the work. That's true for most humans. Most of us, and I'm not going to say this is a firm rule for everybody, but most humans do their best work in the early part of the day between breakfast and lunch and sometimes into the early afternoon, but there's a reason why a lot of the deep work that people do often happens in that time between breakfast and lunch or kind of in in the morning. So, summer camp schedules put the work at the beginning. You're going to do cabin cleanup, you're going to do chores, you're going to do various things before we do any of the preferred activities of the day. You can see on the right I've listed the Primac principles, one of the major evidence-based principles at work.

[00:12:52]That's a fancy name for do things that are non-preferred before you do things that are preferred. And summers camp schedules are set up like that. And and the reality is lots of schedules for kids should be set up like that where we're saying to kids, look, we're going to reward ourselves with this activity later. We're going to do this activity that you really want to do later, but we're going to get the tough stuff out of the way first. There's good reason why saving the best for last is actually better at extrinsically motivating humans. So, we start off with clean up or chores. And then usually, and this is where summer camps are are really good, you may not have all the activities that kids want. Like kids might say, "I really wish I could skateboard as my morning activity." But maybe at summer camp we don't have skateboarding available say at 10:30 a.m. or at 11:00 a.m. But we'll say here are a, you know, slew of activities that you can do for your morning activity. Make one of these choices. Now, there's two really important evidence-based principles there. One is choice. People are a lot more likely to elect to do something, even something that might be slightly less preferred if there is some choice.

[00:13:59]Secondly, the notion that boredom isn't the worst thing in the world. In the event that you know you only have certain choices for your morning activity and none of them necessarily appeal to you on that particular day, no matter what age you are, it's okay to get bored, to think maybe you got to be creative or to think you can just ride the wave of boredom for a little while until you get to the next thing. But summer camps are structured in that way so that you know we say this is the morning activity time. You know, you can choose to protest by sitting off to the side at waterfront or sitting on the side as you do an activity, but at the end of the day, this is what's available and we're okay. If you decide to be bored or if you decide to protest, we're just going to keep going. The next piece is you can see that in summer camp schedules, there are uh feeding is at regular intervals and oftentimes preemptive. We're not waiting until the kid melts down. We're not waiting until people get hangry. We're actually making sure that there are more opportunities to feed during the day than perhaps uh we necessarily need. Some of the kids don't eat two snacks a day, but they're there for that reason, even if it's just like kind of a a short break. But what you can see as well is that, you know, we've got kind of the work in the morning. We got these activity periods.

[00:15:11]uh we have a number of opportunities to eat meals after lunch. Commonly when kids are digesting what may be their largest or second largest meal of the day, there is rest or quiet time. Now, many kids don't like rest or quiet time.

[00:15:24]Many kids feel kind of stir crazy on that. Lots of kids need it. And it's okay to kind of like make sure that that's a part of the day where we're saying, "Look, this is going to be a quiet portion. This is going to be a rest portion. You may not need it, but it's good to just kind of have that as part of the rhythm of your day. Then we've got an afternoon activity portion, another snack. Oftentimes the free time comes later in the day, you know, in the late afternoon. And this is often when, you know, we're seeing activities that may not be as physical, may not involve as much physical activity, may not involve as much work, but are sort of more preferred activities. And again, you're able to utilize that in the early part of the day to say to kids, in order for you to have access to this during your free time later on today, we need to get these few things done in the early part. We're not procrastinating and leaving some of those less preferred things toward the end of the day. So, there's great wisdom in this in the sense that as I've listed on the right, as you're structuring a summer schedule, diet and hydration are accounted for here with more opportunities than you might actually need for some kids to feed and hydrate. physical activities accounted for because many of the activities that we're giving kids a choice of are physical. Now granted, in any summer camp, you could be the kid who picks arts and crafts, nature, drawing, and photography and not involve doing any cardio at all, but at the same time, you're still broadening your horizons. You're still doing things that are creative. You're still doing things that, you know, feed your brain. So even though we want to give kids a lot of opportunities for physical activity, if say a kid tends to choose a little bit more sedentary activities, that could be okay. We might still say to that kid, hey, I'd like you to choose one thing that is outside or one thing that gets your body moving. And lastly, there's sleep and sleep hygiene. One of the things that, you know, we can again borrow from summer camps in terms of sleep hygiene is that when you look at how kids sleep at camp, and lots of kids will report sleeping better at camp.

[00:17:21]Part of the reason is unknown to them.

[00:17:23]It's it's the the sleep hygiene that's baked in. It's that sleep rituals tend to happen in the same order every night and at about the same time. Lights are dimmed. There's not as many lights at summer camp. There's not as many overhead lights. Lights are often dimmed in the evening time. You've also got the night sky. It starts to signal to your body that it's time to kind of close down. And at the same time, you know, the the rituals of going to bed are pretty simple at summer camp. only have a certain number of choices of activities. As you go to bed, you can read, maybe you can play a game with another member of the cabin. Maybe there's a few kids who've snuck in certain devices, but at the end of the day, those devices are shared and not something you can spend a ton of time on, which we can talk about in the question and answer portion. Um, but at the end of the day, you know, that sleep is facilitated partly by routine dimming of the lights, common sleep and wake times each day that helps us to sleep and sleep better. As you can see also with the camp schedule, face-to-face social interaction is prioritized. Uh I already mentioned on the boredom and quiet time part and on fostering independence and choice. What I will also say that we can learn from camp schedules is this notion that screen time can be offset by a lot of other activities. If you look at the camp schedule and try to apply it at home, that free time in the afternoon often becomes the moment where we might, for example, give kids time to play video games or give kids time to watch TV or, you know, uh, play with a device or something like that. And we can again do the same thing that we do in camp where we say look we put the stuff earlier in the day that's non-screen activities or that might be work homework enrichment and then later in the day we get to reward ourselves with some of these preferred activities you have on screens at a time when I feel like a number of boxes have been checked as a parent and it's a little easier for me to lean into that. Now this leads in and I have two more qu two more slides. This leads into the zeitgeist question. I know we'll get a few questions about this in the Q&A portion. Um, what I mean by this is that so many of the questions about summer boundaries are really also questions about how we do the interplay of what we want to happen during the summer and technology. And so here are a few talking points that we think about for parents, you know, related to technology for the summer. I'll also say that just today in you know conjunction with this attitude webinar we posted a companion article about technology boundaries over the summer just that topic on childmind.org on our website written by me and delving into some of these points further. But what we want parents to think about is there's a lot of panic about technology and for good reason.

[00:19:59]There are risks that parents need to be aware of and informed about related to technology use in their kids. At the same time, technology is here to stay and multiple things can be true. We want to be aware of the risks. Technology is also a facet of our lives. Kids are really interested in technological activities. The vast majority of what kids are doing online in small doses, it's not necessarily intrinsically harmful. And what we know from the research is that while technology may be a factor in you know risks for youth uh the research has not indicated it is driving youth mental health crisis. So the more we can take that to parents and say let's focus on the practical technology the things that keep you sane around technology for the summer not the panic the more likely that we can kind of move forward and not get into screaming fights uh you know with kids.

[00:20:50]So first thing is what we hope is that when parents are familiar with the risk factors when they know a bit more about what kinds of content to be avoiding when they know about what kinds of activities on screens might pose more risks you know for example watching TV or movies as a family low risk playing video games in general probably fairly low risk in small doses uh being on social media by oneself as a teenager it's not necessarily high risk in small doses and with some monitoring and understanding and critical thinking about what that world looks like, spending a lot of time on it alone and really not critically thinking about the content that's being fed can be much more of a risk. And so it's really important that we kind of map those out, help kids to gain competencies, help kids to think about what the risk factors look like. And then once we've kind of made ourselves aware of those things and helped kids to think about where those critical boundaries are, we want parents to take a little bit more of a self-compassion approach to say, look, you know, each moment that my kids are on screens playing some video games, watching TV, using their tablets, uh things like that should not cause this like upswelling tidal wave of parental guilt and anxiety as if I am doing something wrong as a parent. The screens are here. We're going to focus on trade-offs. The key is, and this goes back to the summer camp schedule, if we're balancing key developmental tasks, if we're really thinking about where screens, you know, displace the most important things that kids need to be doing, uh, and we create kind of a checklist around that, we can often relax by the time that the kids have as a remainder that they are spending on screens. So, when I ask parents, going back to the summer camp schedule, for example, you know, are your kids regular eating and hydrating? Are they regularly moving their bodies this summer? Uh, are they getting some face-to-face time with friends, face-toface time with family?

[00:22:45]Do you have some nocreen zones in your house, like certain family meals or certain times of day when there really isn't any screen related activity? Uh, are we making sure to be conscious about how screens affect sleep? you know, are we making sure that we're not just kind of like, you know, giving in to kids saying, "Oh, well, I need my tablet or my phone to sleep and saying to ourselves, how do we think critically about how screens infringe on that and how to help ourselves to build sleep hygiene and sleep rituals independent of screens, you know, for our kids?" And that's, you know, kind of one of the major research findings. And then how are we monitoring their content exposure? How are we monitoring the activities they're engaged in? uh how are we monitoring how they're you know critically think about the information that they're being fed through screens.

[00:23:31]All of those are key questions. But once we've gone through that developmental checklist, if a parent can say, "Well, here's what's happening with facetof face contact. Here's what's happening with basic wellness habits. Here's what's happening with our no screen times." The time that's left over for screens, we can kind of take the threat level down around. We can say to ourselves, I might be able to have some self-compassion that maybe I'm not doing it wrong because I am checking off those important boxes and I am decreasing the overall time and the time that's left might just be for relaxation, for social connection, for entertainment. It's not necessarily a terrible thing. The other thing I'll include as kind of the the technology question is that being your child's digital neighbor is often uh extremely useful in figuring out how to set boundaries around screens. All too often what we see is that parents will read an article about something related to screens that are having, you know, for example, just kind of asked their kid to guide them through that app or show them that game or show them that particular thing that they're watching.

[00:24:32]The more we're able to have that experience with kids, the more we're helping to foster for them the critical thinking they need in a digital world.

[00:24:41]Kids aren't helped by us just saying, "I want to outlaw these things from your life." Now granted, there are some things that kids might be too young for, like we do not recommend, for example, social media for kids younger than the teenage years. But what we're saying is once you get into that age range where kids are saying, look, I want to be able to chat with my friends or I want to be able to, you know, utilize social media as a way of maintaining social connections. any of those things. It helps us better if we take a curious kind of a seek to understand perspective first and then say okay how can I together with my kid think critically about the content on this thing the behaviors they might engage in on this thing the risks that might happen on this thing whether it's they could be you know engaging with strangers we want to think about privacy or there's more of a chance that they could be impulsive or you know be caught up in ridiculing other kids using inappropriate language or cyber bullying. How do we take a practical approach to those things rather than saying a ban is the only way that we can address such things? So, we can get more into that in the Q&A. Last slide. And this is just because, you know, we're talking of course in a a zone that is very focused on really appreciating and supporting neurodiversity and thinking about, you know, what's going on for kids with ADHD as they're in these spaces. When we think about, you know, summer structure for kids with ADHD, these are just a few of the the main points that we often hear from parents where parents will say, "Look, I'm trying to set up this structure, but it is like pulling teeth to get my child who struggles with ADHD to engage with like mundane or repetitive activities each day." And a lot of that also comes back to the behavioral lens that I was highlighting earlier. It's that we want to pair the mundane or the repetitive with, for example, visual cues to make it so we're not just having this kind of oral dialogue between parent and kid like Groundhog Day every day that usually escalates through the course of cycle to yelling. We're trying to say, how do we put this in writing or put this in visual form so that we can all kind of reference this, but we're not reinventing the wheel verbally every single day. And then beyond that, how do we use the primac principle and these behavioral principles we talked about to say, look, we're going to load the mundane or the repetitive in certain times of day. And maybe there will be some sort of incentive or some way that we take the things that you do find are preferred or the things that you do really want to do and say, "We're willing to give you more of those things or willing to give you access to those things if we can see, you know, some level of habitual performance on the mundane or repetitive." That's a lot of how we build up those systems for kids with ADHD. The second thing is tolerance for boredom. You know, kids with ADHD often report that being bored is excruciating. And they will they will say in sessions with me that it is harder to be bored for them than other kids. And we get that. We feel that for them. That may actually be a more painful state for their brains than for other people. At the same time, that doesn't mean that it's not a state of being that we should learn how to tolerate to some degree. You know, if we're talking about sensation seeeking and reward seeking, we don't want, you know, being bored or being quiet to be so displeasing that we can't tolerate it even for a second because that might make us impulsive and might have us engage in things which are less helpful rather than more helpful. So, the more that we kind of practice that muscle or talk to kids about how we're going to be behind them and practicing that, the better. Parents often talk about the reward-seeking hyperfocus. And this is where I pair it with the initial point of if they're reward seeking, I get it.

[00:28:10]A lot of times it's more painful for their brains to feel boredom. And at the same time, it's much much harder to get them to engage in mundane or repetitive activities. So that's a lot of the pairing that goes on in bundling tasks where we say we're going to do the mundane uh before we get to the things that you're really thinking about as rewards. The last two points I'll make about considerations for youth with ADHD over the summer is that one of the things we know about, you know, a large percentage of of kids with ADHD is that estimating the amount of time that something takes, you know, is often times uh inaccurate. So, if it's a non-preferred task, they'll overestimate the amount of time it takes. If it's a preferred task, they'll underestimate the amount of time they're getting for it. And at the same time that self-regulation on on time. So like how much time they have to complete things leads to procrastination which then leads to feverish activity because they thought they had more time and they weren't necessarily estimating it too well. Thinking about how to non-judgmentally communicate with kids with ADHD over the summer about time, about calendars, figuring out ways to get them that information in a form that isn't dependent just on you orally saying it to them. It's really good. I'm a big fan of whiteboard calendars, big calendars in the kitchen, uh weekly breakdowns of certain things. Uh you know, some way of saying, "How can I communicate best for you or with you throughout the day as we're staying on our schedule or what's coming up next so it doesn't lead to blowups or arguments?" And kind of asking kids to be with us on that. And in the same way, trying to ask them to estimate time and then really looking at how much time certain things take. If we say, "Look, you told me that doing this activity that you thought was non-preferred for today was going to take you two hours."

[00:29:50]You know, let's take a look. How long did it actually take? 32 minutes. Let's remember that for the future when I ask you to do this that it's not like I'm dragging you to the gallows here. I'm really trying to just, you know, do something I think will take a short time. And I know we're probably going to get to this in the Q&A, but a lot of the questions we also get are that kids with ADHD will sometimes have, even more so than a kid without ADHD, meltdowns or moments of emotional dysregulation when preferred activities are removed. This could be screens. It could be jumping on the trampoline. It could be playing with water balloons outside. But we can kind of talk about how to get through that if we feel like from Carol's questions that's really prominent. So with that, I'm going to pause. We're going to spend the latter half of this just answering questions we've gotten from you, the viewers and presubmitted attendees.

[00:30:39]Carol, I I leave it to you here to guide me. Thank you, Dr. Anderson. Before we start the Q&A, I'd like to share the final results from from today's poll question. We asked, "What are your biggest challenges in managing your kids over the summer?"

[00:30:56]Not surprisingly, 31% said managing screen time. 23% said keeping a consistent routine through the day. 17% said getting enough structured activities in. 14% said providing enough learning opportunities. And 13% said managing bedtime schedules.

[00:31:18]Um so now to your questions. Um, someone writes, and you just talked about this, so you could talk about this more. When I set boundaries, it triggers my younger child's anger and frustration. How do I handle tantrums in the moment, and how do I prevent them? And before you answer that, we got a similar question. A parent asked, "How do I reduce meltdowns in teens?" So, if you could talk about those two different age groups.

[00:31:46]Absolutely. And it is not surprising that we got those two questions because of the 500 presubmitted questions by parents for this uh uh webinar, I I would say there were probably 45 that mentioned the word meltdown at some level because that's a really common question that we get. So one of the reasons why I wanted to make sure to include this slide is to think about this as a framework for how we address meltdowns uh you know anytime that they occur. When parents say to us, you know, my kid is having meltdowns, we say is, look, meltdowns are multifaceted and multiply determined, a, they're a function of the fact that kids are evolving their emotion regulation systems. And often times, if they're under, you know, age 10 or 11, they're really using a parent or caregiver as a proxy and how to manage that meltdown.

[00:32:34]Even though we would love for them to perhaps see that it causes great stress and have some motivation to decrease said meltdowns, you know, when we we take things away. The key here is this.

[00:32:46]You know, the reason why meltdowns happen is that a they are having some emotional dysregulation. They don't exactly know what to do with that. They need those skills from us. And then secondly, uh sometimes there's a functional aspect to meltdowns. you meltdown and sometimes your parent says fine fine you can have five more minutes of you know this tablet or it fine I won't bring you in from outside or no you don't have to like go in and pick up your room I can't deal with this right now you know we leave that's not a failure as a parent that's just what happens for parents that's one of the reasons why meltdowns happen is just because you know for some small percentage of situations kids know that if they throw a fit or they get really emotional uh you might be likely to reshuffle the deck and you know deal them a new hand and maybe that hand will be better than the current hand you're kind of wanting them to do. So what we'll lead parents through and there are lots of resources about you know preventing meltdowns online lots of resources on attitudes website on childmind.org or you know, we've got lots of articles on these strategies, but we're often saying to parents, we're saying like, look, what's first of all the positive opposite of meltdowns? It's staying calm in challenging situations.

[00:33:53]And then we'll say to a parent, the the way that we build this out over time, it's about hundreds of trials, not just a single meltdown. So, if it's staying calm in the midst of challenging situations, we think about a few different components we build. The first is how we actually build the skills to manage challenging situations. We want to we want to educate kids, provide them a bit of what we call psycho education on what you can do in the moment. You see this a lot in schools where teachers will say what'll happen you know what do you think we should do if a friend of yours you know comes after you on the playground or makes you angry or makes you frustrated or what do you think you should do when you have to wait your turn you know in line. These are like early on elementary school training activities. uh child mind. We have a series of videos we developed that's facing toward preK then elementary then middle school then high school kids teaching all of these skills called the thriving kids projects freely available on our website. But the whole focus is we teach kids how do you understand your emotions, label your emotions, better kind of check in on the intensity of the emotion you're feeling in the moment, and then think about what strategies you might have. Whether that's deep breathing, whether that's seeking support from an adult, using your words, looking for a hug, you know, seeking support from a friend, whether that's considering how you might ride the wave of this big feeling. Maybe there isn't anything to do, but we teach kids to maybe construct say a sensory kit. We say, "What can you look at? What can you listen to? What can you touch? What can you smell?" You know, those sorts of things. What taste is is often in the sensory kit, but that often leads to like, you know, preferred snacks and things like that. So, you know, we can put that as well. But we're asking a kid like what can you do to either seek support, do something active to cope with this big feeling or figure out how you might be able to ride it out even while we know that big feelings are like waves. They come and they go. And so we'll we'll try to help kids think about how they learn those skills. Then we try to model as parents how we deal with challenges. So if we're dealing with a challenge and we're trying to show how we're dealing with it calmly, that modeling is so important to help kids to manage their own meltdowns where we say, "Oh my gosh, you know, I have this challenge. I am so frustrated about it."

[00:36:03]But at the same time, it's not this person's fault. It's not that person's fault. I'm just going to manage this situation. You know, maybe there's nothing you can do. Serenity prayer.

[00:36:12]You're taking deep breaths and listening to a song you like. Maybe there's something to do and you're narrating for your kid how you do that. Then the next thing is we'll often say to parents the meltdowns often happen in the face of really big challenges. So what we want to do is catch our kids being good in the moments where they face small challenges and they cope with it calmly.

[00:36:30]And the more we can explicitly say to them, hey, you did a great job, you know, in that moment coping really calmly with that challenge. You may not say it in the language that I'm saying it sounds highly academic and I wouldn't say it that way to my eight and 5-year-old. I might say, "Hey, you stayed calm even when I saw you were really frustrated with that thing." And all I'm doing in that moment is, you know, noting the fact that they were able to stay calm in the face of a challenge and naming their emotion in that moment in the hope that maybe they see that as as helpful. Beyond that, when the meltdowns happen, what we're trying to do is think to ourselves, I don't necessarily want to give into the meltdown. If it's just big feelings, maybe I can sit with my kid for a second and just be with them in those big feelings. Hey, I know it's it's really hard that I'm not giving you this thing right now and I know you're having big feelings about that. And so you'll see a lot of content kind of online about how you sit with your kid in those moments of big feelings as long as they're behaving safely or they're not doing something really off limits. And then if a kid does do something really off limits like hit you, throw things, you know, something like that, there may need to be a moment where that that child say takes a moment separate from you, something like that. uh or you know takes a moment to calm down or you ask them to please take a moment in another room you know just to uh collect their thoughts there may be an incremental loss of a privilege you might say I'm going to take away a few minutes of this preferred activity later today because of this particular thing and there's a lot of different ways that we can give incremental consequences fairly immediate to the behavior uh each time it happens and then really look at how that medicine does its work. So when we look at that combined system, a parent who is trying to introduce their kids to coping skills, a parent who's trying to model for their kids how they cope with challenges, a parent who's trying to catch their child being good in coping with small challenges, and a parent who's sitting with their child when they have big feelings but are not behaving in a way that's really offlimits. and then finally tries to kind of dispassionately deliver an incremental consequence when you know offlimits behavior occurs by saying look you know you've lost for example 15 minutes of screen time later on tonight for throwing that thing across the room again those things altogether should over time shape a child toward more and more of those kind of coping behaviors and being able to cope effectively with these things you know with the com combined kind of powers of all those skills. Carol, we want to go to the next question. Yes, thank you for that. Um, my teen only wants to play video games all day now that he has no other school related responsibilities. Should I suggest he get a summer job? And how do I know if he's ready to have a boss and adhere to a work shift?

[00:39:13]So, that was a that was a two-parter right there. That was teens and, you know, video games and whether or not that's okay for the summer. And then the second thing was kind of acting like well maybe the only other tradeoff for that is getting a summer job. So jobs first and then teens and video games. Um you know if teens are old enough to be able to get a job. Uh obviously like this is this is a major aspect of child development and character building. We want kids to think about citizenship about contributions to a household about their character. If they're too young to have a job it's really helpful to think that one of the things we should be doing is asking them in some way to contribute to the household. the group of people they live with. Maybe that's taking out the trash. Maybe that's clearing the dinner table. Maybe that's keeping their room clean and keeping their bed made. But at some level, you know, this kind of maps on to the notion of, you know, doing some work later on.

[00:40:05]For teens, you know, one of the things that we hear a lot right now, you know, currently is that the job market is tough for them. um they're kind of embarking on things and a lot of the old school strategies that their parents have for getting jobs are not as applicable in today's modern world in the sense that a lot of jobs especially the jobs that teenagers might be able to have for the summer. Uh are you know not terribly well paid or maybe unpaid. Um they involve oftentimes online applications where a lot more people apply for the job than actually can have the job. And so teens report back to us that their parents will say, "Well, look, it it obviously isn't the online world. You should drop by the Starbucks or you should drop by, you know, the car wash, you should drop by the, you know, uh, local restaurant or or diner or something like that and give them your resume directly, shake hands and let them know that you're looking for a job." And while those old school strategies, you know, we're not we're not saying to parents that you shouldn't inform your teen that you should do those things. Um, but a lot of times what we're finding, at least in today's job market, is that there are fewer opportunities available for teens to really get jobs. Um, a lot of the old school strategies may not work as well.

[00:41:17]And we've got to kind of be empathic to the fact that it it may be difficult for teens to just suddenly have the skills needed to secure a job here. So, we often need to help them. We often need to scaffold that task. really think about what kinds of connections we might have that can help them make contacts and and figure out how to get a job for the summer. That said, it's not the only trade-off with my teen is no longer in school and they only want to play video games. Reality is, you know, I get a lot of teens in my office, they want to have a summer. They say, "Isn't part of the summer that I get to relax and that I get to, you know, spend some time doing activities that I want?" And I say, "Absolutely." You know, I think both your parents and I can support you. Your parent or grandmother or caregiver, whoever it might be, can support you in the idea that there's might be a reasonable amount of time this summer that you would spend relaxing and playing video games in a way that you can't during the year or with your friends or you know what, whatever you might want to do. But there's also still a number of things that are really important developmentally for teenagers over a summer. like summer is an unparalleled opportunity to deepen your interest in certain passions. Uh perhaps engage in enrichment experiences that you wouldn't be able to during the school year. Uh think about, you know, outside academic experiences that maybe you didn't have time for or that could, you know, exercise your brain a little bit over the summer or prevent learning loss. Uh adventures that you might not be able to have uh during the school year. And so oftentimes when I'm speaking with parents, you know, in the beginning of the summer around teenagers is I'll kind of ask them to reflect on their own values, what they think the summer should be used for, and then try to engage in a more collaborative problem solving process with a teen where they say, "Look, I want to give you access to some of your preferred activities in a reasonable amount.

[00:43:07]I also want to make sure we prioritize these things I think are really important for your preparations for post high school or your preparations for the job world or you know you deepening your passions enriching your brain whatever it might be. So how can we meet in the middle? How can we make sure you do some of these things say during the earlier parts of the day to hearken back to my summer camp schedule slide so that later on in the day during the afternoons or during the night times when you're asking to stay up late so you can play a few video games with your friends. I feel more like that's not like grading on me as a parent and like we've accomplished some of the things are really important for your development.

[00:43:43]Carol, you want to go to the next question? Yes. Um, a mom writes, "How can I create and implement summer activities and routines when I have executive function deficits, too?

[00:43:55]There's so much decision fatigue that interferes with setting up, communication, and management of routines and best practices that it feels insurmountable."

[00:44:04]Yeah. So, I I I feel you on this. I mean, we we get that question a lot because the reality is ADHD is one of the more genetically loaded uh of the mental health and learning disorders, you know, realm. Uh so, it's more often than not if we see a kid who has ADHD, uh they might have a sibling who's got a little bit of those symptoms. They might have a parent who actually has ADHD. And you know, a lot of the solutions that we propose, I agree with you, sound like we're saying to someone, we want you to demonstrate, you know, 99th percentile executive functioning on behalf of your child. I'll go back to the same coping thought that I have as a parent during the summer. Every day doesn't have to be a win, but I really focus on bringing my best self to certain moments. Similarly with structuring schedules for the summer, uh it's trying to figure out how to take it step by step rather than being paralyzed by the 10,000 foot view.

[00:44:57]And I don't blame you. I've given a lot of the 10,000 foot view right here. What I would go back to with any parent who says, "Look, I got decision paralysis and executive functioning is I'd say, look, let's start with one specific intervention. Maybe you want to get a big calendar for the kitchen and we're going to focus at some point this week on getting what you know is out there.

[00:45:17]Not making a perfect calendar, but just getting some of the stuff on there for the summer. Then the next step, you know, the next week might be, okay, we've got what is in the summer right now. Now, let's focus on a couple of things you think might be missing. And really we're just going in small increments saying how can we break whatever this list is into manageable chunks you know closest to the values you have and what you want because perfectionism is our our enemy if we're struggling with executive functioning I mean actually I should say whether we struggle with executive functioning or not we can't be perfect but we can be intentional and we can be intentional in small bursts and we can reflect on you know what little nuggets out of anything that's being said in a webinar like this we want to focus focus on and then try to block out the noise for everything else as we set up just small goals for ourselves. And the reality is you knock down one small goal, you know, over the course of a span of a few days and then we just kind of try to see if we can move to the next one and we won't notice big changes maybe on the span of a few days to a week. But if we reflect then back on the scale of one to three months, we might really see some movement. Carol, what do you want to go to next?

[00:46:29]Um, we had a few questions around rising seniors, um, that they need to write essays for the numerous schools that they plan to apply to. Yeah. And how to get them to do that this summer without nagging them. Yeah.

[00:46:46]So, a lot of the the ways that we see parents work, so if we see that, you know, we're embarking upon the college application season and uh parents say, "Look, I I've been told, you know, by their school, by 17 articles I've read online that it's a good idea to kind of, you know, get this stuff down." What we often start with is this kind of nebulous task where, you know, we'll be telling a kid, you need to get this done by the end of the summer. the task isn't broken down into small pieces and the amount of time is so large that most people don't do well with that whether they have ADHD or not. If you've got a really big time block, the the tendency in our brains is to say, "Well, it's a really big time block, so I don't have to do anything now. I'll do, you know, things as the time gets closer, as my anxiety, the urgency increases." So really what we want to do with something that big is say all right where do we want to be at different way points of the summer. We want to have like let's say that you know we don't want to be running this up right to the start of school. We want to have you know certain points of the summer we're relaxing more. Certain points of summer we're working. We could choose to structure the summer so we're working in bursts.

[00:47:55]We could choose to structure it so that we're doing a little bit every single week. But we want to present this to kids and say, "Look, this is what needs to get done. This is what that process looks like." Like what we're looking for is, you know, say a draft of this particular essay by such and such a date. And what a draft might mean is just, you know, having some good thoughts in an outline by this date. It might mean having some pros written up uh by this date. It might mean we've collected the information for this facet of your college application by this date. And we're trying to kind of like put that out there. Now, for some people, they're intrinsically motivated once we break the task down in smaller parts. They see it as manageable and they say, "You know what? Now that's in my zone of proximal development. I can do that. If if we've broken this down to small enough parts, now I'll tackle that. I'll work in the bursts. I'll take the relaxation time otherwise offered to me and and you know, this will work out." For some people, they get that whole plan, you know, set up and it's massively demotivating. And so we might say to ourselves, "Well, look, how can we reward ourselves for each way station we hit?" And a teenager might come back to you and say, "Look, I want to be able to do X with my friends. I want to see my summer curfew extended by this amount. I want to see you put this amount of responsibility in me. I want the opportunity for uh a little bit more allowance. I want you to give me the ability to to, you know, have this little bit of freedom." Something like that. There are lots of things that teen might teens might ask and that tends to be the social contract with rising seniors is that they ask for their social life. They if they don't have a job, they might ask for some of our financial support. Uh they might ask for us to relax the boundaries and monitoring them or their screens or their curfew. And that's the moment where we can say, "Look, you've asked me for this over the summer. We've mapped out this plan. As long as we're hitting our way stations within reason, I'm willing to, you know, kind of negotiate around these particular things."

[00:49:53]Wonderful. Um, so this is uh two related questions. One is what's the best way to strengthen executive function skills in tween this summer? And the other question is what routines are best to follow this summer to get a child ready for school in September. Right. Okay.

[00:50:10]Got it. So, executive functioning over the summer. So, I'm going to I'm going to um push you all toward another resource um which is a lot of the work of uh Richard Gallagher and Howard Abacov and others in the executive functioning space. we talk about end of elementary school into the tween ages.

[00:50:25]Um if we look at their work on executive functioning organizational skills, um a lot of that work is focused on the fact that interventions are most successful when parents find a way to help and support with the implementation of the practice of executive functioning skills through brief, you know, moments of check-in on any particular day. uh and the focus on certain basic skills like managing a calendar, keeping track of what needs to get done on a daily basis.

[00:50:55]Uh managing materials, managing spaces and ensuring that they're organized and free of distractions. You know, looking at organizational skills like how you keep your backpack or folders organized, those types of things. There are lots of opportunities in Vivo to practice over the summer organizational skills to say to a kid, "We want you to get your backpack ready for summer school or for camp and to, you know, help us with the list of things that need to be done each day. We want you to help us create reminders, you know, each morning for what this looks like. We want you to help us with the calendar and to consult that, you know, for any given week or month. Uh we want to focus when we're practicing learning activities over the summer. If we know that a kid is practicing reading or practicing math skills to prevent learning loss, let's make sure their workspace is free of distractions. Let's make sure if they can't necessarily focus in a private area because they keep getting distracted, we help them to think how do they manage their work in a public area of the house and you know increase their level of accountability for that as much as we could do that supportively. But there are lots and lots of opportunities to think how can I help them to anticipate? How can I help them to plan ahead? How can I help them to organize their materials? How can I help them to, you know, think about their own calendar or their own schedule and give them a little bit of responsibility mediated by me in practicing executive functioning skills? Carol, what was the second half of that question? Uh, it was the road map. It was the road map. How to get ready for a new school year in September. Right. So the the key with with getting ready for the the new school year in September is just more that we'll often say to parents like you don't have to spend the entire summer, you know, getting ready for the school year, aside from what schools will often tell you, which is, you know, they really want to help prevent loss of gains that have happened in the school year by asking kids to practice via summer reading or other academic tasks, you know, periodically with some challenge activities, hopefully some things that are a little bit different than what they've done in school to just kind of keep their brains active and keep practicing that muscle. But more of school prep, you know, comes down to the last couple weeks before school starts.

[00:53:02]And it's really starting to think even though we may have relaxed a lot of boundaries over the summer, maybe we've relaxed, you know, bedtimes, wake times, things like that, maybe we've had kind of more unfettered time in the morning.

[00:53:13]The biggest pain points when school starts again are getting back into the predictable routines of school. going to sleep at a certain time, waking up at a certain time, getting out of the house with a certain amount of time pressure.

[00:53:27]Those three things alone, if we can think in the last couple weeks of the summer, how do we start to readjust ourselves to bedtime routines that a little bit more resemble the school year, bedtime that more resembles a school year, wake time that is closer, it doesn't have to be, you know, at school, and even practice with what our morning routine will look like in getting out in the morning. Those things can really help for a smooth transition to the school year and not feel like it's like, you know, you've kind of come into it from the summer happening one day and then the next day suddenly we're at school and screaming at each other.

[00:54:01]Okay. Um, someone writes, "My middle school son has no friends. How can I help him work on his social skills and what do I do to get him out of the house while he has no one to play with?" Oh, that's a that's a really uh it pulls at the heartstrings as a question. Um, you know, my first thing is that if if kids um if parents really feel that their kids don't have peers that they're able to interact with, um, my first question is sort of like if there are if we do have access to any sort of structured situations over the summer that will put them in contact with kids. That's the first thing. Um because if we've got those structured situations, we can often let the caring adults in, you know, the day camp or the basketball program or the, you know, playgroup that's happening in the neighborhood or whatever it might be say to the adults, look, my kid, for one reason or another has a tough time making friends. Um, you know, I I would love to be able to do this better. Can you flag for us kids who we might connect with in this that we could perhaps invite for a play date after school and and kind of begin to develop those peer skills? Um, I'll say that there are a number of books and online resources about how to help your kid, you know, work on peer skills in a supportive way or work on what it means to be a good friend and what those skills look like. Um, I'll also say that, you know, frequently what I'll ask parents is if they don't have access to a structured opportunity or if they don't have access perhaps to a mental health professional who can work on some structured social skills building that can help that kid to generate like a friendship plan and a way of trying to connect with peers. The last thing is I I look for connections in the community.

[00:55:42]Are there parents, family members, others who we can say, look, my kid is having a really difficult time making friends. Is it possible we can get our kids together? And I can structure the situation by saying to my kid, you know, here are a couple of things I really want to focus on while we're getting together with this family or while we're getting together with this family member. This is going to help us to be able to have, you know, playdates in the future or get kids to come over to our house. The last thing I'll just throw out there is even if a kid has no deep friendships, if we can structure a situation that would be enjoyable for any kid, like when I talk about like, you know, uh situations where, you know, we invite a kid over to the house, if there is an activity that we think any kid will enjoy, and I think about what my own eight and 5-year-old would do over at anybody's house, if anybody's got a trampoline in their backyard, if they're having a water balloon or squirt gun fight, uh if they've got for my 8-year-old, new Legos for my 5-year-old if they've got a new art set. Like, you know, it's I don't love it, but like kids are very much attracted to novel activities that are kind of structured.

[00:56:46]We can structure it as a brief play date with a really interesting activity. And then what ends up happening is that kid kind of associates the good feeling they have from doing this cool activity with your kid and may be more amenable to longer and longer play dates in the future. But we might be able to structure that where if we can figure out a really fun game to play, like I also think of one time last a couple summers ago where there was a parent structuring a capture the flag game in their backyard that all the kids in the neighborhood want to take part in, you know, regardless of whether or not they were good friends. Again, a good activity could bring the kids to the yard and then you might be able to get, you know, opportunities from them. Okay, last question, Carol. Last question. Um, one person lives in the UK and says they don't have great weather and another person says she has 13 and 15 year old boys and they live in an unsafe neighborhood. Um, so they're both asking about opportunities to engage their kids brains and do fun activities that don't depend on being outside. Yeah. And so I will say that uh in the article that's actually highlighted in the screen we're displaying right now uh screen time in summer we do talk about that exact point that for kids who live in areas where parents don't feel safe with them being outside the house or where there's not as much access to outdoor activities.

[00:58:04]You know we want to think about those trade-offs because for a lot of parents they'll say I know they've got to be either inside the house for a lot of the summer or I know they might have to be indoors due to the weather. um I don't want it to all be on screens and to be sure not all screen time is created equal. So we go into the notion that there are activities that can be more enriching on screens, can be facilitating of learning, can be facilitating of physical activity even indoors using screens. What we'll also go back to and I mean look I go back to this and I do this with patients all the time where a patient will say to me look I can't be outside too much this summer.

[00:58:36]I can't I can't necessarily be out in my neighborhood. And we'll say this is where you know we live in a digital age.

[00:58:42]The internet can really help us come up with all kinds of activities in all kinds of different categories that may not be screenbased but that we can do you know on a budget indoors. We can look at how we develop new skills. We can look at you know learning new things. We can look at ways of uh you know and and all of these things can happen indoors. We can be doing service.

[00:59:04]We can doing arts and crafts. We can do creative activities. We can do movement activities based off of you know guided things that we find on screens. We can be doing no tech activities where it's board games, card games, you know, all kinds of different projects that we might be able to do. We can help out around the house. We can do chores. But a lot of this becomes from we'll try to make lists with families of all the opportunities we might have that we feel safe doing all the activities we might have aided by Google and chat GPT. And then say, okay, now given that we're going to have a schedule that's going to have breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Maybe a couple other times we ask ourselves uh you know if we need a snack given that we might you know have some time we're practicing learning reading or you know math or something like that and we've got some time that's free time and just doing fun activities we each like on on screens. How do we want to occupy the other parts of the summer in enriching ourselves, developing skills, connecting with each other or doing any activities that are safe indoors and don't cost us anything?

[01:00:06]Okay, Dr. Anderson, thank you so much for joining us today and for sharing your great advice for our ADHD community. We appreciate it so much.

[01:00:16]Thank you all for having me. And please check out the resources.

[01:00:20]And thank you to today's listeners. If you would like to access the event resources, visit attitudemag.com and search podcast 564.

[01:00:29]The slides and recording are posted a few hours after each live webinar. If you're listening in replay mode, simply click on the episode description. Please know that our full library of attitude webinars is available as a podcast. It's called the ADHD Experts podcast and it's available on most streaming platforms.

[01:00:50]We hope to see you again next Thursday for our webinar, How Mindfulness and Meditation Build Emotional Regulation in People with ADHD.

[01:00:59]Then we'll take a break for the week of July 4th and we'll be back on Thursday, July 10th with a webinar called A Self-Confidence Toolkit for Parents: How to Counteract ADHD Criticism for Your Child. Make sure you don't miss future Attitude webinars, articles, or research updates by signing up to receive our free email newsletters at attitudemag.com/newsletters.

[01:01:22][Music] Thanks everyone. Have a great rest of your day.