A Mom's Honest Look Back at Raising a Son With ADHD

Dear friends, we've covered ADHD in childhood many times, but this thoughtful look from Ursula Frühe at life with her oldest son's “neuron thunderstorm” (the German title of her book is Neuronengewitter) completely blew us away. He's now an adult and on his own.

Please take the time to listen to this mom. What she went through and how she got through it. What a story: a clinic stay, slipping, and then finding his footing again through sports and acting and people who never stopped believing in this very special kid.

Dear Ms. Frühe, you have three kids, and one of them was later diagnosed with ADHD. Did you notice from the very beginning that something was different about this child, and if so, what?

From birth, our first child had a significant delay in motor development. For example, he didn't walk until he was 22 months old, and his speech came very late, too. At the same time, I had the feeling that he took in every stimulus around him with incredibly alert eyes and a high level of sensitivity, but couldn't (yet) process it all.

In his first year he had bad skin irritations, trouble eating, and he startled very easily. Now, those are all pretty nonspecific things that don't necessarily lead to an ADHD diagnosis later on. Maybe you also piece it together that way in hindsight so that it fits. What I do find striking looking back is his high sensitivity to every kind of sensory input, including sounds, touch, and smells, which fits the typical sensory overload. Everything is perceived and felt more intensely.

That's why, and I want to say this right at the start, the term attention deficit doesn't fit our kids at all. They're equipped with a different kind of attention, one that's less in demand these days and so seems to be deficient. Our third son is affected too, and of course experience helped there: I knew exactly what was going on before he even started school. Though the core symptoms are very different. Our oldest was the inattentive, easily distracted type, while the youngest has mostly struggled with his unchecked impulses and emotions.

Take us into a moment when you thought: This is it. I can't do this anymore…

“This is it, I can't do this anymore?” …that came up mostly on vacation, when he slept even worse than at home, ran off, refused to eat, put himself in danger by sneaking off to the beach alone, and you had to watch him every single second. The classic: I was exhausted myself, needed a break, and was looking forward to some downtime. Dad was off duty and could have taken over, but our son clung to me.

It took me years to get that the very thing I love about vacation, a completely different environment, is a huge challenge for kids who depend enormously on routines and structure. What's relaxing for me is stress for them: everything is different from home. They don't want to go to the kids' club, and no wonder. But back then, those clashing needs naturally pushed us to the brink.

Much later in his development, a completely different issue came up, and it has taken on new urgency because of what I see as a totally misguided law (Germany's cannabis law). I see red when it comes to smoking pot. For me it's zero tolerance. I have a great deal of understanding for the wish for “finally some peace in my head,” but with this stuff, which is incredibly dangerous for vulnerable brains? No thank you! I won't go along with that!

Did you also doubt yourself and your parenting?

Doubting my parenting was pretty much the normal state of affairs. And the nagging questions about who's “to blame” and what set off the child's difficulties with his surroundings are still kept nicely simmering by society. Outsiders still often hint that the child's (mis)behavior might be the result of my being overwhelmed after all.

The complicated part is that yes, we were overwhelmed often enough. But as a reaction to the behavior our child had already brought with him into this world, not the other way around. In the end, I also tried to get to the bottom of those doubts in a productive way, by writing. So indirectly they were good for something, too…

At some point you reached your “inner near-breakdown,” as you called it. What did that look like?

The “near-breakdown” showed up in the fact that some mornings I didn't know how I would get through another day… in a total lack of strength that made my whole body feel heavy. I could only resist the urge to stay in bed with the last bit of self-discipline I had.

I wanted more than anything to withdraw from the world and this unbelievably exhausting life, to hand off the responsibility, to just not be here anymore. It was all too much, even ordinary life with my own job, the whole household, paying bills, meeting deadlines. Every kind of demand felt like too much. On top of that came the usual thin skin, emotional instability, a lot of crying that looked groundless to other people. Exhaustion depression — that fits. Nothing is fun anymore, nothing brings joy or lightness.

That breakdown made you see with total clarity: “We can't go on like this! We have two other children, and I still have a life of my own.” Where did that realization take you?

The most important realization was: I need help myself now, and it's not nice to have, it's essential. I have to take care of myself now, or the whole family system will collapse. That's one side, my obligation to the others. The other side is the harder part: I'm allowed to take care of myself, too, because I'm not just a mother, I'm a person in my own right who is allowed to be well. That meant confronting all the old ideas about what a mother should be, which I describe in the book.

That was a lot of work that I couldn't have done without professional help. It's also a decision to say: only I can change this pattern of running myself into the ground. After that it went on with lots of tiny steps of change. One initial push was a mother-child retreat with my youngest (a Kur, as it's called in Germany). It was wonderful (I think these retreats sometimes get an unfair bad reputation), but three weeks can't work miracles. It can only be a call to build more self-care into everyday life for the long haul.

At some point your son was admitted to a clinic as an inpatient. What led up to that?

Before the inpatient stay there was self-harm and also suicidal thoughts that he said out loud. There was also a jolting crisis conversation with the adolescent psychotherapist who was treating him as an outpatient, who clearly said a change of strategy was needed. Until then our son hadn't wanted to go to a clinic, and of course we had respected that wish. You can't drag your child into a clinic against his will. The decision to want help can only come from within him. That was the hardest part: bearing that powerlessness.

In the clinic, your son understood that ADHD is part of him but doesn't completely define him. That he's more than the occasional disorder in his head, and that it doesn't have to stop him from living a good life. What else did he learn?

He learned that what he had experienced as terrible loneliness, being an outsider, also makes him strong. And unique, in any case. That his particular mindset with that high sensitivity makes him a brilliant observer of the world and of other people, someone who experiences life more intensely. It's more exhausting, but not worse. He learned to stop comparing himself to others.

He learned that he has plenty of say in getting access to his partly brilliant brain: What's bad for me? Which habits trigger me in the wrong direction, and which are good for me? He learned self-care and autonomy. He learned to trust himself, because for the first time he experienced that he really can rely on his brain functions. And of course what we all learn, some of us with more struggle than others: self-acceptance! I have “only” this one body, this one brain, and I have to get along with it in this life, and it's nicer to do that at peace with yourself.

Your son also had great support from an empathetic friend and two teachers, and you believed he could make a comeback at school. Tell us about that.

You can't forget that the teenage crisis coincided with the pandemic. In fact, its severity was triggered in the first place by being isolated at home and losing all the coping strategies he'd learned. The problem wasn't the original ADHD but the co-occurring symptoms that had “piled on top,” like depression. There was no face to face contact with the teachers back then. Once it was clear that school was out of the question and a cut was needed, everything was open: nobody knew whether Lukas would ever decide to come back after a break, repeat a grade, or make a fresh start toward his high school diploma (the Abitur, Germany's university-entrance exam).

Even after the lockdown, the school counselor, with the principal in the background, reached out to us several times, always with a respectful question about whether that was wanted. So the contact and the bond with the school never broke, and that helped enormously in daring to take the step back. They also clearly sent the message: we believe you can do this, we think you're a smart guy, we believe you can. That's something completely different from when your own parents say it.

That statement carries weight. It sounds sappy, but it's true: they believed in him. And they let him feel it personally. We parents never doubted that our son is highly intelligent anyway (see his alert little eyes as a baby :) ), but we suffered almost as much as he did from how hard it was for him to get ACCESS to his own intellectual capacity. After the crisis, something clicked. Maturity came, just delayed. That's a pattern that ran through his whole development.

Sports and theater were crucial turning points in your son's life, right?

From our personal experience, I believe that sports, lots of physical movement overall, and also training body awareness are very important parts of therapy. They can't replace medication, but they're almost like an additional medication themselves. It's no secret that exercise has an antidepressant effect, and it's long been used in therapy. There's the term “runner's high,” the release of the body's own endorphins during or after running.

I think a lot of “emotional imbalance” gets regulated in the brain through physical activity, sweating, tuning in to your body, breathing more deeply. Afterward you carry yourself differently, you feel grounded and upright and strong, you trust your body more, and you sleep better after physical work.

What's essential for everyone is even more pressing for people with ADHD and their sensitive nervous systems, above all the regularity of training. The feeling of having a good home in your own body can ease many a bad mood. And, very important, sports can cushion the unfortunate pull toward addictive substances by giving them an outlet.

You can see in affected elite athletes how their ADHD in particular can make them exceptional, through their ability to hyperfocus and block out everything else (Olympic champion Simone Biles, among others). You have to watch out when the structure and the physical outlet of sports fall away, for example because of injuries or infections. And they have to learn to treat their bodies with care, because their sense of pain can be delayed or only registered after massive overload.

The same thing, the good kind of compensation, goes for theater on the emotional side. Here he got to be the clown, the court jester, to be a little crazy, to step outside the frame. Above all, in improv you're allowed to make leaps in thought and connect things that have nothing to do with each other. So all that associative thinking that so often gets in the way at school, because you can't hold on to the thread, is suddenly a strength people want. It just feels so good: supposed weaknesses become talents and make him a good actor.

It's no accident that the celebrity list on ADHSpedia includes many great, well-known actors who are perhaps successful not in spite of their ADHD but because of it. Seeing that helps enormously. After just a few rehearsals, Lukas knew not only his own lines by heart but could recite the whole play along with the cast. That's where his fabulous memory for things that interest him showed itself. Music is also an incredibly important, wonderful way to bring emotional balance, either listening or, even better, making it yourself, singing, playing.

A new way of looking at ADHD also helped you, because you could see it not just as a problem but also as a resource, you write in your book “Neuronengewitter”…

Yes, here I have to mention systemic therapy in particular, which gave me a different view of ADHD. It's less about ADHD as a “problem to get rid of” and more about a changed perspective and, with that, a changed way of dealing with it. There's a phrase that sounds strange at first, the “benefit of the problem”: what advantages might it even bring with it? As long as someone is suffering, that may sound cynical, but even then it's worth trying a change of perspective as a thought experiment.

Systemic therapy is built on constructivism, which, put simply, assumes that we all “build” our own versions of reality, completely subjective and dependent on our experiences so far, our perception, our values, our life stories, our culture and background. I will never know exactly how someone else perceives and feels this world, even if we try to understand each other objectively.

This way of thinking brings in a whole new respect for the very different perception of the person in front of you. That goes especially for people I think I know well. Trying to wrap your mind around this model changes a lot, especially when I'm dealing with people who have a different kind of neural “wiring” than I do. Instead of getting worked up about “time blindness” or forgetfulness, I try to find workarounds, knowing that a person with ADHD can't do it any other way. Because he perceives this world differently than I do.

Leaving the nest is a bit harder for teens with ADHD, you write. In what way? And how does it help a mom to recognize that? So she doesn't get seen as a helicopter mom quite so much?

I've mentioned that kids with ADHD sometimes develop with a delay. That can apply to their cognitive and motor skills, but their nervous system also seems to need more time to mature and develop socially and emotionally, which is a general observation. That means they're “younger” than their birth certificate says. Of course that creates a constant gap. On top of that there may be a weaker sense of direction and trouble with appointments, schedules, and planning in general, like packing for a trip or preparing for an exam, and becoming independent in lots of ways: handling money, traveling alone, all the way to moving out.

I wrote a somewhat biting sentence: We Germans are world champions at knowing better, especially when it comes to other people's lives. “Why is that mom still taking her kid to practice?” Mine's been able to do that alone for ages. “What, your kid still sleeps in your bed?” That's an unhealthy attachment. “Why does he still live with you?” Ours were out of the house long before that age… and so on and so forth.

We have incredibly rigid ideas about how you're “supposed” to live, when a child is supposed to achieve what, and heaven help anyone who steps out of line. Oddly enough, for all the emphasis on new individuality, this lack of freedom has increased, at least that's how it feels to me. Maybe because of all the comparing on (social) media. More tolerance for being different is my biggest concern, and it starts with us moms knowing: our kids tick differently, they need more time from us, and I won't let anyone rain on my parade, period. Exactly, I'm not wearing the helicopter mom label anymore.

When he was 21, your son said something decisive to you: “When I needed you the most, you were there for me.” What did that mean to you?

It was very moving to hear. There's gratitude in it, and appreciation, too. For me it means that it was right to trust my instinct, which told me back then: “Let people talk, he needs you.” I was often unsure whether I was doing it “right,” but I followed my gut anyway. It was a beautiful confirmation. It also means he did recognize that it wasn't easy for me, either, to get through that time with him. It means our relationship holds. And it's changing: now he doesn't need me anymore. Freedom is coming, but it's coming late.