The Care & Feeding of Your Adult Child

So you're the reluctant owner of an ADHD toddler-brain. Here's how to get the most out of your excitable, creative, chaotic tendencies.

“Remember, your artist is a child. Find and protect that child. Learning to let yourself create is like learning to walk. The artist child must begin by crawling. Baby steps will follow and there will be falls.” (Julia Cameron, The Artist’s Way).

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I couldn’t wait. But I had to of course.

Time never did bend to my will no matter how strongly I urged it to pass faster, weaving wishes with the earnestness only a child’s mind can channel. I was quite literally itching with excitement to see Sophie again. Chewing my nails, twisting and untwisting my hair, drawing stars in the window condensation with a clammy finger. My mother and Sophie’s were best friends, and so were we. We slept top-and-tail in a single bed on weekends, eating stolen caramel popcorn under the duvet with a torch. We watched the Care Bears movie every playdate, and made witches’ potions in the backyard out of mud and glitter and flowers. We threaded daisy chains together, then watched her pet rabbit crunch-crunch-crunch them up while shrieking with laughter.

Sophie’s family lived across town, at least an hour’s drive, and we hadn't made the trip in what felt like forever. We had a LOT of catching up to do, and I wasn’t about to waste any time once we arrived. I waltzed rudely through the open front door, chirping hello to the family’s huge cage of zebra finches and completely ignoring Sophie’s mom. I practically ran down the hall to Sophie’s room, pulling up short just before I ran headfirst into the closed door.

There were voices inside.

Sophie introduced me to Emma, and I quickly decided I did not like this new girl. The two of them were lying on Sophie’s top bunk, flicking through magazines and doing “Who’s Your Ideal Celebrity Husband” quizzes. There was no room for me up there, and neither of them offered to come down. They were wearing lipstick and eyeshadow, bright boob tubes and denim shorts. I tried desperately to join in as they started talking about their “crushes” and which boys were “hot”. I have a friend called James, I offered. Sure, I guess he’s “cute”. We played pranks on each other, and liked the same movies. Emma asked if I had ever “gone down on him”. I can’t remember what I said, but I remember her contemptuous look as she realised I had no idea what she was talking about. I remember she whispered something about salty pancake batter to Sophie, and they both collapsed into giggles. I twisted my favourite shirt in my hands, the one with the glittery cats on it, and stared at the floor. I had no idea what was happening, but I knew I felt awful inside. I didn’t say anything, and they ignored me completely after that. When I left the room to ask Sophie’s mom if she could put Care Bears on for me, I don’t think they even noticed. Sophie’s little brother Adam curled up silently next to me on the couch and offered me a slab of shortbread, and we watched together while my eyes leaked. I wasn’t really sure what I was crying about, but I knew it was really big and it hurt a lot.

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Forever young

I’m fond of saying that my ADHD diagnosis made my life make sense, and it’s not untrue. However, there’s one particular ADHD insight that really pulled everything together, like one of those optical illusions you can see when you let your eyes go slack at the corners. Once you can finally see it, it’s so obvious. You can’t unsee it, and you can’t believe you missed it before.

Here’s what I discovered: as a general rule, a child with ADHD is 30% “younger” than other kids their age¹.

Sophie was (chronologically at least) a little over a year older than me in this little sob story. She was 13, I was about to turn 12. Unfortunately, when you consider my developmentally delayed ADHD-brain, I was actually almost-8. The same age as Adam. This mattered less when Sophie and I were younger (a six-year-old will happily play with a four-year-old, or an eight-year-old with an almost-six-year-old). But as we approached adolescence, the gap between myself and my peers became too wide to leap. As time went on, I could barely communicate across the chasm.

The age difference levels off somewhat as we grow into adulthood, fortunately. But it’s my belief (and the hypothesis of much smarter people than me) that due to deficits in executive functioning, ADHDers retain childlike qualities right into adulthood. ²

Executive functioning, roughly speaking, is the part of the brain that deals with adult concerns. Planning. Focus. Emotional regulation. Delaying gratification. Time management. As Gabor Mate points out, “Self-regulation implies that someone can direct attention where she chooses, can control impulses, and can be consciously mindful and in charge of what her body is doing … we are born with no capacity whatsoever to self-regulate emotion or action.” It’s absolutely debilitating to have deficits in executive functioning, the brain capabilities that separate us from toddlers. Dogs are smarter than toddlers on average, the more intelligent breeds at least. Certainly they’re easier to train.

It’s not all bad news

As I’ve written about previously, I happen to believe that there’s a link between ADHD and creativity. There are seasoned academics arguing both for and against this idea, but I think that creativity roughly translates to “impulsivity gone right” and ADHDers are nothing if not impulsive.

Creativity: "Impulsivity Gone Right"

We don’t censor our thoughts, feelings, or ideas as readily as other people, and that’s a handy skill to have when looking to create something unique and striking. If ADHD means having a “young” mind, surely it follows that such a mind tends towards the imaginative? Adults spend their entire lives trying to recapture something of the vivid colour of childhood fantasy, days lost in dreaming and playing.

In theory, we can tap into this.

However.

In reality, a toddler-brain is phenomenally chaotic and unpredictable. If allowed to run rampant and unrestrained, then run it will. Into the street. Into a door. Into four hours of trashy screen time followed by a bag of chips, exhausted crying, and a nap.

It is not a kindness to let a toddler, or an adult toddler-brain, run towards just anything. It is not a self-managing entity, it has little sense of safety or consequences. It doesn’t recognise what it needs until it’s far too late to stop the impending meltdown. A toddler-brain requires lots of love, and a firm hand. It needs a tonne of patience, and plenty of boundaries. To survive long enough to grow, it must have the sane care and stewardship of a thoughtful adult.

So, if you’ve got an ADHD inner child, here’s a rough guide to what it needs in order to play, explore, create, learn, and live well.

1. Your child needs their basic needs met. This is not negotiable.

I won’t spend much time here, because you’ve probably had enough nagging on proper eating and sleeping to power a small city (if small cities could run on sound and fury). If you want to do anything, you need to nourish yourself. You’re a slightly more complex Toyota made of meat and tendons, and if you don’t put fuel in the tank you’re going nowhere fast.

You know this already. But you don’t do it, do you? At least, not consistently enough. I know I don’t. Sometimes, when I was younger and stupider, I did the exact opposite (partly out of defiance, partly out of helplessness, and partly out of trying to sew an entire personality out of bad stereotypes about writers). Can one truly be a great artist, if one exists on sushi and peanut butter smoothies instead of a steady diet of menthols and existential ennui?

To not meet a toddler’s basic needs, when you are entrusted with their care, is not only cruel but stupid. It’s handicapping yourself, and I mean this rather literally. Think shooting yourself in the foot with a rocket launcher, then putting the wet end of what’s left in an anthill. If small children are not fed enough, exercised enough, or helped to sleep at adequate intervals, they will tear the house to pieces and/or be enragingly annoying to everyone in a five-mile radius. They will not play well, communicate well, or engage in creative exploration. They will not be happy. They will let you know about it.

The right food, sleep, and movement takes care of about 80% of the day going well with a small child. The same is true of toddler-brain, and if you think otherwise you are lying to yourself.

What does this look like practically?

More info here:

Creative Conditions: 3 Must-do's to Drive Your Can-do

2. Your child needs time for play

Children figure out the world, work out their problems, and come to understand themselves and their place in the way of things through play. Unfortunately, plenty of ADHD creatives (myself included) are guilty of saying (and worse, believing) things like this:

• I don’t have time to write/paint/play/dance/connect with my inner creative world today/this week/until my kids leave home/until I retire.

• It would be nice to do things that help me feel more creative and alive, but I have so much to manage already.

• I won’t be taken seriously if I indulge my playful side, I should have mature adult hobbies.

You can’t afford NOT to take the time your child parts need to play. As Julia Cameron puts it: “spoiling my artist [child] means it will let me type a business letter. Ignoring my artist [child] means a grinding depression … when we are not creating, artists are not always very normal or very nice – to ourselves or to others.”³

You can’t have a life full of creative vitality without play and curiosity, because play is the most essential ingredient in creativity. It’s like trying to bake bread without yeast, it doesn’t matter how many combinations of the other things you try, it’s not going to work. It’s also how you get past your own sense of artistic self-consciousness. Have you noticed how unselfconscious a small child is when they’re playing, how absolutely in-the-moment? Allowing ourselves to play is how we build the capacity to get into creative flow.

What does this look like practically?