EP 166: Beyond the Label empowerning parents of ADHD Girls

Today is a special one. It is publication day for my debut book, Beyond the Label: Empowering Parents of ADHD Girls, and I wanted to mark it by recording something just for you.

In this episode I share the things I wish someone had told me the day we got Alexandra's diagnosis. Why ADHD is so consistently missed in girls, and what it actually looks like in the home rather than the classroom. The one symptom that causes more chaos in families than almost anything else, and that does not even appear on the diagnostic checklist. The piece of neuroscience that changed the way I parent completely. And the four things that have made the biggest, most tangible difference for our family.

This is not a clinical overview. It is what I know now, after years of living it, researching it, and supporting hundreds of families through it.

Beyond the Label is available everywhere books are sold from today. The link is below. And if you are looking for a community of parents who truly get it, details of the ADHD Warrior Mums membership are in the links too.

You are not alone in this. You never were.

📚 New Book — Out May 7  👉 Order your copy
Beyond the Label: Empowering Parents of ADHD Girls
A powerful blend of science and lived experience to help you truly understand and support your daughter.

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🌱 Join our SEND Parenting Private WhatsApp Community — a free, safe, welcoming space to share, learn, and feel supported by parents who truly understand the realities of neurodiverse family life.

⚡ Ready to go deeper?
Become part of the ADHD Warrior Mum’s Membership — a paid membership space with group coaching with Dr Olivia, access to masterclasses with neurodiverse experts, monthly self-care and real connection. You don't have to navigate this journey alone.

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Transcript

A Mum’s Hallway Breakdown

Dr Olivia 0:09

Welcome to the Send Parenting Podcast. I'm your neurodiverse host, Dr. Olivia Kessel, and more importantly, I'm mother to my wonderfully neurodivergent daughter, Alexandra, who really inspired this podcast. As a veteran in navigating the world of neurodiversity in a UK education system, I've uncovered a wealth of misinformation, alongside many answers and solutions that were never taught to me in medical school or in any of the parenting handbooks. Each week on this podcast, I will be bringing the experts to your ears to empower you on your parenting crusade. There was a moment, Alexandra's about 11, where I was standing in the hallway of our house in tears, shaking, not quite believing. I had just tried to get her to turn off the television and come to the table for dinner. That was all. Scream to dinner, a normal evening. And what happened instead was a full explosion. She screamed, she hit me, she dissolved, and then she stormed off into her room. And I just stood there shaking in the hallway on my own, completely undone. I'm a doctor, I've trained at the Royal College of Surgeons in Dublin, Ireland. I've done my residency at Johannesburg General Hospital where the philosophy was see one, do one, train one. I can handle a lot. And I couldn't handle this. I didn't understand what had just happened and what continued to happen on a regular basis in our household. Today, Beyond the Label, Empowering Parents of ADHD Girls is published. And I want to spend the next 20 minutes telling you everything I wish I had known standing in that hallway crying and shaking. Because you might be standing in your hallway on your own right now. I'm Dr. Olivia, and welcome back to the Send Parenting Podcast. When most people talk of ADHD, they picture with a hyperactive boy disrupted in class, can't sit still, the teacher's nightmare. That picture is outdated and it's costing girls years of their lives. Because girls with ADHD can look completely different. They're very good maskers, they're people pleasers, they over-prepare, they copy their peers, they become perfectionists. On the surface, they look like they're managing. Teachers love them. Nobody flags them. And underneath, they're drowning. Alexandra was exactly that girl. Her teachers adored her. She was trying so hard, but she was falling apart at home in ways none of us understood. And here's the thing that nobody tells you. The symptom I see most in the families I work with, the one that causes the most chaos and the most shame, is not even on the diagnostic checklist. It is emotional dysregulation and the flash anger that can come with that. Explosions that seem to come from nowhere and accelerate from zero to a hundred in milliseconds. But the truth of the matter is, between 25 to 45% of children with ADHD experience significant emotional dysregulation. Some longitudinal studies put that number as high as 75%. And yet it doesn't appear anywhere in the diagnostic criteria. In fact, it was removed in 1968, probably because they can't measure it. So families are living with one of the most disrupted features of ADHD with no name for it, no framework, and absolutely no idea that it's connected to ADHD at all. I was a doctor and I still missed it in my own daughter for years because I was looking for the wrong picture. We struggled with that, we struggled with sleep. She wasn't a hyperactive boy. So what is actually happening? Why does a child explode over the television being turned off? Why does homework cause an unbelievable meltdown? Why does a simple morning routine feel like a war zone that you're walking and you're a grenade can explode on you at every any minute of the day? The answer to that changed everything for me. Once I got the diagnosis for my daughter that she had ADHD and I dug into the science and the research, I begun to understand what was going on. I was able to make sense of it. The ADHD brain runs roughly about 30% behind chronologically in terms of executive function development. So it is a neurodevelopmental condition. The way I like to look at it is it's like a cake that just needs a little bit longer baking, 30% longer. It'll get there in the end, but it just takes a little bit longer. And during that journey, it's going to need extra support and also a change in expectations. So what is executive functioning? I know it gets bandied around a lot, but really, you know, it's the area of your brain behind your forehead. All right. And it manages impulse control, it manages working memory, it manages emotional regulation. And it is significantly devayed compared to the rest of the child. So what this means in practice is that, you know, homework that looks manageable to you and the teacher feels is right for their age genuinely can be too hard for your child right now. That transition, any transition actually, but the one that we use today was the screen to dinner. There are many others. That can be really overwhelming to them. They're doing a high, high-focus, enjoyable activity, and you're trying to pull them away from that. And that frustration builds much faster than they can handle because the very tools that they would need to regulate their emotions are also running 30% behind. It's not defiance. It's a brain that doesn't yet have the tools or the development to manage the moment. When I stopped and understood that, it was like a light bulb moment. I stopped trying to reason with Alexandra mid-explosion. I don't even know why I thought that was a good idea, but I did. Because you cannot reason with a brain that is flooded when it is in fight or flight. She's in her brainstem, she's not in her thinking brain. So what I was doing by reasoning with her, or maybe even getting angry and getting emotionally dysregulated myself, was escalating the situation. And I stopped taking it personally. She wasn't doing this to me. I didn't need to activate my fight or flight. And instead, I started to actually understand what was going on and be able to help her, to calm down and to regulate and to have her use my regulation to regulate herself. The behavior was always communication. The problem was I didn't speak the language and nobody had given me a dictionary. So getting her a diagnosis, um, when I finally decided to get an assessment, I actually, you know, to the point where I spoke to the clinician, had convinced myself, you know, that she probably didn't have ADHD. I was really scared that, though, at the same time that if she didn't have ADHD, what the hell was going on? And how was I gonna fix it? So when I started uh the video call with the clinical psychiatrist, I kind of jumped the gun and I said, you know, oh, I don't think she has ADHD, but I still, we still really need help. So even if she doesn't have ADHD, I need we need help. That was my opening line. Um, a doctor, you know, and the clinical psychiatrist just said, Hold hold on a minute, Olivia. And she said, Alexandra does have ADHD. She has a mixed presentation of ADHD. And what I felt at that moment was like two completely opposite things arriving at exactly the same time. I felt relief, it had a name, but also dread. I felt the relief because now I knew what we were facing, because everything that had felt so chaotic and confusing suddenly maybe had an explanation. But I also felt dread because I was like, now what? And where do I start? And I don't really understand ADHD even as a doctor. I have a metaphor I use for this in the book, and it's it's a cashmere sweater. It's actually one of my podcast guests who came on and used this analogy, Anya, the garden fairy. And she said, you know, when you have a cashmere sweater, you have a label that says, you know, don't wash in warm water, wash on delicate, and you know, lay out to dry. Now, if it didn't have that label and you didn't read it, you would just stick it in with a normal wash. And what would happen? Well, that lovely fluffy sweater that was so soft and nice would come out shrunk and not soft anymore. There's no need to look at the label, but to understand the label and to know what it says is super important to keep that sweater fluffy, soft, and the right size. And I think that's true of our kids as well, you know? Um, and that's kind of how it's a great way or a great analogy for what the diagnosis was for me and Alexandra. Not a life sentence, but a cure label, a starting point. We had a map and it it had places on it that we could look at. So my first kind of priority was telling Alexandra in a way that felt positive and not limiting. So I got her a book called All Dogs Have ADHD. We're a big dog family here. We have two dogs. And we sat and read it together. And at some point she looked up at me and she said, Mommy, that's just like me. And, you know, she had real clarity about it at that moment, too. And I think it really helped her as well to understand, you know, this is just normal. This is who you are. And actually, you know, it's nothing to feel bad about. But you know what? Um, you know, you get that diagnosis and it's like, okay, I have it. But then there's no like what next? You know, they send you a whole bunch of like PDFs, is what they basically sent me. And, you know, said, oh, read this. And, you know, it didn't really get into the questions I had, you know? There was no manual. The, you know, the clinic had shared that information, but I had more questions than they were giving me answers to. So, you know, I did what I knew how to do. I used my medical background and I started digging. I read everything I could find. I bought experts on the podcast, I built a picture of what actually helps. I really went into a deep dive into the science. You know, I wanted validated research, clinical trials. I wanted to understand what was going on. I wanted to understand why I hadn't recognized it as ADHD. I wanted to understand how my daughter's brain worked. I wanted to talk to as many people as I could to get as much information as I could. There's a saying I've had, which is if you throw enough shit on the wall, some of it sticks. And so I was going to learn everything I could, and that's what I did. And I then put it into practice with my daughter. And I can honestly say, now looking, she's turning 15 this summer, and she was turning 12 when she got her diagnosis. So it's been three years, and we have gone from such a chaotic environment to one of pretty calm. You know, you're never gonna have a completely calm ADHD child, but we know how to deal with it now. And she has just blossomed, is the only way to describe it. But you know what? Our relationship has blossomed too. So we are much closer, we are much more connected, and we have both really blossomed independently too. I have a life outside of my daughter now, she has a life outside of me. And we come together and we really have a lovely relationship. And that's not something I thought was possible at all when I was sitting, shaking, and crying in that hallway. So that's really why I had wrote this book actually. And at the end of the book, I talk about the four wheels of success. And I like to use the analogy of a car and a car driving straight because you need all four wheels to run smoothly. And you take one away, you're gonna swerve off the road and not go anywhere. So you need all of them. The first one is medication. And I know this is one that parents are super nervous about. And I've done quite a few podcasts that you can look up about this with experts and with myself. And I think it's really worth educating yourself. It's one of the safest, most studied medications for children. Um, I don't know if everyone knows this, but CalPOL hasn't actually been studied in children. It's only been extrapolated from adult studies. But with ADHD medication, it has been studied in children and it is safe and it is really efficacious. And what that medication does, as you know, I talked about that 30% delay in the prefrontal cortex. It in many children can negate or lessen that gap. Okay. And that's in 80 to 90% of kids. Okay. And that's huge. So when the medication is active, things that they found extremely difficult is no longer difficult. And I'll use the example of getting ready in the morning. Like we had to make sure that she had the medication in the morning to get ready and get ready for school, because there's a lot of instructions and tasks that you need to do for that. And so we would take the medication, and then I'd also use post-it notes to support her so she knew each thing to do. But as time went on, it became no longer, she didn't need her prefrontal cortex. It became a behavior. So actually, now she can take her medication after she gets ready in the morning because she knows how to do it. So it can provide that scaffolding to give them the ability to do things that they found really difficult before. Now, I know that when we look at other medications in children, like if we look at insulin for diabetic, uh type one diabetic, we wouldn't question it. If we looked at an inhaler for a kid with asthma, we wouldn't question it. But we do really question ADHD medication. And I think it's something that you really need to dig into the research, and I do a lot of this in the book for you, because it really can be transformational. The second wheel is sleep and exercise. And I didn't touch on sleep very much in this podcast, but it was also a huge debilitating factor in our lives. It would take two hours for her to go to sleep, and then she'd wake up two or three times a night. So we were sleep-deprived, very sleep-deprived. And that makes the ADHD symptoms worse. And it also made my ability to regulate worse as well, because I don't do well on little sleep. And we tried everything sleep psychiatrists, sleep training, everything. Nothing worked. And when the doctor suggested melatonin, and she was prescribed melatonin, it was unbelievable the difference. And that's because with ADHD, it can be biology biologically delayed the melatonin in the body. Okay. And by supplementing that with a fast-acting and a short and a long-acting melatonin, she now goes to sleep within 10 minutes and stays asleep all night, which is absolutely amazing. Exercise is also part of sleep because if you've had an active day, you're more likely to want to sleep. But I find exercise important for ADHD in a different way. It really helps release those endorphins and it takes that pressure cooker down. I use it myself. If I don't exercise, I can't be the parent I need to be for my daughter. And in fact, she will say to me, She'll be my, I had an injury once and I couldn't run. And she's like, Mommy, I really think you should run because it takes my pressure cooker down. So finding things that kids find fun to do that are exercise oriented helps decrease and helps improve emotional dysregulation. The third wheel is nutrition. And, you know, I love Lucinda Miller. She's got some great books out there on neurodiversity and nutrition. But fundamentally, you know, what we put into our body is what the medications are going to use to help as the building blocks for that dopamine. So you need to make sure we have the right ingredients in our child to maximize the benefits of the medication. And unfortunately, the ADHD brain gravitates rather towards sugar, processed foods, things that give a real good kick, good dopamine kick, you know, but unfortunately also create crashes and mood instability. So you really want to pack them full of protein, healthy fats, and the right vitamins and minerals. And I talk about this in the book, that might mean a very different breakfast. It might not mean your eggs and bacon. It might, because that's great. But you know, in our house, she might have mashed potatoes and prawns for breakfast. You've got to find what they want to eat and work with that so that they have the right building blocks to take them into school for them to use in their brains. And the fourth wheel, and this is super important, it's creating the right support and adjustments for your child, both at home and at school. And if you can align with the school, that is even better. Because if you can scaffold their brain while it's still developing, you know, they're a slow cooker. They're not a fast cooker, they're not an air fryer, they're a slow cooker. So if you can support their brain while it's developing, whether that's with lists, post-it notes, breaking tasks down, making homework manageable, there are so many simple things that you can do that just make life so much easier. And I talk about all of those in the book. Um, and they are tried and tested, um, not just with me, but with other parents as well. They're simple. And you know it's nice. Now Alexandra is at an age where she's using those tools in different environments. So, for example, she's in a play and she's got lots of lines, and working memory is difficult. So I'm like, well, why don't we do the post-it note thing? She's like, Yeah, that's a great idea. So she's broken down even sentences that she has to memorize into post-it notes and stuck them along, and then her brain can just remember those little chunks, and then boom, she's got it. So they're learning tools that they can use in life as well. So I want to say one more thing before I close. The thing I hear most from parents, and I heard it myself for years before I understood what was happening, is that they feel like they are alone. The only one whose child maybe has hit them, bit them, when they're really too old to be doing that, the only one that dreads the school run, the only one that loves their child more than anything, and is also completely broken by them. The shame is enormous and it's completely unnecessary because millions of families are living exactly the same reality behind closed doors. You are not failing, you are really parenting something that is genuinely hard, especially when you don't have the support and knowledge that you need. Today, that changes because today my book is available everywhere. Beyond the label Empowering Parents of ADHD Girls is everything I wish had been handed to me on the day we got the diagnosis. The manual no one gave to me, it covers the science of the ADHD brain, how to navigate the diagnosis, how to work with schools, goes into those four wheels in much greater depth, and it can help you create that framework and that map for success. And it's not just for girls. There are lots of boys that present like girls as well. So I would say it works with girls and boys. It even works with the hyperactive boys, the strategies and tools in this book. So, you know, I know I'm biased, but please, you know, go to the link in the show notes, go to Amazon, pick up your copy today. And for those of you who want more than a book or have questions after reading the book, I also have a community membership. It's called ADHD Warrior Moms. And we've been running since November, and I haven't lost a single member since we started. We meet every week for group coaching with me. And, you know, what happens in that room is just magical. It's beautiful, actually. We've got some beautiful, beautiful, beautiful souls because people get each other. They recognize each other. There's relief. There's also tools that have worked that they can share with other people. It's something I'm really proud of. And it's a community I wish I had had from day one. And there's details on how you can join that in the show notes alongside the book. So, if you picked up on this podcast today and it's resonated with you, I know you're not giving up on your child. I know that you're still striving for answers and being the best parent you can be. And that matters more than you know. Sending everyone big hugs on this incredibly exciting day for me as a dyslexic, and I look forward to you joining us again next week.