Advice for Supporting Autistic Children with ADHD – Presented by Purple Ella

At least 30% of autistic people would meet the diagnostic criteria for ADHD. So that means that it's a really common comorbidity. And the challenge with having both autism and ADHD is that sometimes the things that you need to maintain wellness as an autistic person are not the same things that you need as someone with ADHD and that can really clash. For example, your autistic child might really need a routine in order to feel safety and structure in what feels like a chaotic world, but conversely might find that because of their ADHD, the routine very quickly becomes boring and they find that they want to do spontaneous or impulsive things to mix that up. And also you might find that autistic children who really need a lot of time alone and a lot of quiet time in order to regulate end up overstimulating themselves by talking a lot or being really, really social and not recognizing when they need to stop. So I would recommend little tweaks to the adaptations that we make for autistic children to accommodate that ADHD. So for example, rather than having a specific routine that's followed every day, it might be more useful to have different routines that can be used interchangeably so that there are familiar routines that get changed regularly to keep that excitement going or little tweaks within that routine. So even though they might do a certain thing at a certain time of the day, like they might watch TV at a specific time, you might change what show they're watching or what location they're watching in order to give that a little bit of novelty. What I've found with my child who has autism and ADHD is that I need to keep in mind at all times that she needs to increase her dopamine levels and we increase our dopamine levels by feeling like we've tried something new or we've achieved something. So I try to make sure that either we're doing new activities or that she feels that she's got a reward at the end of what I'm expecting her to do so that she has that dopamine seeking behavior fulfilled and that keeps her regulated and more able to stay within the accommodations that we've put in there for her autism. So one of the challenges for children who have both autism and ADHD is emotional regulation and it's not often talked about because emotional regulation is one of the executive functioning skills but the other executive functioning skills associated with ADHD like regulating attention and remembering things are more commonly thought about. One of the things that can happen if you have both ADHD and autism is that you can become emotionally dysregulated because of the ADHD which can lead to you becoming overloaded and experiencing autistic challenges like meltdowns and shutdowns. So it's really, really important for children who have both conditions to learn, to recognize, manage and regulate their emotions and how I would recommend you teach your child to do this is first of all to teach them the skills they need to recognize their emotions. So that's things like firstly charting their emotions so that they start to put names to how they're feeling on a daily basis. This can also be things like teaching them about the different emotions, talking about them. It can also look like thinking up plans for strategies that they can use in different emotional states. You can make lists of things that they could try when they're sad, things that they could try if they're feeling like they're getting a little bit overly excited and they can try out different things and see what works. When you teach your child to learn to manage their emotions then you're giving them a really great skill and empowering them and that can really help to increase their self-esteem.