How To Cross That Motivation Bridge - Now!

As a parent of a child with ADHD, one of your biggest challenges might be the question of how to motivate your child to get things done.

It might start in the morning with an unwillingness to get dressed and brush their teeth, followed by a struggle to finish breakfast and get out the door. After school, doing homework might take forever until you find yourself on the verge of a nervous breakdown – and then there is this whole thing called a bedtime routine that mirrors your child’s morning tantrums.

Why, you might wonder while lying exhausted on the sofa at the end of the day, is it so impossible for you to motivate your child to get started on basic tasks and complete them without major drama? What can you do to help your child feel more willing to move through the day without so much frustration and angst?

Of course, we all know that motivation is something many neurotypical people struggle with as well. However, it is particularly difficult for folks with ADHD, whose brain chemistry is slightly different.

For all of us, getting motivated is facilitated by the neurotransmitter dopamine, which is often called the “happy hormone,” because it is responsible for feelings of well-being, joy and pleasure.

But dopamine does more than make us feel good. It also helps us get our butts out of the chair and tackle those items on our to-do list. When we want to get something done, we visualize the outcome and imagine the sense of accomplishment, pride and joy we will feel once things are completed. Those feelings – facilitated by dopamine – help us get through tasks, even if they are boring or repetitive.

Yet, from what scientists have been able to understand so far, ADHDers function differently due to a significant lack of dopamine in their brain that deprives them of those positive feelings. Low levels of dopamine make it much harder to feel motivated. To get going, people with ADHD need more stimulation or incentives than neurotypical people to reach the same level of good feelings necessary to function in a neurotypical world.

Intrinsic and extrinsic motivation

When we can find motivation within ourselves, we call that intrinsic motivation. Intrinsic motivation makes us self-sufficient and independent from outside incentives to reach our goals. We do something because we see an inherent value in a specific task and trust that completing that task will make our lives better.

Yet, for people with ADHD, it can be difficult to find this intrinsic motivation when their dopamine levels are low, especially when a task takes longer to complete and doesn’t hold their interest. For them, extrinsic motivation – that is, outside incentives – are often more important since those incentives raise dopamine levels and keep a person engaged longer.

Jessica McCabe, founder of the YouTube channel “How to ADHD” and one of the key figures on ADHD in the US, talks about motivation in the form of a bridge that consists of motivational planks. For neurotypical people those motivational planks are plentiful, with each plank representing a different source of motivation like willpower, self-discipline, or perseverance. Because the sources of motivation are plentiful, the gaps in-between those planks are small and easy to cross.

For people with ADHD, however, motivational planks are few and far between, making the gaps much bigger and the effort to cross the bridge more pronounced. Oftentimes, getting to the other side turns out to be an impossible endeavor. No matter how determined the original intention of the person, and instead of moving forward, the person gets stuck or falls through the cracks.

How can you as a parent add more motivational planks to your child’s bridge to help them get through their day?

McCabe emphasizes the importance of turning a lengthy, repetitive and quite boring task such as homework assignments into an urgent, novel and interesting activity. Not all three of those traits need to be present, but a significant shift – even if it’s just a shift of mindset – has to happen.

Make it urgent

To make a task more urgent, use a timer and ask your child to get a task done before the timer goes off. You could turn this even into a game where your child races against the clock and tries to beat it. You could use the timer to get started (once the timer goes off, your child has to brush their teeth) and to complete a task in the allocated time. Here are some concrete examples:

1. Doing homework: Do a chunk of your homework within a certain timeframe – maybe 10 minutes – and find out how much you can get done.

2. Cleaning up: Find out how many toys you could put away in 10 minutes – if you have other children, let them race against each other by dividing the room into multiple spaces with toys to clean up.

3. Getting dressed: Ask your child to get dressed before the timer goes off (try 5 minutes).

If the task is more complex or too difficult to complete at once, break it down into multiple parts and set a deadline for each part. If your child has a longer essay to write or a project to complete, you could help them get small tasks done every day, which will add up to a finished product over the course of multiple days. And if your child manages to complete each task on time there will be a little reward – which we will get to in our section on personal interest.

You can also ask your older child whether they want to study with a friend who could function as your child’s accountability buddy – someone who keeps your kid on task and makes sure that certain projects get done. The more other peers help your kid succeed the better.  

Make it novel and exciting

If something is new, we tend to be more willing to give it a try – and feel more excited about it. Of course, it is impossible to come up with completely new things every day – especially since most tasks are repetitive in nature like brushing teeth, getting dressed or doing homework. Yet, how can you rethink those tasks and make them slightly different? How can we do that? By using our creativity to come up with new ways of approaching our routine. Here are a few ideas – but the possibilities are endless:

1. Brushing your teeth: Change location and do it in front of the kitchen sink instead of the bathroom. How about a new toothpaste flavor or a new toothbrush with your favorite character on it? Or brush at different speeds or use a different technique once in a while.

2. Taking a bath: Buy new bath toys or take your favorite toys with you into the tub. Use bubble bath and play with the foam. Listen to music while taking a bath.

3. Doing homework: Do your homework while lying on your bed – or in a hammock (as McCabe suggests). If you are older, try out the library or a café – or take your homework to the park in the summer. Experiment with different utensils such as cool pens, colored paper, stickers or fragrant erasers. If you have a trampoline, jump on it while studying your vocabulary, listen to the audio version of a book instead of reading it, sit on an exercise ball instead of a chair, or do your homework while standing.

4. Doing household chores: Turn them into a game. (This idea works for homework, too.) Time yourself how fast you can do them, and then try to beat yourself the next time; compete with your other family members and find out who can clean up the fastest.

Link it to your child’s personal interest

We all know that kids with ADHD can focus intently on things they truly love, be it building with Legos, learning about the planets or be it playing video games. It can be almost impossible to pull them away from something they are passionate about since they get so engrossed in it (we call that hyperfocus) that they forget about time and space. How can we leverage that special interest or passion of our children when it comes to doing chores or completing tasks they are not that invested in?

The first question we need to ask ourselves is whether we can combine our child’s passion with a more boring chore such as homework. If your kid needs to practice reading, can you find a book whose story they truly enjoy? Can you pick a comic if your kid is into superheroes and motivate them that way? Can they increase their vocabulary by translating the lyrics of their favorite songs? Or can you practice simple additions in Math by helping your kid pay for small purchases with actual money?

In general, is it possible to bring your child’s outside interests into school? If your child needs to do a project for school, can they choose their own topic? You might want to find out how much leeway there is when it comes to tailoring schoolwork to your child’s hobbies and passion.

Reward Systems: Another way to make your kid more interested in starting (and hopefully completing) a task is to use reward systems. Reward systems – if you offer the right rewards – create more motivational planks to get your kid to the other side of the bridge.

If your child is a bit older you can come up with a mutual agreement – e.g., pertaining to homework – where you put down on paper exactly what your child needs to do to earn a certain reward. The reward is chosen by your child (within reason) and together, you discuss the consequences should your child not adhere to the rules laid down by the two of you. Thus, you have a mutual contract, set up and negotiated by both of you, that eliminates the need to discuss rules and terms over and over again.  

If your kid is on the younger side, you can still negotiate rewards that your kid is excited about. One thing to keep in mind is that rewards should be provided in due time since ADHD kids need immediate gratification to keep going. If your child has worked for ten to fifteen minutes, let them have a cookie, read a story together or grant unstructured playtime.

If the task at hand warrants longer periods of time – several days or weeks – you can work with a point system, also known as delayed rewards. You might still want to hand out small rewards to keep the motivation going, but in addition, you can give out points for each completed task and record them on a piece of paper. Once the task is done – or once your kid has reached a certain number of points – your kid receives a bigger reward.

Rewards do not need to be material in nature. They can be extra time with a parent to play a favorite board game or go on a bike ride. They can be extra screen time, a toy or a piece of cake. The most important thing is that the reward is appealing to your kid and thus a true incentive to complete the task at hand.

Motivating others can be difficult and might warrant a trial-and-error period to find out what works for your child. It might be frustrating at times, especially when things change and rewards that used to work like a charm don’t suddenly yield the desired outcome. Do not give up. Be creative and involve your child in the process.

If all else fails, outsource certain tasks such as homework to a tutor or another support professional. Sometimes, a third person can work wonders and can give you a chance to recover from your daily battles with your child – until the next one rolls around.