Podcast Title: Aug 4: Why Your Child's Meltdowns Happen at the Same Time Every Day
Host: Sharon Collon
You could set your clock by at 7:15 in the morning, right when the shoes need to go on. 3:15 in the afternoon, when you're just minutes away from your front door, 8:45 at night, just as bedtime lands. The meltdowns arrive at the same point in the day most days. And it feels like it comes out of absolutely bloody nowhere every single time. Now, here's what a lot of parents miss: it doesn't come out of nowhere, it actually runs to a very tight timetable.
And the timetable, the thing that feels like it's the worst part of your day is actually the most useful information you've got. I'm Sharon Collon and I'm a PCC credentialed ADHD coach and parenting expert, and I'm a mom of three beautiful boys with ADHD. So I have watched this exact pattern play out in my own hallway more times than I can count. I've worked with over 40,000 families, and let me tell you.
These predictable friction points or where your child's gonna lose it at the same time every day. Well, it's one of the most common things that I get asked about. Now, I want to tell you about a predictable friction point in my own family. My little guy has sensory processing disorder. In fact, so do I. I have a real problem with a lot of fabrics. You'll often notice that I hold my hands away from clothes because I can't stand the feeling of fabrics. Oh my gosh, the things that we have to navigate in this household.
so my little guy has sensory processing processing disorder and he has a really big problem with fabrics like me. I don't know where he gets it from. I don't know. but he doesn't like the school uniform and he doesn't like the feeling of the collar on the back of his neck. In fact, I bought a Dyson Airstrape because I run it along the back of the collar so that it sits up like Elvis for him, because he can't tolerate that feeling. Now I know that when it comes time to get dressed.
well, there's gonna be a bit of friction. He's gonna do a lot of avoidant behaviors, he's gonna try and engage his brothers in sibling conflict. he's going to do lots of other things. Now I was treating that friction point like it was a surprise every single day. I don't know what I was expecting. I was just going into it every single day, thinking that I don't know, today was gonna be different. I didn't take note of what time it was.
I was just trying to kind of maneuver him through it all the time, using bribery or whatever I could throw at it to get him to do it.
But what I actually realized is this friction point, even though it felt completely random every single day, because when you're in the thick of it, it does, had a very, very predictable rhythm. So we're going to talk about this today so I can support your family to kind of disrupt these patterns and to be able to support you and your kids in the best possible way. So here's what we're going to do today. First, I'll show you why this is predictable and not random.
And then I'll walk you through three windows where most families break. Then the question every single parent asked me about, and then what you can actually do about it. And there's a question I want to ask you halfway through this episode that changes how most parents see afternoons completely. So stay with me for that.
So let's start with why it's not random.
Here's the first thing to understand. A meltdown is not a decision. It's what happens when the demands on a nervous system outrun its capacity to cope. I'm going to say that again. The demands on a nervous system outrun its capacity to cope. And for a child with ADHD, that capacity is real, but it's limited. It gets spent fast on things that cost other kids almost nothing. So something as simple as getting dressed, switching from one task to another.
Coping with a change of plan, holding a big feeling without acting on it. All of that draws down the tank. Now, your family's day already has a shape. Even when families come in to work with me and they're talking about, no, we have no routine. Everyone's family has a routine. It's just whether that routine, actually hate the word routine. I prefer the word rhythm. It's just whether that rhythm is working for you or against you, but everyone's family has a rhythm.
everyone gets up around the same time usually. You leave at the same time, usually. you come home at the same time. You wind down at the same time. And the high demand moments, the hard bits, they sit at a fixed point in that shape of your day. So the meltdowns land at a fixed point too. That's the whole thing.
So the demand spikes at the same time each day. So the meltdowns, they cluster at the round the same time each day, too.
It looks random because the trigger keeps changing. One day it's the wrong socks. The next day it's a sibling breathing too loudly. And that's the part that trips most parents up because we go looking for the cause in the actual trigger. But the trigger isn't the cause. The trigger is just whatever happened to be standing there at the moment the tank hit empty.
So where are these points? For most families, there are three. The first is in the morning launch, roughly between 7 and 8 a.m. Everything hard about ADHD gets asked of your child before they've even woken up properly. You're asking them to sequence a whole string of really boring steps, get dressed, teeth, shoes, bag out the door. You're asking them to move at your pace, not theirs, and you're asking them to do all of it against a clock.
And we're applying a lot of time pressure.
The morning is basically one long executive function obstacle course. And there usually is a very set point in which it collapses. The second window is the after school landing. So roughly between 3 and 4 p.m. Your child has held it together at school for six hours. Six hours of sitting still, focusing, following, trying to follow rules, managing friendships, and the tank is empty. Then they walk through the door where and home is safe and you are safe.
And that's exactly where that release happens. The snack is the wrong snack. The sibling looked at them. The homework question, any of it can tip it because there's nothing left in reserve. and window three is that bedtime window, roughly between 8 and 9 p.m. By night, whatever regulation was working during the day has simply just run out. And there's tiredness on top of that.
and for a lot of children, a dip as their stimulant medication wears off and you get the bedtime encore. Now, not every family runs all three. Perhaps you have a different pattern that you're running. Most run at least one of them hard. Now, I know in my family it's definitely the mornings. The mornings are just outrageous. the point is that your child's meltdowns are landing on specific hinges in the day.
They're not scattering at random. And once you can see that, everything changes. Because now you're not dealing with chaos. You're dealing with a pattern. And a pattern can be planned for. But before we get to planning, I need to ask you a question I get asked more than any other. Is my child doing this on purpose? The answer is no. This is a capacity, not manipulation.
Here's how I know. If it was a choice, it wouldn't be so predictable. And it wouldn't cost your child so much. Children with ADHD are not choosing to fall apart at 3:15. It feels awful to fall apart. It actually feels awful to lose control. Nobody chooses that. They're heating the same wall at the same point in the day because that's where the demand sits and that's where the fuel is the lowest. I know it can look deliberate and I know why.
It looks deliberate because it so often lands on you, the safest person in the room, at the exact moment that you've got your least left to give yourself. That timing feels personal. And I want you to hear this clearly. It really isn't personal. It's a nervous system running out of road at a predictable bend.
And the moment you can see it that way, well, something shifts. You stop bracing for an ambush and you start planning for a scheduled event. That one shifts everything you do next.
Picking my boys up from school in the afternoon, I knew that car trip. Now that car trip's only five minutes long, right? But we we do not car well. Go back and listen to that car episode. My goodness. we do not car well. And I knew that that car trip would often result in tears, violence, me wanting to just abandon the car and run away. but it was a very, very predictable timing and predictable friction point.
So okay, here's the question I promised you. If you knew exactly which three moments in your day were likely to combust, what would you put in place before you got there? If you could avoid your whole stress response, what would you put in place before you got there? Sit with that for a second.
Because here is the thing. Most parents have never asked themselves that question. Not because they don't care, because they've never seen the pattern clearly enough to plan for it. It's just felt like random explosions day after day. We've been on a trigger hunt. We've been looking for the trigger, not actually planning for the predictable friction point. But now you can see it. Let's build the plan.
I'll say this up front. You will not stop every single meltdown. That is not the aim of the game here. And anyone who promises you that is trying to sell you something. What you can change is the frequency and the intensity of that meltdown or explosion. And you do that by planning for the pattern instead of reacting to it.
So here are the four moves. And don't worry, I've got these mapped out for you in the show notes. The first is to map your flashpoints. For one week, all I want you to do is note the time each meltdown lands. Don't try and fix anything, just watch. You're gathering data. What time of day? What are they doing?
And what most families find is that their afternoon and evening collapse into two or three repeating times, same time most days. That map, that little list of times is your plan. Everything else builds off that. The second move is to lower demand at the spike. Not all day, just at the spike.
We move that demand away from that time of day.
Now, this bit is important because parents here lower the demand way too much, right? And they think that they need to strip the whole day back and walk on eggshells from morning to night. You do not. That's exhausting and it doesn't hold. And worse yet, it doesn't give parents anywhere to go. when it's a little bit different if you have a child with a PDA profile.
But for straight ADHD, you just move the demand away from that friction point spike. Do you see the difference? I need you to have somewhere to go with asking your kid to develop executive function skills. You need to know how to play this out. It is very, very tricky. We move it away from that demand spike, from that usual demand spike, but we don't lower all demands. Do you see the difference?
The third move is to build a rhythm into the hard window. A predictable sequence does the thinking so your child doesn't have to. Same snack, same spot, same order every single day. Because here's what's
Because transitions cost the ADHD brain energy. It costs your child energy and it costs you energy. Every what happens now, do you ever notice that our kids are asking about what's coming next a lot? They often ask, what's for dinner? What are we doing after this? What are we, you know, they're constantly asking what happens now. Every what happens now is a withdrawal from the tank. Sameness gives you and your child energy back.
I really want to factor this in. This is why I lean so hard on systems, particularly if you have ADHD yourself. You shouldn't have to do all the mental load planning. You should be relying on your systems to do that for you. So that's why I go in hard for systems first. We want to create capacity so you've got the energy to do this stuff. So sameness gives energy back. The more automatic the window, the less it costs you. The fourth move is the big one.
move the demand off the person and onto the system. So here's what I mean. Instead of relying on everyone to have a good day at the same time, which let's be honest, if for our families, it's just never going to happen. I'm never reliable. I often say in our household, like, can't we just all be like like not losing it at any given time? Like at any given time, one of one of my kids is throwing a friction point, right? And so it's just never going to happen that we're all going to be
reliably on track at any given time. You design the window so so it runs the same way whether the day is good or not. most people plan as if it's a high capacity day when we actually need to plan our systems as if it's a low capacity day. The system carries it, not your willpower.
Not your child's best day behavior, not everyone being in a good mood at 3:30. The system does the work. And in a family navigating ADHD, that's the only version that actually holds.
So let's use those four moves to map it out with an example now. So the first one, if I go back to me picking the kids up at the school gate, for example, I knew that trip only five minutes was going to be a very intense five minutes, right? So that I clocked the timing. We mapped that out. We knew that that was a predictable friction point. Move two, we lower the demand at the spike. I knew that was a spike at the school gate.
So I stopped asking questions. I used to wait at the gate and go, how was your day? Did you hand your note in? Did you blah blah blah blah blah blah blah peppering them with questions? Right. And so I stopped. I lowered the demand. I just said hi, did a cuddle hello. I didn't ask any questions about their day. I just, we just started walking towards the car.
Next, move three, I built a rhythm in. So I knew that often they were losing it at the school gate at pickup because they haven't eaten all day. Why do they not eat their lunch? So annoying. I hate packing lunches. they don't eat they don't eat their lunch all day. That's a different podcast episode. they didn't eat their lunch all day, and they're getting to that afternoon restraint collapse at the school gate, and I'm standing there peppering them with questions. And so
Part of the rhythm that I built in is that I would have cheese and bacon bread rolls every day. I know it's annoying for me to go and get those, but I've got them and I've got a system around that too. And I hand them a cheese and bacon bread roll or whatever it is that we've agreed on right at the school gate without asking them any questions. They eat it on the walk back to the car for the drive home.
Move four, move it to a system. So I had to look at how I was going to have that afternoon snack ready every afternoon. How I was going to remember not to pepper them with questions as soon as we got in the thing, as soon as I picked them up at the gate. How I was gonna remember not to pepper them with questions as soon as I picked them up at the gate.
So I needed to make sure I had a system so I could carry out this strategy even on the days where I was fried or my autoimmune disease was kicking my ass.
Because here's what I've noticed after all of these years. The families who turn their afternoons around are really managing their child harder. They haven't found some secret discipline technique. They've simply stopped being surprised by a pattern they could actually see coming. So here's what I want you to take from this. Predictable is not bad news. Predictable is a whole opportunity.
A problem that shows up at the same time every day is a friction point you can plan for. Now, if the meltdowns in your house are escalating, if they're wiping out family life day after day, it is worth building a proper plan with someone who actually understands and knows ADHD. And I want you to be really clear about why.
Not because you've missed something. A family carrying this kind of daily load deserves a real system, not another list of tips. Your family deserves to have an easier home life with ADHD. You need a real system, and you often need someone to support you to create that system. Sometimes we're just too darn close to it to see it.
You don't need another big list of tips and you certainly don't need to do any more reading. You've researched enough.
So this mapping is exactly what I'm gonna walk my beautiful families through on a free online session that I'm hosting. It's called the ADHD Family System. Together we're gonna map your family's flashpoints. We will build the beginnings of your friction map so you can see your week coming instead of bracing against it.
It's completely free and I'm running three sessions, so you can just pick which one is the most convenient for you. We've got the first of September at 7 p.m., the fourth of September at 1 p.m. and the eight of September at 7 p.m.
So head on over to the functionalfamily.com forward slash system so you can pick a session that suits you. The link is also in the show notes too, so you don't have to remember it. Remember, predictable means mappable and mappable means you can get ahead of it. I'll see you over in the next episode.
