[00:00:00] Dr. Amy Moore: We have to learn how to regulate our own nervous systems first because we can’t show up for our child in the best way when we’re dysregulated. We can’t access grace when we’re dysregulated.

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[00:00:19] Gretchen: Welcome to the Demme Learning Show. I am so excited to have Dr. Amy Moore here today. Both of us are pretty high energy. You may need a nap by the time you’re done with this conversation with the two of us because we met each other last summer at the CHAP conference in Pennsylvania and found so many serendipities so quickly that you’re going to have your hands full today, and I can’t wait. I’m so excited. If you all notice that book on Dr. Amy’s shelf behind her, today is lunch day for her book, and I cannot wait to read this. I have read up excerpts. It’s going to be amazing. Dr. Amy, tell us all about you.

[00:01:05] Dr. Moore: Gretchen, I’m so excited to be here. You said that your guests might need a nap, but I think we might need a nap because I know that when we met, I’m not sure how we stopped talking long enough to actually lead our workshops.

[00:01:19] Gretchen: It was funny to watch the people standing around us because it was like they were at the wildest tennis match they’d ever been to. [chuckles]

[00:01:28] Dr. Moore: You’re like, “Look at my shoes.” I said, “Look at my shoes.”

[laughter]

[00:01:34] Gretchen: It was fun.

[00:01:35] Dr. Moore: “Hey, you should be on my podcast.” “No, you should be on my podcast.” Here we are.

[00:01:42] Gretchen: Absolutely. I think the thing I’m most interested in is knowing that you have ADHD. At what age did you figure that out? Because there are so many women who are undiagnosed. I was undiagnosed until I was 55. Then it was like, “Oh, that explains why it looks like a whirling dervish when I clean my house.”

[00:02:07] Dr. Moore: I was actually diagnosed at 19. My mom was a child development specialist, and she was at a conference where Dr. Ned Hallowell was speaking. She said, as he spoke, she just kept seeing me. She kept saying, “This is my daughter, this is my daughter, this is my daughter.” This was in the late 1980s, when hyperactive boys were being diagnosed with ADHD, not inattentive girls. I had off-the-charts ADHD symptoms. It took her a little while to convince me to go get tested. Once I did, it explained my entire childhood. It explained my entire struggle. It really enabled me to soar. It’s what brought me to the field of psychology.

[00:03:06] Gretchen: I was going to say, is that diagnosis part of what brought you into the field of cognitive psychology?

[00:03:12] Dr. Moore: Yes. I was in college, and I really struggled the first couple of years of college. I graduated from high school at 16, failed out of college twice because I had undiagnosed ADHD. Because I was at University of South Carolina, main campus, 40,000 students, and overwhelmed. Just no longer had the structure that my mom had provided at the dining room table. I was a psychology major and said, “Yes, this is going to be my thing. I’m going to save every ADHD girl.”

I graduated from college and had not decided where to go to grad school yet. I got a job teaching at a day school where my mom was the director. While I was there, I fell in love working with young children. I actually took a detour, went and got a master’s in early childhood education, became a child development specialist, and did that for 10 years. Worked in the classroom, was a teacher of teachers. Was an administrator of early childhood programs for the Air Force.

Then finally said, “Okay, now that I’ve had 10 years in the trenches, now I’m going to go finish what I started, get my PhD in psychology, and really dig into what we’re missing, what are we missing still in the classroom with kids who are struggling to learn.” That came full circle. I’ve been working with neurodivergent kids and their families for more than 30 years. Being neurodivergent myself and being an ADHD mom.

[00:04:45] Gretchen: Now you have three boys. In doing the reading that I was doing that Rebecca shared with me about your book, your husband’s not neurodivergent. My husband is. We just laugh at each other. He’s like, “Oh, I see this ADHD moment in you.”

[00:05:02] Dr. Moore: Well, my husband says he’s not neurodivergent.

[00:05:06] Gretchen: [laughs] I was going to say, in this day and age, I don’t know how we all don’t have some degree of neurodivergence because there’s so much that comes at us.

[00:05:20] Dr. Moore: That’s a really controversial term anyway, because really what does neurotypical mean? My husband is a retired fighter pilot. In order to be a fighter pilot, you have to have a super fast brain. He is definitely not a typical brain at all. They did a Discovery Channel documentary about 20 years ago, and they said fighter pilots have superhuman brain power. We always say, yes, that’s your superhuman brain. That’s not typical either. That’s not neurotypical. No, he does not have a neurodevelopmental disorder like the rest of us.

[00:06:02] Gretchen: Sure. Then all three of your boys are neurodivergent.

[00:06:06] Dr. Moore: Yes. Two of them have ADHD and other diagnoses as well. One of them does not have ADHD, but had his own struggles too with Tourette syndrome and OCD and anxiety disorder. I describe in my book how our home felt like a living, breathing psychology lab. I was one of the participants in said lab, not the researcher.

[00:06:38] Gretchen: I can understand that. Of my six children, four are twice exceptional. I have to admit when they were little, I didn’t even realize that. I thought my eldest son was inattentive ADHD. Raising him was like trying to raise Mr. Magoo. He was just lost in a book. He’s a very wildly successful adult, but he does it to his own beat. I think maybe where we had conflict growing up is the German in me wanted to, “Hello, attend. You must pay attention to me because I am in charge.” It’s not really true, but [laughs] it did make a tremendous amount of difference.

Talk to me about how you decided that this information that you have learned and applied over 30 years was worthwhile of this book because this book is going to be such a game-changer for so many families.

[00:07:44] Dr. Moore: Yes. I’ve been a parent educator and a teacher educator almost my whole career. Everybody always wants my slides or they want the notes. I had given handouts all along, but I finally got to the point of saying, “Hey, I think it’s time that I put the lessons that Jeff and I learned as parents, along with okay, what does my research say as a clinical researcher? What does my clinical experience say as a Christian counselor? What does my child development specialist experience say from being in the trenches?”

How can we put that completely together and package it as some insights that parents can use on Thursday afternoon when their child is melting down at the dining room table or on Sunday morning when everyone is trying to get into the minivan and we’re like, “We all need a little bit of Jesus,” by the time we would get to Sunday school. [laughs] It was just time. At that 30-year mark, I had somebody ask a question this morning. Somebody promoted my book on Instagram. I was so excited to see that. Somebody asked a question. I thought it was really telling.

They said, “Does Dr. Amy write this book for neurotypical parents? What I have found in the past is that advice for neurotypical parents doesn’t work for neurodivergent parents.” She didn’t want to read yet another book that was written for the neurotypical brain. I was happy to answer and say, “Look, I’m an ADHD mom and a mom with ADHD. My lens has always been through my neurodivergence.” My husband has a lens that doesn’t include that. He shares insights throughout this book where he says things like, “Wow, I wish I had understood that 25 years ago,” or, “I wish that I had listened to what Amy was saying about her own struggle 25 or 30 years ago,” because it would have changed how he approached some of his parenting decisions or lessened the conflict that he and I were seeing between each other on parenting decisions because my brain is not typical.

[00:10:27] Gretchen: Well, so many of us who are neurodiverse, you can see that reflected in the questions that parents ask us. There are so many neurodivergent parents who are now trying to parent the next generation, and we want to do it at least as well as we were parented, if not better, but we know so much more. My husband was dyslexic in high school, and it wasn’t until my fifth child was diagnosed with dyslexia, and my husband was a 40-year-old adult, that we realized he had dyslexia. He was always labeled as lazy, and he wasn’t. He just was struggling, and no one recognized it as a struggle.

I think a lot of that is happening now in this day and age, and I think you’re really at the forefront of being able to help parents well out of a place of grace, not frustration.

[00:11:30] Dr. Moore: Exactly. In fact, that’s what the title of the book means. When I say, “Hearts on ADHD,” that means we have to have grace in mind and our heart turned on towards our ADHD child as we make those parenting decisions. We can’t parent from a place of frustration. We have to parent with open hearts.

[00:11:54] Gretchen: Well, I am an only child. Much of my parenting was informed by my Germanic background and a lack of flexibility because I didn’t realize I needed that. I was born a tiny adult, so I didn’t see my children as children. I saw them as tiny adults. It required, once they grew up, for me to do a lot of apologetics in a personal way to say, “I missed this. I’m sorry I missed this with you.”

[00:12:29] Dr. Moore: That’s how we build trust, is to say, “Hey, I got this wrong, and I’m sorry.” We have to do that repair work. I think that teaches a really valuable lesson about humanity to our kids. That just because we’re the adult doesn’t mean we think we’re right. We have to be open to the possibility that we got this wrong.

[00:12:51] Gretchen: Right. I love the way that you’re saying that. Talk to a mom who is at the height of her frustration now because she’s neurodiverse. She’s trying to parent neurodiverse children, and she’s tied the knot in the end of her rope. What advice would you offer to her? What do you do first?

[00:13:14] Dr. Moore: Yes. We have to learn how to regulate our own nervous systems first because we can’t show up for our child in the best way when we’re dysregulated. We can’t access grace when we’re dysregulated. We have to recognize, “Okay, I’m flooded right now. I can’t access grace. I cannot think or reason through the next decision. I have to do something to create a space between that big feeling that I’m having now and the next thing that’s going to happen. I have to create a space. How do I do that?”

We do that by practicing how to take a pause, how to do some grounding exercises, how to do some breathing exercises, how to shock our senses so that we can pull ourselves out of that fight or flight hawk brain. Then we can say, “Okay, how do I respond to my child?” Because nothing can happen in the middle of a hurricane. We can’t talk to our child in the middle of their hurricane, and we can’t access reasoning in the middle of our own hurricane. We have to be okay with taking a pause.

Often we think, “Oh, I have to act on this. I have to do something. I have to do something. I have to do something.” Sometimes doing something means doing nothing. I’m going to pause for a few seconds to regulate myself. Then and only then can I show up in the best way for my child.

[00:14:48] Gretchen: I really like that, recognizing that a pause is not a weakness. It’s actually a strength to be able to do that. Now, we had a mom who said, “What’s the best way to restore fellowship when you have lost your cool?” It happens. It happens to the best of us.

[00:15:13] Dr. Moore: The best way is the simplest way. Apologize. Do the repair work. Admit when you got it wrong. I will never forget, one of my kids, as a teenager, I actually said these words out loud, “I’m so disappointed in you.” As I was saying them, I could not believe they were coming out of my mouth. That’s one of the worst things that you can ever say to a child. That’s all about their identity. He storms up to his room, and it only took me about three minutes to say, “Wow, did I miss the mark on that.” I went right up, knocked on the door, and said, “I am so sorry. I got that so wrong.”

Then was able to, you watch your child’s countenance change. When you’re showing up vulnerably like that, when you’re showing up and saying, “Hey, I did something that I recognize hurt you.” The last thing that we want to do as parents is to hurt our child. To show up and say, “I got that so wrong, and I am so sorry.” Look, here’s the thing. We ruptured trust. We created some distance there. That might take more than that one conversation to repair that trust. Fortunately, I had a super close relationship with this child. This was the first time I had lost it like that with him. We were able to repair that relationship pretty quickly.

I had to be vulnerable. I had to admit, “I totally messed that up. I screwed that up.” We screw up all the time. We admit it. We apologize, and then we commit to doing it better. That’s the thing. Just apologizing doesn’t help. We have to do it better the next time. Again, it means taking a pause and say, “Hey, every word that comes out of my mouth is either going to strengthen the connection with my child or weaken the connection that I have with my child.” In that pause, we say, “What words can I say that will strengthen the relationship I have with my child right now?”

[00:17:39] Gretchen: That’s such a valuable piece of advice because I think somewhere there’s this unwritten rule that as a parent, you’re supposed to have all your stuff together, and you’re not supposed to be able to show in front of your children you don’t have your stuff together. It’s funny. There’s a major gap between my oldest and my youngest. There’s 19 years between my oldest child and my youngest child because I really thought I was done, and God said, “Watch this.” My last one arrived when I was 46. He was parented very differently because both my husband and I were at a very different place adult-wise.

I think I’d love to hear your thoughts for younger moms who think, “Oh, we’ve got to do this just right.” There is no just right.

[00:18:35] Dr. Moore: No, there absolutely isn’t. There’s no perfect way to parent. I’ve always said if there were a perfect way to parent, there wouldn’t be any prisons.

[00:18:43] Gretchen: [laughs] This is true.

[00:18:45] Dr. Moore: We’d be raising these perfect people. The reality is every child is different too. What works for one child might not necessarily work for the next or the next. It is this constant, flexible fluid process of saying, “Okay, what does my child need for me right now?” Not last week. Not because he’s 10 or 12 or 2. What does my child need for me right now? It’s being able to shift that mindset of saying, “I don’t like this behavior. What do I have to do to stop this behavior?” To saying instead, “What is this behavior communicating to me right now?”

[00:19:33] Gretchen: Oh, that’s such a different question to ask. Yes.

[00:19:36] Dr. Moore: Absolutely. What it does is it changes what we do next because then we’re not coming at it on, “Oh, how am I going to stop this? How am I going to punish this child? How am I going to ground this child? How am I going to yell at this child because I have to stop this behavior?” That child’s behavior that’s super challenging is not typically on purpose. It’s communicating an unmet need, and it’s our job as parents to determine what that unmet need is and then meet it. We don’t punish unmet needs. We meet unmet needs.

We have to be flexible detectives, curious detectives, and say, “All right, what is my child’s behavior telling me right now?” Then once we figure that out, it makes it a whole lot easier to address it.

[00:20:29] Gretchen: Sure. I love it that you’re coming from the perspective of, what is the message? What is the inherent message here that I should be getting instead of, how do I stop the behavior? I think a lot of us come from the perspective of, I need to stop this, and then I’ll figure it out. You’ve flipped that around, figure it out, and then you have a way to ameliorate it or redirect it.

[00:20:56] Dr. Moore: Meet the need, because ultimately, as parents, we love this child, and we see this child who is struggling. These big emotions and these challenging behaviors are telling us, “Mom, dad, I need something, and I don’t know how to communicate it to you, which is why I’m having this meltdown right now.” We need to say, “Okay, what is it communicating? Is my child tired, hungry, sick, or stressed?” Answering tired, hungry, or sick is pretty easy. It’s pretty easy.

Is my child tired? Did he get enough sleep last night? Finding the source of stress is a little bit harder, and that’s what I spend the whole second half of my book on, is what are those sources of stress that create these big emotional responses and these challenging behaviors? Is it an unmet need for connection? Is it an unmet need for autonomy or control? Is it an unmet sensory need? Because we know that probably 80% of kids with ADHD have sensory issues also, which impact sleep, which impact how they show up at the dining room table for class. Is it an unmet sensory need? Is it an unmet need for physical activity? Is it an unmet nutrition need?

We have to look at, okay, what are we putting in and on our bodies that could be influencing our child’s behavior right now? It’s sort of a holistic look at what might be causing my child’s stress, and then the brain responds to stress the same way it responds to trauma. Our kid hits fight or flight because of stress. That’s the stress cycle. We typically think, “Oh, well, fight or flight is because of violence or trauma or something really big happening,” but the presence of a neurodevelopmental diagnosis is a chronic stressor. It’s a source of adversity.

Our kids live in this chronic state of fight or flight, and so we have to lower the temperature on that. We have to help lower the temperature on that by meeting as many of those unmet needs as we can.

[00:23:13] Gretchen: I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the parent who finds themselves in that stressful situation, a conflict situation. I know a couple of parents mentioned math, and we’re really not going into math per se. Both of us agreed that we weren’t going to address that, but it’s a good example. How as a parent, when I know math is a source of stress, how do I not find myself going, “Well, we just won’t do math for the next two years?” I talk to those parents. That happens.

[00:23:50] Dr. Moore: We have to go back to that whole willingness to be vulnerable, willingness to say, “Hey, this is not in my wheelhouse, and this is causing me stress. When I’m stressed, I can’t show up in a regulated way for my child.” In our home, math was not something that I participated in. That was Jeff’s job because Jeff is strong in math. Amy’s not. It caused me an enormous amount of stress. In fact, I was a 2nd-grade teacher for a year, and I would have to study for the math lesson every single night in order to enact the 2nd-grade math lesson the next day. Talk about stress. No.

[00:24:35] Gretchen: I can’t imagine.

[00:24:37] Dr. Moore: I can get through Algebra 1 with a child, but anything beyond Algebra 1– I had one child who was in calculus 4 by the time he graduated. He got a five on his AP calculus exam. I don’t even know what calculus is.

[00:24:55] Gretchen: [laughs] See, we are twin daughters of different mothers in that context.

[00:25:01] Dr. Moore: Why would I try to teach it? That doesn’t make any sense. To a homeschool audience, you either need to share that responsibility with your spouse, or your mother-in-law, or somebody who is comfortable teaching math, or you outsource it because there are so many amazing outsourcing options for those subjects that cause us stress. There is no reason, no reason in today’s age that we should show up and try to teach something that we can’t do ourselves. Why? That’s just something that we need to agree that we’re going to take off our own plates because we have enough stress.

[00:25:46] Gretchen: Finding a resource to make that happen is equally important. Don’t take a diagnosis and say, “Well, we just didn’t do math because he has ADHD and he can’t attend.” That’s crazy as well. Although that has been said to me this year.

[00:26:02] Dr. Moore: There are enough resources out there. That’s your job, Gretchen.

[00:26:08] Gretchen: [laughs] Well, like I said to you in my email yesterday, I might work for a math company, but I still think math is spelled with four letters for a reason. Help me understand when medication is appropriate. What are your feelings about medication? I know this mom who asked this question, and she’s asking it from a heart of, “Am I doing the right thing by trying to offer medication to my student?” I’d love to hear your thoughts on that because sometimes I think it is appropriate.

[00:26:44] Dr. Moore: I just need to put a disclaimer at the beginning of this opinion. I’m a PhD, not an MD, so PhDs don’t prescribe medication because that’s not our training. We’re psychologists, not psychiatrists. I just need to give you that disclaimer.

[00:27:07] Gretchen: I think that’s important.

[00:27:09] Dr. Moore: I am not anti-medication. I’ve never been anti-medication. I take medication, so know that. I say this with all love in the world for children, but all medication have side effects. What does that mean as a parent. What I think that says is, “Have I done everything I can to optimize brain function for my child before I pull the trigger on something that will cause potential side effects? Have I looked at what my child is eating and what the research shows on how nutrition impacts ADHD symptoms?” There’s a ton of research on gluten and dairy sensitivity and inattention and brain fog in ADHD. There’s a ton of research on omega-3 fatty acids.

When kids with ADHD have low omega-3 fatty acid levels, their ADHD symptoms are stronger. When we normalize their omega-3 fatty acid levels through taking omega-3 supplements, those symptoms lessen. There’s a ton of research. I always say, if you try nothing else, start with omega-3 fatty acids. Omega-3 fatty acids actually form the myelin sheath around our neurons, so they help our neurons communicate more effectively. That, to me, is always the first thing I say, is have those omega-3 fatty acid levels checked and then supplement if they’re low. The kids with the lowest levels benefit the most from supplementation.

Have we looked at that? Have we optimized sleep? If our kids are not getting restorative sleep, their brains can’t work. Sleep is like putting our brain through a car wash. It literally activates something called the glymphatic system, which is this release of cerebrospinal fluid that cleanses our brain every single night of waste products that we build up in our brains during the day as we use up neurotransmitters. Without sleep, our brains can’t function properly. Is my child getting restorative sleep? Is my child getting enough physical activity? We have to have physical activity for the ADHD brain.

These are things that we have to work on, so restorative sleep, optimizing nutrition, getting enough physical activity, meeting all those unmet needs, and then say, “Okay, is my child still struggling?” Have I looked at whether my child has cognitive skill weaknesses? Did their neuropsych test results show low working memory, low processing speed, low visual processing? Have I tried cognitive training? Have I looked at LearningRx? Have I said, “Okay, let’s try cognitive training first to improve those cognitive skills?” Then and only then, when we’ve tried everything else, then we say, “Okay, I think they still need a boost.” Maybe now it’s time to look at medication.

I will say that most pediatricians will listen to what I just said and say, “Hey, medication and parent behavior therapy is the first-line treatment for ADHD, and that’s what you should do.” Most pediatricians are going to say that. That’s okay because that’s what the American Academy of Pediatrics, in their traditional medicine view and lens, that’s what they say. Sure, that’s okay, too, if you choose to do that first.

Think about building a sandcastle on a beach. If you take a bucket and build your sandcastle, there’s no wind, there’s no rain, and the tide is far out, that sandcastle is going to be beautiful with that bucket. If there’s wind and rain and the tide is coming in and washing away your beautiful sandcastle while you’re trying to build it, think of medication as that bucket. Let’s optimize our physical health and our brain health so that then if you do add medication, it has the best chance of working.

[00:31:42] Gretchen: Sure. I’m grinning because I remember you saying this last June in Pennsylvania, and I really wanted this to be heard because this has been my own experience. My youngest son, we went through, I made sure of all the things, and then he still wanted to try a course of medication. Once we tried the course of medication, he said, “This does not make me feel better. It makes the edges prickly.” I said, “Help me understand that.” He said, “I’m much more hypersensitive to everything that’s happening around me because of the medication.”

He chose behavioral modification to manage his ADHD because he said, “The medication doesn’t help me feel better.” You mentioned something here that I think we as parents fail to attend to fully, and that is sleep. I know your research backs this up. Can you help me in my campaign to get parents to understand how vital sleep really is in order to help our kids function well? Because so many parents are like, “Well, they’ll go to bed when they’re ready. They’ll get up when they’re ready.” When we homeschool, we can flex on that some, but that restorative sleep is so vitally important to our kids.

[00:33:10] Dr. Moore: Absolutely. Like I mentioned, we need that cleansing process that restorative sleep provides. All brains. Not just ADHD brains, but all brains. When we think about it that way, when we think, “Okay, has my child’s brain been through the car wash today?” Then if it hasn’t, because they’re struggling, and we know that kids with ADHD are notorious for having sleep issues. They go to bed later. They wake up earlier.

They have a hard time staying asleep, so why? What is happening that’s contributing to that? The same neurotransmitters that create the ADHD symptoms are responsible for helping us sleep well. We automatically know that that’s going to be a struggle. When we have dopamine and norepinephrine issues during the day, we’re going to have dopamine and norepinephrine issues at night. Just know that, that ADHD is directly related to some of those sleep issues.

Sensory processing issues are huge at bedtime. If we have a child who is running laps around the living room and throwing themselves into the couch cushions at bedtime, that’s a child who did not get enough proprioceptive input from the environment during the day, and they are looking for more. Their body is seeking that, and without that, they’re going to have a hard time regulating at bedtime. We have to look at, “Is my child exhibiting sensory-seeking behaviors like that, and how can I meet them?” That’s a child that needs a swing in their room.

Or is my child a sensory avoider? Is my child the type that can’t stand the itchy tag in their pajamas? It has to get cut out. Do their sheets have to be ultra-soft? Can they not stand the bold mint toothpaste? Is it overwhelming to them? I had two kids who I had to cut the feet out of their footed pajamas because they couldn’t stand the pressure around their feet at night, and so they couldn’t go to sleep.

We have to be detectives. Are there unmet sensory needs happening in the bedroom related to those bedtime routines? Can we make some adjustments that will help them regulate at bedtime? A lot of times, figuring out those unmet sensory needs at bedtime fixes the bedtime issue. Another thing that happens all the time, especially with ADHD kids, is we rush through the bedtime routine because we’re exhausted. “Oh my gosh, I have been with my ADHD kid all day long. I am exhausted, and I just need him to go to bed.”

When we approach bedtime with that lens, it shows up as our dysregulation, which is contagious. We have these smart cells in our brains called mirror neurons, and it makes our emotions contagious. We’re dysregulated. We’re hurrying through the bedtime routine. We’re frustrated that our kid won’t just go to bed, and now they’re dysregulated. I tell a story in this book where my husband would yell, “Boys, go to sleep,” and they would keep talking and laughing and moving around and running, and his command, “Boys, go to sleep,” would get louder and louder until he would show up in the doorway of their room screaming at them.

We didn’t know 25 years ago that we were creating this massive emotion dysregulation in our children, which made it even harder for them to fall asleep because we were yelling at them to go to sleep. We have to approach bedtime like we approach the language arts block of the day. We have to approach bedtime like dinner. It is a time for connection. It is a time for regulation.

When we can sit arm to arm with our child, that releases oxytocin, the bonding hormone, which is very calming. We have to be willing to say, “It is not time for me to rest yet. I have to get through this last block of time where I can connect with my kid in order to help my child get restorative sleep.” When we approach it that way, it’s a little bit easier than saying, “Oh my gosh, just go to bed.”

[00:37:36] Gretchen: [laughs] Absolutely. Now, you alluded to something that I want you to expand on a little bit, and that is the tools that LearningRx can bring to the table. You talked about a couple of things. You talked about low sensory processing. You talked about working memory issues. Because in the interest of full disclosure, you are affiliated with LearningRx.

I don’t want to butcher your title here. I have it written down on the paper in front of me, but I’d rather look at you than the paper. Tell us what you do for LearningRx and how your expertise really informs the things that they do with kids, because I think this is so super important. I’m the director of psychology and research.

[00:38:28] Dr. Moore: I’m the director of psychology and research at LearningRx World Headquarters. We’re a global network of cognitive training centers. We’re in 43 countries.

[00:38:39] Gretchen: I did not know that it was 43 countries until I started doing some research last Friday. Then I was really amazed at how this brand has– because I think somewhere along the line, I had the misapprehension that this distractibility is an American thing.

[00:38:59] Dr. Moore: No, it is not. Yes, we’ve been training brains since the 1980s. We’ve been doing this a very long time. I obviously have not been training brains since the 1980s, but that’s Dr. Gibson and his team.

[00:39:13] Gretchen: As an aside, I will tell you that I have a coworker who has a brother who went through LearningRx in the mid-’80s. She talks so highly about how that changed– He had virtually no processing speed whatsoever until he went through LearningRx. She talks about how even as a young teenager, it affected her to watch him struggle so hard and how it changed after he had the opportunity to do that.

[00:39:45] Dr. Moore: What we do is we work one-on-one with every client, either across a desk from them or across the Zoom screen. We can come into the dining room table anywhere in the world, or we also have learning centers all over. We use intense but fun mental exercises, all hands-on, paced with a metronome or a timer for intensity, to remediate weak cognitive skills. Cognitive skills are those skills that the brain uses all day, every day, in thinking and learning. Working memory, long-term memory, attention, processing speed, visual and auditory processing, reasoning skills.

Those are skills that have to be strong in order for us to be effective thinkers and learners. That’s our job, is to remediate that. We typically associate cognitive rehab with things like traumatic brain injury, which we absolutely work with people who have had traumatic brain injuries. A majority, about 40% of our clients, have ADHD. We work with clients who have dyslexia and are on the autism spectrum, or even older adults who are trying to stay sharp. We work with all ages.

My job is clinical research. We have published our research in medical journals and psychology journals where we’ve tested this approach using lots of different outcomes, from MRI to neuropsych testing to real-life changes. That’s what my job is. That’s why I feel so strongly about it. It absolutely changed the life of my youngest child. In ADHD, we did this really interesting study back in 2019 where we created cognitive profiles of children and adults with ADHD.

We took their gold-standard IQ tests, and we looked at the individual subtests of all those individual cognitive skills. We plotted them on a graph because we wanted to see, okay, overall, in this group of 5,000 people with ADHD, what were their strongest skills and what were their weakest? What we found was attention was not their weakest skill. In fact, attention was pretty average. Working memory, long-term memory, and processing speed were the weakest cognitive skills across the lifespan in these more than 5,000 people that we tested. What that said to us was, whoa, interventions for ADHD that are just focusing on attention are missing the boat on what’s really happening in that ADHD brain. If we’re not looking at how are we remediating working memory, long-term memory, and processing speed, these people are still going to struggle.

[00:42:42] Gretchen: You’re putting a band-aid, but you haven’t healed the wound.

[00:42:46] Dr. Moore: Yes. It was this huge aha moment for us. Of course, exciting because it validates our work, because those are the skills that we’re constantly looking at. Of course, everybody has some different strengths and different weaknesses. That’s why we do testing before we create a program because we work on what you can’t do, not what you can. There might be people who come in with ADHD and have great processing speed. It’s rare, but it happens. If you have great processing speed, then we’ll work on what you can’t do. I have terrible visual processing skills. Terrible. I have to turn the map to be able to use a map. I have to be in the same direction as the map in order to follow it. That’s common.

[00:43:36] Gretchen: That to me is fascinating. I have great visual processing skills, but my auditory processing skills are low. If you’re going to tell me something, I’m going to be rude and say, “Excuse me, while I take notes, will you tell me this?” Because I need to make my brain attend. The way I’m going to make my brain attend is because I’m going to take notes while you’re telling me that.

[00:44:03] Dr. Moore: That’s a great learning tip too. We encode information differently when we put it in our own handwriting. That actually really strengthens learning. Everybody should do that.

[00:44:15] Gretchen: I wanted to ask you this question. I can’t believe it’s 20 after. This has gone too quickly. This was a question that I thought is good for anybody at any age. That is, how can we instill resilience and welcome challenge in our children? Really, that question could be directed at how do we welcome challenge and instill resilience in ourselves?

[00:44:41] Dr. Moore: I actually love that question. Dr. Robert Brooks is a neuropsychologist, and he says that kids with learning disabilities swim in oceans of inadequacy. They swim in oceans of inadequacy. Our goal as parents is to help them find their islands of competence. What are they good at? In the middle of this ocean of feeling inadequate and this big struggle, where can we find areas to nurture competence? When we nurture competence, that builds resilience.

With our youngest child, Evan, we looked at his struggle having ADHD, having dyslexia, and all of the things that come with that struggle. He had dyspraxia and motor overflow. We said, “All right, what is this child interested in? What is he doing well, and how can we pour into that?” What we found for Evan was music, movement, and ministry were the three areas where he was passionate and was doing well. We poured into that. We got him involved. He played the flute and the piccolo in the city’s youth symphony. He’s now a music performance major in college.

[00:46:15] Gretchen: How cool is that?

[00:46:17] Dr. Moore: He got an internship in youth ministry at church. All the while, we’re giving him homeschool credit for these things. He got certified as a rock climbing route setter. We flew him across the country to get these certifications at age 17 to be a route setter for indoor rock climbing competitions because he was a rock climber. That movement not only helped his ADHD, but he was so good at it that this just added to that competence building.

As he leaned into all of these things and was experiencing success after success after success, that was building his resilience to those things that he was struggling with. When we pull back and look at that as parents, we’re not always going to be able to shrink how much room a neurodevelopmental disorder diagnosis takes up in our child’s resilience bucket. That diagnosis is that diagnosis.

What we can do is we can stretch the size of their resilience bucket so that that diagnosis takes up less room. We do that by pouring into those areas where we can help them build competence, build mastery, strengthen skills that need to be strengthened, meeting unmet needs that need to be met, so that we do then give them the best chance of success despite the struggle.

[00:47:55] Gretchen: Amy, one of the things that I think is important to recognize here is it took careful observation on your part as a parent to recognize where his strengths were. Sometimes when kids lead with their dysregulation of their ADHD, it’s difficult for us as parents to go, “All right, what are these strengths here?” To be able to pause and evaluate that is enormous.

[00:48:28] Dr. Moore: Sometimes as parents, we have this tendency to sign our kids up for everything and hope that it sticks. Then what ends up happening, especially with neurodivergent kids, is if they get into a sport or a hobby that they don’t feel good at, that they’re struggling in, they don’t feel like it’s a good fit, then that amps up their anxiety and their stress level. Then what do we do? We say, “Well, just stick it out. You’re already signed up. We already paid. You got to stick it out.” I understand that that is a lesson that many parents want to teach their kids: that when you make a commitment to something, you need to follow through.

When we’re talking about a neurodivergent child, when we’re talking about a child with a neurodevelopmental disorder, that is not helping. We have to say, “Do we want to teach them this lesson about following through right now or is my child’s emotional health more important in this moment that I’m willing to say, yes, I know I paid for that, but this isn’t working. I need to look a little harder at what will work or what could work for my child right now.” Sometimes that means we wasted money on that activity, but in the end, that happens. We have to meet their needs.

[00:50:02] Gretchen: It’s funny, as you tell that story, I’m thinking of my middle daughter who wanted to play the cello. She had requested cello lessons, and it was very apparent within a couple of weeks of lessons, she was miserable. She was miserable when she practiced, she didn’t like the instructor, the whole shebang. I had to wait as a parent until she was willing to say, “I’m not having fun here.”

That space is hard to be in as well, to be the parent who you see that, but sometimes when you want to say to them, I don’t think this is the right thing for you, they’ll double down just because they want to own it, if you will. My youngest son did that. He was recruited by five D1 schools to swim at the college level. In April of his junior year, he broke down crying, and he said, “I don’t want to do this.” I said, “I know.” He said, “What do you mean you know?”

I said, “Well, I figured it out about four months ago, but I wasn’t going to tell you because I wanted you to come to that decision.” He said, “Well, I have wasted a lot of time here that you could have saved me.” No, not really, because now you really own this decision, and it’s okay. He said, “I could have come to you eight weeks ago, except I was afraid you’d be upset.” I said, “Where would you ever get the idea that I would be upset because you’d changed your mind?” Sometimes as parents, that’s the hard work of parenting.

[00:51:51] Dr. Moore: Yes, absolutely.

[00:51:53] Gretchen: We are almost at the bottom of the hour, besides go get the book because it’s going to be awesome, what advice would you have for parents who are parenting a neurodivergent child?

[00:52:10] Dr. Moore: I talk about this in the book, I think we have to come at this parenting phenomenon with a mindset of curiosity, with this openness to all possibilities, with this commitment to saying, “Hey, I’m going to take care of my own needs so that I show up in the best way for my child. I’m going to be flexible with my child and myself. I’m going to show grace to my child and myself.” I think that’s the important part.

[00:52:44] Gretchen: I like the fact that you’re saying, and to myself.

[00:52:46] Dr. Moore: Of course, because we’re going to get it wrong. So much about parenting is trial and error. We have to have grace. We have to say, “Okay, that didn’t work.” When something doesn’t work, we don’t melt into a puddle on the living room floor crying that we failed. We say, “That didn’t work, so that’s just a piece of data.” That tells me, “Okay, I need to try something else.” When we recognize that when something doesn’t work, it’s not who we are. It’s not about our identity.

It’s a piece of data that says, “Well, I’m going to try it differently now. I’m going to go back to the drawing board.” We can include our kids in that process too, where we say, “Hey, we tried this. We said that this was going to be our bedtime routine. I’m noticing that didn’t work for us. Let’s talk about how we can try something else and see if that works a little bit differently.” That’s okay. We might have to try three, four, five things before we find something that lands. That’s just part of what it means to parent.

[00:53:56] Gretchen: Absolutely. There’s one more question that I wanted to ask because this was a personal perspective. I loved this mom’s question. It was any insight for the adult years? Now, I know your kids are now adults. All of my kids are adults. I have lots of opinions about this, but I would really like to hear what you would say. Her question was directed toward after a child graduates but still lives at home. I have three of those, so I got it. I would be really interested in how you see the role changing when you are now parenting an adult as parenting a child.

[00:54:40] Dr. Moore: I love that question. I can totally relate to that question because, like you said, Gretchen, all three of my boys are in their 20s now. I’ve said multiple times over the last couple of years that this has actually been my hardest season of parenting. I say that because I know what to do with a two-year-old. I know what to do with a six-year-old or a 12-year-old. I know what to do with a 16-year-old.

A 20-something, that was this territory where I said, “Well, how much advice do I give them? If they’re not living with me, how often do I text or call them? How much advice do I give? Do I pull back?” It’s been a lot of new types of trial and error. Even if they are at home, and actually especially if they are still at home in their 20s, we’re still tempted to stay in that parenting role that we had when they were teenagers.

I think when they’re out of the house, it’s a little bit easier to have some separation and recognize their independence a little bit more. If they’re still at home, we have to be a little bit more intentional about saying, “Okay, my role is different now. I am a coach and a mentor. I am no longer raising children. These are adults.” While I have opinions about what I think my kids should be doing at 9:00 or 10:00 AM, I don’t get to dictate that anymore.

I have to be really careful how I make suggestions. I have to be really careful about how I offer opinions. My advice is to be present and listen. Before giving an opinion, say to your child, “Hey, how would you like me to show up for you right now? Do you want my opinion, or do you want me to just listen?” That grows so much trust because it keeps that line of communication open. It honors their emerging adulthood while, at the same time, reminding them and reassuring them, “Hey, I’m still here for you if you need me.”

Whereas if we’re still dictating, “Hey, you need to get up. You need to be participating, and you need to be taking out the trash by 9:00 AM.” When we’re encroaching on their autonomy as adults, that is not going to strengthen our relationship that we have with them. That’s not going to make them open to hearing our advice. Now, that’s not to say your house, your rules. You still get to say, “Hey, if you’re going to live here, you have to contribute in some way. I need you to do this as a contributing member of this household,” whether that’s taking out the trash or emptying the dishwasher. You don’t get to dictate how and when it’s done. We still can’t step on their autonomy.

[00:57:44] Gretchen: I love that answer. Nobody’s written the book on how to parent adult kids because that’s a tough book to write. I think maybe the most important thing is to listen more than you talk. When you’ve been in the mode of directing, particularly as a homeschool parent where you’ve directed everything for a number of years, that’s quite a paradigm shift.

[00:58:14] Dr. Moore: It’s hard, and you’re going to screw it up. I’ve had to go back and say, “Hey, I’m sorry I stepped on your toes.” I’ve had to say that. Two of my kids are engaged. I’ve had to say to a fiancé, “Hey, I’m sorry. I’m so used to doing this for my son that I stepped on your toes. I’m going to step back, and you guys work this out now.” It’s hard, right? It hurts.

[00:58:43] Gretchen: It is.

[00:58:45] Dr. Moore: That’s the evolution of adulthood.

[00:58:46] Gretchen: It’s another evolution of life, though. It really is something precious. I loved my kids at every age. I think I loved parenting teenagers the most because it was so fascinating to watch them learn who they were. That was such a wonderful experience. I feel like I’ve won the lottery because I still have the privilege of having interactions with three of my kids on a daily basis. The fact that they’re here is really precious to me.

[00:59:18] Dr. Moore: It’s a gift, right?

[00:59:20] Gretchen: Yes. I want to say thank you so much for joining me today. I don’t take it lightly. I know how busy you are. You just got back from a wonderful trip. The fact that, jet-lagged, you’re still sitting here with us is pretty amazing. I want to say thank you. I cannot wait to order this book and have it get here so I can read it. Just the little bit that I have read has me wanting more.

I know for families, we’ll make sure we include a link to the book in the show notes. I just want to say thank you. I want to say thank you to those of you who joined us today for allowing us into your living rooms. I want to say a special thank you to Dr. Amy for taking the time to be here today. I think you can-

[01:00:05] Dr. Moore: Oh, it’s my honor, Gretchen.

[01:00:06] Gretchen: -see why I fell in love with her last June and why I’ve been waiting for this conversation.

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