by Quinzel | 2025-05-01 09:54:16+00:00
Hey, I’m a parent of a child with severe Tourettes and ADHd. I just thought I’d share my 2c worth:

While all kids struggle with disinhibition, it sounds like your child might have a harder time with inhibiting unwanted behaviours (so struggling with disinhibition). This is actually quite common in a lot of children, and nothing to be too concern about, although if it’s disruptive to his own education and opportunities for socialising with other kids, you will need some form of extra support. Your child is not naughty or bad on purpose, rather, a better way to frame it is their nervous system might be a bit more reactive and a little bit more impulsive that some other kids. Understanding that can help inform better strategies for managing it.

My main question is, is your child showing any signs of trying to regulate himself already that you can leverage? It took me a while to realise that my son was regulating in ways I wasn’t recognising because I didn’t understand his struggle. An example was that for a while he had a tic where every time he picked up a pen he had the urge to throw it at a wall. So he stopped using pens. The school panicked and tried to say he was autistic and regressing. But once someone eventually asked him why he wouldn’t hold a pen, he just told us, it was because he didn’t want to throw them. Once they realise that, they gave him a computer to type with instead. So looking for the ways he may be already regulating himself that might not make sense to you but make sense to him will also start to help you understand what is driving the behaviours.

Another point I want to make though is that mainstream school is genuinely a very damaging place for kids who struggle with behaviour/conduct issues/disinhibition. Schools isolate these children, and they ostracise them, thereby sabotaging the child’s access to equitable education, limiting the opportunities to form healthy friendships with peers and destroying their self-esteem, basically effectively reinforcing antisocial behaviours. I think if you have the resources you should consider alternative schooling options like Montessori type schools, private schools, private tutoring, or even home schooling.

I can guarantee your child is probably an incredibly creative, wonderful person with so much potential, but he’s probably just wired slightly different. Schools don’t foster creativity, they foster uniformity, they don’t foster curiosity, they foster reciting of facts unquestioningly. Western schooling systems also teach people to mindlessly follow authority without questioning it, which also has its repercussions. Your child is probably not the real issue when they’re at school. School will be the issue. Schools/teachers often know very little about paediatric brain development and behaviour. They treat children like mini-adults. Furthermore, teachers are often incredibly overworked under-resourced and underpaid. Even when they want to do better for each individual child, they are not equipped to.

My final piece of advice is that no matter how deeply frustrating the behaviours continue to manage your child’s behaviour with firm but fair boundaries, lots of love and reassurance that they are loved, lots of reassurance that they’re intelligent and full of potential, and a great deal of patience.

He will naturally grow out of a lot this behaviour. It’s his self-esteem and self efficacy you want to protect a long the way.