Why Activating Your Child’s Brain Changes Everything About ADHD Parenting. You’ve tried the charts. The rewards. The consequences. Maybe a new therapist, a new book, a new approach someone swore worked for their kid. And some of it helped—a little, or sometimes—but nothing’s really stuck.

Here’s what’s usually missing: an understanding of what’s actually happening in your child’s brain.

In this episode of Parenting with Impact, Elaine Taylor-Klaus and Diane Dempster introduce the first of four cornerstones they teach in their Sanity School® for Parents program—a framework ImpactParents has been refining for 15 years. It’s called activating the brain, and it’s the foundation everything else is built on.

What does “activating the brain” mean for parents of neurodiverse kids?

It means understanding that kids with ADHD, anxiety, autism, or other neurodevelopmental differences have brains that need to be engaged in order to operate at their best. The way you do that looks different for every family. Medication works for some, and Elaine and Diane are clear that they’re medication-agnostic, not medication-opposed. But activating the brain could also mean sleep, nutrition, exercise, coaching, or therapy. The how matters less than understanding the why, and that’s what this episode is really about.

Why does my complex kid struggle even when they’re clearly smart?

Because the part of the brain that makes your child smart is not the same part that helps them organize, regulate, or take action. These are completely different systems, and that distinction alone is one of those ‘Aha!’ moments that changes everything. Elaine and Diane focus on three areas where this shows up most in daily parenting life:

Executive function: The brain’s system for planning, organizing, time management, and follow through. Elaine and Diane use Dr. Thomas E. Brown’s six-area model because it’s practical and easy to see in real life. Understanding which areas your child struggles with most helps you stop guessing and start meaningfully supporting them.

Emotional regulation: When your child seems to go from zero to a hundred, they probably aren’t actually starting from zero. Most complex kids are already carrying a low-grade stress load, so one small thing can tip them over. Understanding the anatomy of a trigger helps you stop reacting to the behavior and start responding to what’s underneath it. And this applies to your nervous system too, not just your child’s.

Motivation: Your child is motivated. They’re just not motivated the way you might expect, or in the environments where you most need them to be. The neurospicy brain doesn’t have a “just get it done” button, and that’s not a character flaw, it’s brain wiring. Understanding how motivation actually works for your child shifts the whole conversation.

This is part one of a four-episode series.

Elaine and Diane are walking through the four cornerstones from Sanity School® for Parents, the coaching framework at the heart of everything ImpactParents teaches. If you’ve been doing what Elaine calls “pinball parenting”—trying this, then that, then something else—these four episodes are the powerful starting point you’ve been looking for. Next up: positivity and communication.

What to expect in this episode:

• Why “activating the brain” is the foundation for everything else you’ll do as a parent of a complex or neurodiverse kid—and what it actually means day-to-day
• The real reason your brilliant child struggles to organize, plan, or follow through (it has nothing to do with how smart they are, it just requires a completely different part of the brain)
• What executive function looks like in daily life, and how Dr. Thomas E. Brown’s six-area model helps you pinpoint exactly where your child needs support
• Why your child probably isn’t really going from “zero to a hundred”—and what’s actually happening in their nervous system before the meltdown
• Why your child isn’t unmotivated — they’re differently wired, and understanding that changes everything about how you show up for them

How to Activate Your ADHD Child’s Brain:
Executive Function, Emotions & Motivation

Related Links:

• Sanity School® for Parents — ImpactParents’ signature coaching program; the four cornerstone modules are the backbone of this series
• Executive Function Skills – What Every Parent Needs to Know (podcast #6)
• Motivation Myths & the Magic of P.I.N.C.H. (podcast #126)
• Why Smart Kids Struggle in School and What Executive Function Has to Do With It (podcast #210)
• Executive Function & ADHD: What Parents Need To Know (podcast #236)
• Emotional Reactivity In Kids: Safety Matters More Than Willpower (podcast #242)

Our Discussion

Elaine
So what’s so important about understanding your kiddo’s brain? What’s it got to do with getting them to bed or out of the door in the morning or getting their homework done? You know that complex kids have a little special something going on in their brains. It’s what makes them so extraordinary, and can also make parts of life a little more challenging.
In this episode, we’re gonna talk about what the brain’s got to do with everything that leads you to be listening to this podcast in the first place, and why activating the brain is absolutely essential. Welcome back, everybody, to another conversation in the Parenting with Impact podcast. Hi, Diane.

Diane
Hey there, Elaine.

Elaine
Let’s talk activating the brain.

Diane
Well, do we wanna start by telling everybody that this is part of a series?

Elaine
Can I set the stage? So this is one of those times where I went to Diane and I’m like, “This is what I want to talk about.” I want to do four in a row. When we teach our keystone training, it’s called Sanity School, we’re teaching a model that we help use for parents to help manage all the complex things that are going on, and also for providers.
And there are six classes. The first one is, kind of teaches you the model, and then the next four classes are activating the brain, positivity and communication, shifting expectations, and using systems and structures. And so we’re going to do four podcast episodes to talk you through kind of the key points of what’s important about those four different content areas, because we’ve been doing this for 15 years, and it is absolutely essential to understand these things to be able to really effectively support our kids in a way that helps them foster independence and ownership and all that.

Diane
I was thinking about the fact that, you know, so many of us want to help our kids to change their behaviors, or we want to change the family dynamic, all of those sorts of things. And so we get these ideas, it’s like, “Oh, the, this podcast said I should try this,” or, “I read this book and it says we should try that.” And where, I think, Elaine, at least I see parents get tripped up, is that we jump from, ooh, problem to solution, problem to solution. And the thing that these four, we call them cornerstones, we call them all kinds of different things, but these four cornerstones do is that it’s like a checkbox, and it’s like this sort of, okay, I wanna make sure that if I’m looking at the problem or I’m thinking about a solution, that I’m taking all of these things into consideration, and not just going, “Ooh, let me try this,” or, “Let me try this other great idea,” that it’s giving us a filter for, for better implementing the ideas that we get.

Elaine
Yeah I love that. I love that, and I think that’s true. So what you described at the beginning, I call it pinball parenting. Right? I’m gonna try this, now I’m gonna try this, now I’m gonna try this. I was a pinball parent for a lot of years. It’s exhausting. You’re getting bounced all over the place, right? So I love that, no more problem to solution. This is about understanding the cornerstones that are absolutely essential for managing and tackling and supporting all of the complex challenges we’re facing in our, in our families. So today we’re gonna start with our keystone, which we call activating the brain.
And so can you identify how you would define that?

Diane
So activating the brain, there’s several pieces to this. There’s an understanding that the brain isn’t just one thing. There’s several components to it. It’s understanding why we need to activate it, and what does it mean to activate it, and how do you pay attention to that? There’s components around executive function. There’s components around emotion management and motivation. I mean, there’s all these kinds of big things. So I wasn’t sure. Do you want me to list the big things.

Elaine
The stages, what you started to say. It’s happening in the brain. Right? What our kids are dealing with, what our family dynamics are dealing with, sometimes what we’re dealing with, is happening in the brain. And so we have to understand the brain well enough to figure out how to support it and manage it. And then the other thing you said in there that I think is really important is it’s different parts of the brain are leading to different kinds of challenges.

Diane
Right. And keeping the brain healthy helps us to just do the things of life… and if you’re a neurospicy human, it is critical sometimes to do the things of life in a different way.

Elaine
So what I often say is that when you’ve got any of the complex issues we’re talking about, that’s brain-based, neurodevelopmental differences, we have to activate, we have to engage the brain. We’re trying to get the brain to operate at its maximum capacity, if it’s at its highest efficiency, right? We have to kinda lubricate the brain. And, and I don’t care whether you do it with medication, meditation, nutrition, exercise, or sleep. There are all kinds of things, coaching, therapy. There are all kinds of ways that people engage and, and facilitate a healthier brain processing. So we’re not talking at the moment about how. What we’re talking about is really setting the stage for why it’s important.

Diane
It’s critical, and there’s so many different ways to do it, and that’s part of what we talk about in the program, is what are the different ways, and how do you navigate that?

Elaine
People come to us all the time and they say, “I don’t wanna give my kid medication.” Fine. We are medication neutral. We activate the brain positive.

Diane
Medication agnostic is what I like to use.

Elaine
It works for some. It works about 80% of the time for people who want to try it. It doesn’t work about 20% of the time. It’s an effective mechanism to round the corners and help things better, but pills don’t teach skills. It’s not enough. It’s not sufficient. And it’s also not the only way to activate the brain, right?

Diane
If you’ve got a kid, particularly a kid with ADHD, and we talk about complex kids, so your kid may have something different than ADHD, but a lot of times I’m in these family chats and the parent chats, and they’re all like, “My kid’s on medication, but they’re still having problems.” And the comment to that is yes, because that, that is the nature of the beast, that we’re not in a situation where just doing medication is going to ever be enough. These kids are going to have more challenges than what medication addresses, and that’s really not what medication is designed to do. And you said pills don’t teach skills

Elaine
Medication is not going to all of a sudden make a kid know how to organize their backpack, right? It’s not going to have them necessarily turn in their homework. But it will help them be able to focus on strategies to organize their backpack and turn in their homework, and then you can do the work as, with parent support to figure out how do you get them to want to use the strategies to, you know, turn in their homework or-

Diane
And those are two other episodes. So we’ll take note of that. That’ll be in two episodes from now or so.

Elaine
So we’re talking about what we call activating the brain. I love that agnostic term, because we are not a believer of yes or no. A lot of people in the ADHD space in particular are very strongly in one camp or the other about medication. It’s one of the many tools in your toolbox. It’s a very powerful tool for some people. It is for me, but it’s not for everybody. And, and it has been at different times for people in their lives. So it’s one of the tools in the toolbox, and what we really want to be saying is what’s important is to build your toolbox around understanding how to maximize and, and lubricate and activate the brain.

Diane
Well, and part of that is understanding… And again, there’s another episode on this. There’s several episodes on this. It’s like what is the role that medication does play for someone with anxiety or someone with ADHD, and what are alternatives to that, and what are we really trying to do from a biochemical perspective, and how do we support the brain? And I want go back to the beginning, which is we stand for paying attention to the fact that this is all happening in the brain, and we want to have happy, healthy brains.

Elaine
Brains. Happy brain, happy life. So, when we talk about activating the brain, when we teach this module, this, this lesson on activating the brain at Sanity School, first we talk about the basics of the brain, and when I say basics of brain science, I am, I am no neurologist. So, but we have checked everything we teach with neurologists and psychiatrists to make sure that we’re giving you accurate… I was talking to somebody else recently, Diane. Our job at Impact is to translate medicalese to those of us who are everyday parents.

Diane
No, that makes sense. And when it comes to this and the brain science, I think that the important, there’s a couple of important things, but one of them is that the part of the brain that makes you smart is not the same part of the brain that helps you to manage your emotions and is not the part, same part of the brain that helps you to organize, right? So those are different parts of the brain, and I think that that aha right there, if you haven’t had that yet, that was such a powerful thing for me with super smart kids who were struggling to go, “But they’re so smart. What’s the problem here? Oh, wait. It’s a completely different part of the brain.” It makes sense that it would not be intrinsically linked together that if you’re smart, you’re organized.

Elaine
Right. So, there’s some fundamentals of the brain, of the brain that we need to understand, and, and it does not need to be complicated, I promise you. But we kinda talk about the three parts of the brain in a little bit more detail than Diane just said, but not too much more. But enough more for you to really get it, right?

Diane and I are talking about one of our favorite cornerstones for managing complex kids that we call activating the brain, and that’s about understanding what’s going on in the brain and understanding how to kind of optimize our capacity in our brain. So we’ve talked about the three parts of the brain and that is one of the things we teach. This is one of the cornerstone modules we teach in Sanity School. So we, we start off, we talk about the three different aspects of the brain that are relevant for our kids.

Diane
The second thing we talked about is the happy, healthy brain and why it’s important to have a happy, healthy brain. Areas of, that we, I think of when it comes to where the brain gets involved are that crazy thing called executive function, which you may or may not have heard that word before, emotional regulation and motivation. Those are really the three things. If you’ve got a kid with anxiety or ADHD or autism, they have challenges of executive function, that part of the brain that helps them to do everything, feel everything, think everything, right? It impacts everything. It impacts self-management generally. And so understanding what is executive function, what do I do if I’ve got a kid with executive function challenges, and why is it important? There’s a book we wrote called What Is Executive Function and Why Do I Care?

Elaine
Why should you care, right? So, here’s what I want people to understand. Executive function, there’s a lot of executive functions. That’s the part of the brain that helps us think, plan, act, move, take action on anything we’re thinking about. There are, in the space of complex kids, there are kind of two leading thought people around executive function. Dr. Russell Barkley has done his own work on executive function, and Dr. Thomas E. Brown did a bunch of work on executive function. When we teach it, we use Dr. Brown’s method, or his six areas, because we found them to be really accessible and really easy to use, and really easy for families to be able to see it in real life. And so we think it’s really important to understand it’s not enough to say, “Okay, this kid struggles with memory, working memory,” but what does that mean? How does it show up? How does that show up in multiplication tables? How does that show up in a writing assignment, or remembering to turn in homework? So we want to make it really practical, and we have an exercise that we use to help you identify which of these six areas of executive function your kid is struggling with. And other members of the family. We like to do it with everyone in the family. And then based on that, that helps you know how to begin to take aim and problem solve and, and deal with it. Because if your kid is struggling in two areas of executive function, you’re gonna deal with supporting that kid very differently than if they’re struggling with all six areas, which some of my kids do. And that means you’ve got to kind of pace yourself and deal with it differently when there’s that much going on.

Diane
So the second one is emotional regulation. Executive function, emotional regulation. And emotional regulation is about upregulating, downregulating, cross-regulating, co-regulating, all of-

Elaine
What does regulating mean?

Diane
I think this is the one place where, you know, we said it’s all about the brain, and the science has caught up and no that this isn’t just about the brain, it’s also about the brain and the body, and the body brain.There’s all kinds of language for this. But part of this is, you know, what happens when my kid gets overwhelmed? What happens when I get upset? What happens when there’s frustration or guilt or shame involved? It’s really part of it… One of the executive functions is being able to manage emotions. And so understanding if you’ve got a kid with executive function challenges, chances are their ability to manage their emotions might be different than what yours is or what anybody else’s is, and taking that into consideration is an important part of the process. And because those of us who are parents, this is a really frustrating and difficult environment to be in when you’re parenting a complex kid. Chances are our emotional regulation might be different than the average bear as well.

Elaine
Right. So, part of understanding the emotional regulation that we’re dealing with in our families is being able to see where we show up with that, what’s going on for us and as well as what’s going on for our kids. So, another area we spend a lot of time on in that class is really understanding what we call the anatomy of a trigger, which I, by the way, I think is a great name for that exercise. We have done a lot of work. It took us about 10 years to really create a model that makes it very easy for people to understand what’s happening and what’s happening when our kids get dysregulated. We hear a parent say to us all the time, “My kid goes from zero to 100.” Right? Like, they were fine, and then they were just off. And what we begin to learn when you see the anatomy of a trigger, what’s really happening is that very often our kids are kind of walking around at a somewhat state of dysregulation. They’re kind of on alert.

Diane
They’re stressed. When we’re stressed, technically our nervous system is dysregulated when when you’re stressed. The brain on stress, right?

Elaine
The brain on stress. So how do people tend to react when they’re on stress? Because it’s not always yelling. Sometimes it’s shutting down or avoiding. So we kind of look at how do you recognize it? How do you know when kids are getting stressed or when you’re getting stressed, and begin to identify it so that you’re not looking at that behavior as rude or disrespectful, but you’re beginning to understand what’s underneath the behavior.

Diane
Well, and I think that one of the things that’s important about understanding the anatomy of a trigger is that as parents, we often use the wrong tool at the wrong time, right? It’s this sort of, we’re trying to help somebody calm down when they’re literally not in a place, their nervous system is not able to just calm down. They need assistance. They need help. They need time. They need space, right? And so part of what I love about the model is it helps you figure out, what do I do when they’re starting to get upset? What do I do when they’re really upset? What do I do after they’re upset? What do I do to make sure that it doesn’t happen again? Or, or that I decrease the probability of it happening again, ’cause you know what? It’s gonna happen again, because we all get dysregulated.

Elaine
Well, the example I was thinking about is a couple that I work with, and they have a 13-year-old kid who’s really on the ADHD-plus spectrum, who really struggles with emotional regulation. And part of what is happening with him is he holds it together, and he holds it together, and he holds it together, and then he blows. He loses it. And so he’s getting in a lot of trouble at schools, multiple schools now. But we’re actually making a lot of progress with him recognizing that he’s holding it together. Because that’s part of the process, to try to get him to identify it earlier and get help earlier so that we can prevent him from exploding. And now it’s great, but it’s, you know, it takes a little, little bit of management and time.

Diane
On the other side of it, is recovering well. You know, we say repair, right? And, I think that a lot of times, we forget that part of the process is being able to say, “You know what? I lost it. I’m sorry I lost it. I want to work on this.” It is part of the process, and not just, “I need to get my kid to stop losing it,” or to get my kid to stop being in avoidance mode or whatever the trigger looks like, however it manifests.

Elaine
And so one of the other things we teach in that module is what we call the five steps to escape the stress cycle. So how do you recognize when you’re getting stressed? Once you are, what do you do to get out of it? And, and there’s some processes that we can use and begin to teach our kids so that we can learn how to down-regulate. Because it’s not enough to say to a kid, “Calm down,” right? Nobody in the history of the earth has ever calmed down by being told to calm down. But when we start to get, help them recognize it and give them tools to do that, we can begin to shift the dynamic. And the last thing we want to talk about that we really cover in this module is motivation.

Diane
Motivation is such an interesting topic because it’s so essential for humans that have executive function challenges. And how often have you heard a parent say, “My kid’s just not motivated”? And when you really start digging into it, it really isn’t about motivation. They are motivated, and there’s something else going on, or we’re expecting them to be motivated in an environment where they’re not naturally motivated.

Elaine
Or maybe they are quite motivated to do something else. Right? They are very motivated to stay on that video game when you call them for dinner. So it’s not that they’re not motivated. It’s about helping them understand how motivation works for them and their brain and how to redirect it and use it as a tool to achieve what they want instead of getting frustrated and feeling like, well, they’re just not motivated. Our kids are working harder than average kids.
We just need to understand that better, and we look at that a lot through the brain.

Diane
This is another place that I think a lot of parents have an awareness. Motivation doesn’t work the way, the same way with everybody, and different things motivate different people in different ways. And I think the other piece of it is parents will come in, and say “I want my kid not to do it because I’m giving them a reward. I want them to do it because it’s the right thing to do.” And so understanding that intrinsic motivation is something that’s developed later in life and, and often is harder with neurospicy humans is an important aha for us to say that it’s not you know the language we use is the, the brain doesn’t, the neurospicy brain doesn’t have a just get it done button. And we need to figure out how to support the brain into taking action, and motivation in all its flavors and facets is part of what can make that happen.

Elaine
And to do it consciously and not just assume it needs to be there, but to find the motivation instead of be frustrated that you feel like it’s not there. So, that’s activating the brain. Those are the components that we think are really important to understand in order to activate the brain, and that’s really what we cover in an entire module of Sanity School and lots of other things in group coaching, what we’re gonna say.

Diane
The reminder is that this might be about your kid’s brain, and it might be about yours.
And so we want tp pay attention to both those lenses, whether it’s your executive function because you’re stressed out, whether it’s your executive function because you’re neurospicy, or your emotional regulation, or your kid’s, or your own motivation. You want to pay attention to all those different levers.

Elaine
So my friends, if you want to find out more about activating the brain and, and the kinds of things we teach in Sanity School, we’re going to have some resources in the show notes. Check that out. We’ll make that available to you. Take a minute to ask yourself, what are you taking away from this conversation? What was the insight or the aha? What did we touch on that you went, “Oh, I hadn’t thought about it that way,” or, “Oh, that’s really useful information”? What was helpful for you or insightful for you in this little experience or conversation we’ve been having? And maybe how do you want to take that and move that forward with you into your life? Is there something more you want to learn about executive function or about emotional regulation? Is there a conversation you want to have? How do you want to use it in your life? And as always, friends, thank you. Thanks for what you’re doing for yourself, for your kids. It makes an extraordinary, extraordinary difference. And if you like what you’ve heard on this podcast, we hope you will tune into the next podcast, where we’re going to talk about the next of the four cornerstones. The next one is on positivity and communication. And if you like what you’re hearing, please take a moment to like or follow or subscribe wherever you’re listening, and if you can leave us a review, that’s even better. Thanks for tuning in, and we will talk to you in positivity and communication in the next episode. Take care, y’all.