ADHD son getting up for work

[DesperatelySeekingHelp]

DS is 21. He was out of work for a year but now has a job that he loved for 3 months but the novelty is wearing off as is typical of ADHD.
He is going out most nights and it is proving really difficult to get him up for work without a row and he is starting to get in late.
I know people will say he’s 21 and he needs to take responsibility but I honestly can’t find it in me to let him lose his job for being late so I call him every morning.
He spends all his wages within first two weeks and then doesn’t have money to get to work so we have to sub him.

I can’t kick him out, he would lose his job within a month. I can’t tell him not to go out as he is 21.

all of his traits are typical of ADHD. He is medicated so once at work he can focus.

am at my wits end. Don’t know what to do.

Cut him loose and let him deal with the consequences. I know plenty of such men who still malinger because their mummies coddled them.

take some of his money so you can give it to him in the middle of the month.
find some budgeting support for him or sit down with him so he can work out how much he can spend each week.

continue to wake him in the morning.

I completely agree. There are several Audhd’ers in my family. A diagnosis doesn’t allow you to dial back from life and lean into opting out. You can and should
learn coping techniques and ways to live in the world,
pay bills and take responsibility.

When he is medicated would you be able to talk to him about the possibility of going back to the drs to discuss any tweak in medication that may help him cope a bit better? Ds takes two different medications one of which provides more of a level dose rather than being like his stimulant drug which only works for a limited time (he takes his stimulant twice a day too)

It is obvious everything is going into coping at work at the moment and that the result of not coping the rest of times risks putting that job at risk. I get why others are suggesting letting him fail but losing his job risks sending him into a dangerous spiral.

good luck op.

Regardless of his ADHD, he’s an adult and he needs to manage it. Mollycoddling him isn’t helping him.
Me, and thousands like me, have learnt to manage our ND (plus other health conditions) so that we ensure we don’t lose our jobs and that we have enough money to survive.
It’s tough but those are the cards we’ve been dealt. He’s in early adulthood and needs to start learning ways in which he can deal with his condition. Going out til all hours IS a choice. There are other ways he could manage his symptoms once the medication wears off.

The constant ‘get out of jail free card’ that people wave for ND people on this forum makes me actually very frustrated.

Does he have any hobbies or play sports?
Perhaps going to the gym each day after work could help to release some of the pent up “fidget-ness”?

I'd stop waking him and subbing him. As you see yourself medication only takes you so far with adhd , he has to learn to manage the rest himself. I've quite bad adhd myself and have never been medicated due to a late diagnosis , it is possible to learn to manage and function .

As someone with autism, stop babying him! He will never learn if you baby him & sub him.

Oh dear not a very helpful,informed response!!
@Anon4778 @ArseInTheCoOpWindow @lottiestars76 all given helpful constructive advice OP . I wish the awareness for ADHD was around 25 years ago.
it would have helped my child so much.Only now over the last 5 years has the lightbulb moment struck that this lovely,intelligent anxious individual is not lazy,disorganised,chaotic with time management, out of choice .
His brain is completely wired differently and the signs were there as a toddler,child,teenager but my ignorance ( thinking that ADHD ) was only apparent in noisy,badly behaved disruptive children is my biggest regret for not identifying that my lovely boy was struggling every day .
He now has strategies to help him manage his life and if everything goes tits up he can call me for some decompression counselling.

I think both those who say he needs to be responsible, and those who are saying he needs support are both right. I don't think this is an either/or situation.

He DOES need to take responsibility for himself, AND he needs support (if he'll accept it) to figure out what the barriers are to him currently taking responsibility, and then more support again to overcome them. BUT, this support should not take the place of doing things FOR him.

In this situation, I think appropriate support looks like helping him fund/look for an impossible to ignore alarm, helping him make a plan for his evenings, maybe even funding gym passes if he thinks exercise would help with sleep (short term in case he doesn't use it). But the crucial thing is that this support should support HIM to be the one that takes responsibility for himself, rather than 'support' which is really just enabling poor choices, ADHD or not.

I don’t think his ADHD is all that relevant here. He may well need different strategies than others for making his situation work, but fundamentally the issue here is that he isn’t the one concerned about losing his job. He isn’t the one thinking about what he needs to do to make a success of it. And that’s what needs to change.

You need a bit of a sit down with him and a talk about growing the fuck up.

ADHD medication is short-acting. Taken in the morning it wears off by evening so is absolutely no help in getting up in the morning. My daughter is 19 with ADHD and I am very worried about her getting up in time for university without me there to wake her.

It may not be the right job for him. I think it is a good idea to wake him up but I may pay for stuff for him rather than giving him too much money. If he wants to spend money independently then he does have to manage it independently.

Bear in mind all work places of any size have sleep deprived parents, insomniacs, people with ADHD, people with ASD, people suffering from serious illness and bereavement. Most concessions, like a later start time, have to be stuck to responsibly and I’m not sure your DS would be up to that.

But you also accept there are many people with that condition who can get themselves to work even at a young age? It's insulting to say that people with adhd do that as a general rule. They really don't.

My close friend wasn't the diagnosed until her thirties, and she's never been sacked for not turning up to work. Or university. There is a limit to how far you can blame the condition.

It is possible to have the condition and have been far too mollycoddled. The two aren't mutually exclusive.

Is not actually doing him any favours?He can go out all night on the lash.With his mates, and I'd wager if he didn't do that, he'd be able to get up for work. It is poor decision making as well as whatever condition he has.

I hope he never has a girlfriend because some other poor woman's going to have to make sure he gets to work. He has to learn to be an adult at some point with or without his condition. And if he doesn't get to work and loses his job, well, that's a lesson learned isn't it.

Does he get up in time or does he sleep in and end up late?

A not insignificant number of people with ADHD have a delayed sleep phase syndrome as well meaning they basically don't produce melatonin and get sleepy at the normal time. I have this issue and my DS1 age 16 does too. For me it was sorted once I got the right dose of medication and then some good habits around bedtime. For DS1, it can be frustrating because it looks like he's choosing to stay up late and then suffering the consequences of his own actions. But when I talked to him about it, he does that because he can't get to sleep and lies awake for hours.

I think what's going on for my DS is that he's obviously a teenager and that will shift the circadian rhythm later. Then the DSPS on top of that, then a load of bad habits (maybe relating to ADHD short term thinking/impulsivity/difficulty with routines and transitions) on top of that. The way I see it now in hindsight is that because he has a tenancy towards finding it hard to get to sleep and wake up early, he probably needs to spend more care and attention on this than other people his own age because he's more likely to end up having a problem. A bit like if you have genetically weak tooth enamel, you can't get away with skipping flossing or being perfunctory with tooth brushing. This seems to resonate with him sometimes and then other times he totally ignores it. Of course, medication having worn off by bedtime also doesn't help with establishing good habits either.

When I was that age I could manage on less sleep but with my meds now I find I feel better when I do get enough sleep. So I think there's an element of let him figure this out, but I also think sometimes an outside perspective can help.

Melatonin can be prescribed for DSPS which can be diagnosed using sleep studies, so it's worth him speaking to his ADHD specialist or GP if this is something he wants to explore.

I think one of the complexities is that ADHD presents in various different ways, person dependent. What works for one, does not always work for another. The fact that one person managed to hold down a job doesn’t mean that another would be able to do the same, as easily. (A SEND specialist told me her son with ADHD works best with a screen on so there is noise while he works so suggested we should do this. For mine, I know this would be a hopeless way of trying to work.) My specific experience of people/family with this condition is that as young people they seem to have been a couple of years behind in maturity. I don’t know if this is others’ experience. I wonder, OP, if there is hope that at least some of these behaviours might lessen as he ages? I think it’s said that young men don’t reach full brain maturity until a couple of years time for your son - so maybe there is some time also for this to improve, and a period where continuing to offer support where it’s accepted might bridge that.

This.

The problems kick in when they don't learn coping strategies because of too much of the wrong type of parental support. If you are disabled you learn coping strategies - it's rare to be incapable of this.

Parents need to develop the coping strategies with their children so that they don't get to 21 and can't function to this degree.

That's why there's some much work done on coping strategies, but most parents seem to put their kids on medication and this 'oh that's job done' and not even bother to look into the coping strategies stuff which you are supposed to do alongside medication.

He won't be at the same level of maturity as someone without ADHD who is 21. So, consider more if this is parenting you would do for a 17/18 year old.
Building up a stable job history is just as important as building up the ability to get to that job - it might be too much to achieve both at once.
It is immensely frustrating however to live with.

I was like this when I first graduated. I’d carry on supporting him to build better habits (bringing someone a coffee for example isn’t mollycoddling, it’s just nice) but don't sub him. But, help him to budget. I don’t agree that we should just leave kids to make mistakes because they are technically an adult. 21 isn’t a fully formed adult brain even without ADHD. And getting into credit card debt happens very quickly.

Most mornings I have two alarms, one to take my medication and drink some water and go back to sleep for 30 minutes. The second is allowed to snooze and it is where I wake up slowly over another 30 minutes by which time the medication has started to kick in. I have tried to just get out of bed when my alarm goes off many many times, it always goes badly - I'm nauseous, uncoordinated, liable to fall over, can barely see and it brings on a headache which lasts hours. It's better for me to have a slower wake up, although I have learnt that snoozing and actually going back to sleep is a terrible thing, that was training me to sleep through alarms. I only realised that once someone pointed out that snoozing repeatedly for an hour gives you terrible sleep for the last hour whereas you could just let yourself have decent uninterrupted sleep for an extra 40 minutes and use the snooze period to do something while being actually awake.

However I don't need the slow wake up as much with my current dose. It seems to retain a residual effect from the day before, not sure if it's helping me get more restful sleep, or just helping reset things but I come to and am alert after a few minutes rather than being an actual zombie/lizard for the first 20 mins and then groggy for a couple of hours after waking up.

I also do much better if I can get up after 8am, which is a perfectly reasonable time, except that schools where we are start around then or 15 minutes earlier.

It is weird how embarrassed and ashamed I feel about trying to explain this issue to people because obviously nobody likes getting up at 6:30am, so it sounds to me like I'm saying I'm the special princess who can feel a pea under 100 mattresses. When in reality getting up at 6:30 for me is more like getting up at 4:30 for most people and I experience similar effects when I do it regularly. I'm sure DS1 does too.

One solution is to actually seek out a job/lifestyle which allows for a consistently later sleep-wake cycle.

I also think a lot of people can power through when they are younger and as they get older they find it harder and harder to manage. So I'm not sure that an example of one random person with ADHD who has never been late for work is helpful. Also not everyone with ADHD has the sleep cycle issue. I don't think DS2 does, he's never had issues with sleep at all.

Would he be able to manage using an APP, like Finch or Brain in Hand? I understand how it may not be possible but maybe worth exploring.

All my DC are autistic, DS2 has just gone to university whereas DS1 coping with handling a domino's delivery when we were away was huge achievement for him. It's not because we're terrible parents that mollycoddle, but their difficulties manifest themselves differently.

It's brilliant he's got himself a job. The distraction of his friends still being students will be challenging. The medications wearing off will probably be affecting his mood and the fidgeting and looking for another dopamine hit will be adding to his need to go out out.

Does he respond better to texts/WhatsApp conversations? DS1 is a lot more open at communicating that way, as feeling put on the spot with a formal "sit down" conversation makes him respond quite defensively.

But it can range from severe to mild.

Can they change his medication or give him a top up? I'm on a high dose of slow release and am lucky that it lasts at least 8 hours. If I need more I have top up that can be taken as required.

OP I agree, help him. It's easy for NT parents to think 'he needs to learn' but that is the issue with ADHD. It's almost impossible to learn without extra support.

Sit down with him and explain that long term, his behaviour is not sustainable. He needs and will want to learn how to behave in an adult manner. So, for now, until his habits are set, he should transfer 50% of his income to you and you transfer it back to him mid month.

He could plan a couple of nights at the gym or going running during the week, so he is home earlier and not out boozing.

Have him set an alarm 15 mins too early then another 15 mins later. Maybe with a plug in daylight clock, so the room brightens.

But you can also accept that it is also possible to have adhd and be molly coddled.

Both can exist. Perhaps he does this because he knows, mummy will get him up for work and school. If he lost his job, perhaps that's the lesson he needs to learn. He won't have money for going out on the lash with his mates all night.

If you're going to get into territory where adults with a d h d can't learn cause and effects, well don't start that.

Ds19 has adhd and a job where he has to be up early, he's about 8 weeks into his job.

He's mostly reliable at getting out of bed and downstairs to breakfast now.

His problem is he gets distracted between getting breakfast and temembering to get dressed and ready to leave the house. So I still need to go upstairs and say "get ready now" most mornings.

Time blindness is the biggest problem for him.He can't keep track of time passing, never has been able to. He sits down to do something for 5 minutes and before he knows it half an hour has passed and he's late. Then he feels disappointedin himself when he realises. It's a real thing, a real difference in his brain.

I know many people think I shouldn't remind him like this but he's so excited to have this job and I can't let him lose it this early on. I'm his mum, he's my boy. He would be crushed even by a massive telling off from his boss.

You're not alone op. There are loads of us still doing this for our kids. I don't know when it will end, but it will eventually, right?

This morning he set an alarm to remind him to start getting dressed. But he didn't remember what it was for when it went off. 😞 Work in progress...