Signs You’ve Fallen into the Personal Assistant Parenting Style

If you’ve read my other blogs or social media posts, you know that as the parent of a tween or teen with ADHD, it can be easy to fall into one of two parenting style traps.

Dr. Margaret Sibley has described the personal assistant parenting style in her therapy, Supporting Teens’ Autonomy Daily.

The personal assistant for your teen is the parenting style that I’ll be talking more about today.

Before talking about what the personal assistant parenting style is, I want to make it clear that many parents fall into this parenting style because they simply don’t know what else to do to support their teen.

You only want the best for your teen with ADHD, but you also don’t want them to struggle at the same time.

As a result, you’ve gotten stuck in a pattern of being your teen’s personal assistant.

A personal assistant parenting style is one in which the parent of the teen often takes over a lot of the tasks for the teen or the teen becomes dependent on support from the parent in order to complete different tasks.

While all teens need support from their parents, in this type of parenting style, the teen is often too dependent on their parents in order to get work done.

As a result, many parents start to feel worried that their teens won’t be able to become independent without their support.

Some common signs that you may have fallen into this type of parenting style include:

◾ becoming overly involved in the teen’s homework and schoolwork,

◾ sitting with them throughout all of their work,

◾ frequently (multiple times a week) checking their grades online,

◾ and fear about how they will succeed without the parent’s support.

In my work with parents of teens with ADHD, many parents who fall into the personal assistant parenting style express worries about their child becoming overly dependent on them and not being able to thrive once they finish high school.

Most parents ask me how they can support their teen while not becoming their child’s personal assistant.

What I teach parents in my program, Parenting ADHD Teens Academy, is that your parenting style can become more flexible so that you can raise a teen with ADHD.

There are times when you realistically do need to offer your teen more support.

What’s most important is that you can learn how to reduce the amount of support you’re giving at different times so that you can raise a teen that is independent.

If you want to learn more about raising a teen that is independent, join the waitlist until July 9th (program starts August 20th!).