My ADHD Part 3: Seeing Beyond Myself
announcements
The Mindful Resilience Series | Session 3: Spirit
Tuesday, January 6, 2026 | 10:00 AM to 11:30 AM
Free | DCYF Grantees
Ready to boost your energy and impact? The Mindful Resilience Series for Youth Development Professionals continues with Session 3: Spirit on January 6, 2026!
This dynamic session connects you to the Why of your work, providing the ultimate defense against burnout. You will:
Find Your Purpose: Gain a clear sense of purpose directly tied to happiness and resilience.
Lead Healing Circles: Learn the hands-on skill of facilitating Healing Circles—a powerful tool for creating safe spaces in your community.
Invest in your wellness and community impact!
Family Nervous System Reset — A Calmer Start to 2025
Friday, January 9, 2026 | 12:00 PM to 12:30 PM
Free | Open to All
The holidays often lead to overstimulation and stress for both kids and adults. January is the ideal time to reset!
Join our free, 30-minute workshop designed for parents and educators to understand and manage stress and transitions—especially for children with big feelings.
You'll gain practical, science-backed tools focused on:
Understanding Stress: Learn what happens in the body (the sympathetic nervous system response).
Simple Calming Practices: Explore routines and vagus-nerve–friendly techniques for regulation.
Resilience & Ease: Start the new year with strategies to bring grounding and connection into your home or classroom.
Building Welcoming Spaces for Kids with Disabilities
Tuesday, January 13, 2026 | 10:00 AM to 11:30 AM
Free | DCYF Grantees
Elevate your impact! Join our workshop for Youth Development Professionals and Educators focused on building genuinely welcoming and accessible spaces for Kids with Disabilities (KwDs)—including youth with neurodivergence, mental health challenges, and trauma.
Go beyond compliance with practical skills focused on:
Universal Design: Making activities accessible from the start.
De-escalation: Trauma-informed techniques for challenging behaviors.
Hands-on Practice: Active learning to immediately apply new skills.
The Mindful Resilience Series | Session 4: Rest and Joy
Tuesday, January 20, 2026 | 10:00 AM to 11:30 AM
Free | DCYF Grantees
Next up in The Mindful Resilience Series is Session 4: Rest and Joy on January 20, 2026!
As a Youth Development Professional, radical rest and joy are essential tools against burnout. This session focuses on turning self-care into empowerment:
Outcome: Embrace rest as a radical practice and develop a personalized Joy Plan.
Skill: You will learn to facilitate Joy Plans not just for yourself, but with the youth and adults in your community, furthering your role as a Wellness Facilitator.
Don't miss this opportunity to prioritize your well-being and spread positivity!
the heart of the matter
“I’m flattened.”
This is what my friend Jen texted when I reached out to her yesterday. She’s a trustee of Brown University and a rabbi-in-training. She’s reeling from both the Brown and Bondi Beach Hanukkah shootings. I’m flattened too. It feels like the violence is ubiquitous and close. The murders of Rob and Michelle Singer Reiner are devastating and resonant for me. I’m also raising a kid who struggles with mental illness. Last week a social worker was stabbed to death on the job at San Francisco General Hospital. I knew him. We used to prance around gay bars together in our late 20s. I’m not prancing now. I'm struggling to find holiday joy. The world feels out of control and terrifying. I’m giving myself lots of grace, and I hope you are too.
As an antidote, I’m being intentional about creating joy for myself and others every day. This weekend, I collected about 20 new toys from my pickleball community. My youngest and I brought them to the fire station, where they take donations for Toys for Tots. He called giving all the toys away, “the opposite of shopping.” But he was rewarded! The firefighters invited us in and let my kiddo put on a helmet and sit in the different trucks.
I find so much joy in my work. Yesterday, I had a coaching session with an afterschool program teacher at Community Youth Center in San Francisco. I’ve been working with him on group management techniques and setting good boundaries. He has a third grade student who is bright and curious and sees the class as a one on one conversation with her teacher. If he doesn’t call on her, she gets upset and interrupts the class. We all have that student, don’t we? I advised him to come up with a secret signal. When she raises her hand, show a number with your fingers that says how many people you are going to call on before her. He talked to the girl about the signal. She has a father who is serving in the military away from home. She’s sad he won’t be here for Christmas. The teacher and student decided the signal would be a military salute - the magic number indicated in the number of fingers in his salute. Now she raises her hand, he salutes her, and she grins big and waits her turn.
I get to work with dedicated, committed, educators and families. I get to help them do their work a little better. There is joy and hope in that.
San Francisco’s Department of Children, Youth, and Families hires me for coaching hours for their grantees. If you are a staff of a DCYF grantee and interested in free coaching, book a session here. It’s all confidential.
Okay, here’s part 3 of my ADHD story.
I thought getting diagnosed with ADHD would help me understand myself. I didn’t expect it to change how I see my son.
For years, I thought I was being a “good parent” by pushing him. Encouraging him to try harder. Helping him build better habits. Teaching him the skills that had worked for me; the lists, reminders, routines, grit.
For me, it looked like support. For him, it often felt like pressure.
When my own diagnosis finally clicked, something else did too: I wasn’t raising a kid who lacked motivation or responsibility. I was raising a kid whose brain works differently than the world expects it to.
Suddenly, moments from his childhood rearranged themselves in my mind. The meltdowns that came out of nowhere. The shutdowns when decisions piled up. The way he could hyperfocus on something he loved and completely unravel when asked to do something simple. The overwhelm. The shame.
I had seen all of this before. I just didn’t recognize it as ADHD—because I’d never recognized it in myself.
I don’t regret the mistakes. All parents make those. I regret the misinterpretations. The times I thought he was being defiant when he was actually flooded. The times I framed something as a stubbornness or lack of grit, instead of a nervous system on the fritz. The times I asked, “Why won’t you just do it?” instead of, “What’s making this hard right now?”
Once I stopped seeing his struggles as a problem to fix, I started seeing them as information.
This is the part in simple narratives when I tell you that everything changed for the better. It didn’t. My son’s needs are complex. His ADHD is stirred up in a soup of trauma, mental health struggles, and plain ole adolescent defiance. I am always tweaking how I connect with him and support him.
But I did change things. I changed how I talk to him. I changed how I set expectations. I became more patient. We often laugh at our executive functioning breakdowns, saying, “Sh!t, I ADD’ed that.”
We are working together to stop “helping him fit into the system” and instead trying to build a system that fits him. Of course, we also have to teach skills to function in the world as it is. This means fewer lectures and more collaboration. Fewer consequences and more curiosity. Fewer power struggles and more regulation, including mine.
Here’s the part I stress to parents over and over: you can’t support a dysregulated kid if you’re dysregulated yourself.
Understanding my ADHD helped me slow down enough to notice when I was activated. When my fear, my urgency, my own old shame was driving the interaction. When I was parenting from panic instead of presence. When I could regulate, he could too. Not always. Not magically. But more often.
I can’t go back and redo the early years. I can show up differently now. I can name what’s happening. I can apologize when I miss it. I can be a support instead of an enforcer.
ADHD gave me a new lens. Through it, I can start to see past the difficult kid and focus on the deeply sensitive, curious, struggling young man who is doing his best in a world that wasn’t built for his brain.
Just like his dad.
we’re obsessed with
I think I shared these two cartoons last year, but I was too late to influence your Christmas viewing.
The Snowy Day is a sweet take on the classic board book by Ezra Jack Keats about an African American boy discovering snow in New York City. It has a sweet, if earnest, message about racial harmony, and cameos from Boys to Men!
That Christmas is a story of mischievous and independent kids in a small British town. The messages are delightful and the characters well rounded. Written by Richard Curtis of Love Actually fame, he takes several fun jabs at his perennial holiday fixture.
Australia becomes the first country to ban social media for teens. Maybe because they were tired of memes of their Olympic break dancer? I think it’s a smart move. Come on USA, we can do this.
where we’ve been
We successfully hosted our intensive workshop, Healing Through Cultural Wisdom, in person at CYC in San Francisco for DCYF grantees.
Youth Development Professionals and Educators engaged in a critical shift in perspective, moving beyond viewing families through a lens of trauma. The session highlighted the power of a family's cultural heritage as the primary asset for fostering profound healing and sustainable resilience.
Book a workshop for your school or organization
Bring The Village Well to your school or organization. We provide powerful, interactive and fun workshops for parents and/or staff. Learn more.
Ed Center, the founder of The Village Well, is a parenting coach and educator certified in the Triple P method. The Village Well is a community of parents in BIPOC families, focused on attaining more joy, calm, and meaning in family life. We coach parents to prioritize their own healing and wellness, deepen connections with their kids, and learn tools to support better behavior. Services include Parenting workshops, Parenting courses, and community events. Our support is culturally-grounded support and honors your unique family. Ready to stop yelling? Schedule a free consultation with one of our team members.
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