19: Navigating School After an ADHD Diagnosis: A Parent Coaching Story
An ADHD diagnosis can bring valuable information — but also uncertainty about what to do next. In this episode, I share a real parent coaching story about a family learning how to turn that diagnosis into a thoughtful, practical plan at school and at home. I dig into 504 supports, how to approach conversations with your child about ADHD in a way that builds confidence, and how parent coaching can help you move from overwhelm to steady, confident advocacy for your child.
Key Takeaways:
A diagnosis is valuable information, but it doesn’t create a plan. This family understood their child. They needed help deciding what to focus on next.
Fewer priorities create steadier progress. Clarifying what mattered most right now reduced overwhelm and made school advocacy more strategic.
Support works best when a child understands the why. Connecting services and accommodations to what matters to the child can increase engagement and long-term follow-through.
Preparation builds confidence. Understanding the school’s process and walking into meetings prepared helped this parent move from intimidation confidence.
Resources:
Parent the Child you Have podcast episode
How to Get Support When Your Child Is Struggling in School blog post
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Transcript
19: After an ADHD Diagnosis: A Parent Coaching Story
[00:00:00] On today's episode of Unlocking School Success, I wanna share a coaching story. Now, this is a real life family that came to me for parent coaching, and they came after their child, received an ADHD diagnosis, and they found themselves asking this question that I hear fairly often. We finally have a diagnosis and now we don't know what to do with it.
What do we do now? That's what we're gonna dig into in this episode.
Scotti: Welcome to Unlocking School Success, a podcast with the smart strategies and support parents need to help their kids thrive. I'm your host, Scotti Weintraub, parent coach, school navigator, and your go-to guide for turning School Stress and Chaos into clear strategies that work. Let's get started.
Have you ever wondered if you have the skills you need to support your child at school? My guess is you do have some of them already and you can use a fun tool I have on my website [00:01:00] to take a Golden Girls inspired quiz that helps you identify those strengths. That you already possess and how they can help you be the best support for your child at school.
So log onto my website, reframe parenting.com, and you can find that quiz to find out- are you a Dorothy or a Blanche? Personally? I'm a Dorothy, but let me know what you get.
The story I'm gonna share is about a real client, but I am gonna use other names to protect their privacy.
When Jamie first reached out to me, her child, Ryan, was in elementary school and they had just received an ADHD diagnosis and it wasn't a surprise, and school had also been challenging for a while, they already knew some things about him before this, that tasks to longer than they expected that his focus and follow through were inconsistent.
He got frustrated pretty easily . They worried that his confidence was starting to erode the diagnosis, did help them see their child, but it didn't give them the next [00:02:00] steps and ideas about how to actually use the information. Jamie was especially worried that the ADHD would get sidelined because the school was currently focusing on other concerns.
So she had a lot of questions like, what should go into a 504 plan? How can we make sure his ADHD gets addressed and. How do we talk to him about this and his ADHD diagnosis without really hurting his self-image? And Jamie was doing a lot already. She was reading, she was researching, and she was trying to be thoughtful in her parenting.
So the problem wasn't really a lack of effort, and that's true I think for the majority of my clients. The problem really was a lack of a clear roadmap and usable next steps. So we started working together and the goal wasn't to fix ADHD or solve all the school problems all at once. The goal was to slow everything down and we wanted to build a plan that actually worked for their specific family.
So we [00:03:00] did five things. I'm gonna talk about those first. We clarified what mattered most in that moment. Not in the far off future. We really focused on meeting the challenges where we were. We weren't trying to solve everything, so we focused on a few clear priorities, including making sure that ADHD was explicitly addressed in his 504 plan.
Helping Ryan feel safe and motivated to participate in their already preexisting private occupational therapy sessions. Using the upcoming summer intentionally, and not for reading mediation or summer school, but for emotional enrichment. And we focused on supporting Jamie and advocating with confidence.
So we had our clear priorities, and this really helped reduce the overwhelm that this mom was feeling. Second, we translated ADHD into school friendly language. So [00:04:00] rather than just leading with the diagnosis, we focused on. How was Ryan really experiencing school? What was actually happening for him there?
Where were the breakdowns that were happening in school and at home, and what supports specific to him would best help him learn? So it wasn't about cookie cutter, ADHD advice. This mom began gathering a list of possible accommodations she thought might work for him specifically. And I shared suggestions and resources, and we talked through those to make sure they were tailored.
To his specific needs and goals. The third thing we did was that we reframed this occupational therapy for Ryan, and this was a specific concern because he didn't love their sessions. He was already engaged with ot, and his mom knew that these would be helpful, but they needed an approach that would help him see that too.
So instead of treating it as something being done to him or that he had to do. [00:05:00] And that's what his mom was suspecting he was feeling. We talked about how to tie his occupational therapy goals to things that Ryan cared about, like how would this work help him in his beloved sports activities. And I coached the mom to advocate to see a consistent therapist since they'd been shuttled between different providers and that wasn't helping build a lasting relationship that might help motivate Ryan to keep showing up.
So the goal wasn't simply to get them in the door, it was to get buy-in so he could feel involved and understand what he was gaining from his own experience. The fourth thing we did was talk about how to approach Ryan about his ADHD and how his unique brain learns. Jamie specifically wanted to think through how to talk to him about the diagnosis in a way that felt honest.
Age appropriate and supportive and not [00:06:00] punitive or negative. So we focused on a few things. We focused on asking what Ryan already knew about his own strengths and challenges, and I tell parents often that you, you'll be surprised how insightful your kids actually are about themselves and how they learn.
So we wanted to hear from Ryan about what he knew. Was going well and what his own strengths were. We wanted to focus on normalizing different kinds of brains that different people learn in different ways, and to help him understand himself, and that this is just simply information that we're not trying to fix him.
That this isn't a negative, this is just a piece of who he is, and help him understand how to manage that piece. Jamie wanted this to be an ongoing conversation and not just a big talk. So I shared some age appropriate books and resources so Ryan could learn at his own pace and have language for what he was [00:07:00] experiencing.
The fifth thing we did was really help this mom build confidence in her own advocacy. And this is one of my biggest goals with my clients usually, is to help them be able to step in to their own role as the best advocate for their kids. So we spent time talking through her concerns about this, and like a lot of parents, she worried about saying the wrong thing, pushing too hard, or maybe not hard enough.
And how to navigate school without being seen as that parent and without burning out. These are concerns I hear from parents all the time, One moment that she shared later with me really stood out early on in our conversations when she joined her first school meeting. She hadn't expected how many people would be on the call.
The principal was there, several staff members were there. And it felt really intimidating to her. She told me that knowing [00:08:00] we had prepared ahead of time for the meeting made a lot of difference for her. She understood what the meeting was for, what the school's role was, and that they were following their usual process, not singling her out or pushing back.
That context helped her feel steadier and more confident, even in a room that might otherwise have felt really intimidating. So it wasn't that Jamie needed more information on advocating, but she needed permission to trust herself. She reflected later that part of that shift came from realizing how many providers, programs, experts are involved once a child has a diagnosis and they all have their own perspectives and priorities over time.
She learned how to listen carefully to those perspectives without feeling pushed along by them. She began balancing what she was hearing with what she knew about her child that helped her be more thoughtful and selective. And it didn't mean ignoring expertise or advice, it just [00:09:00] meant trusting that she knew her child best.
And this is how Jamie described the shift in her own words. I felt like I was screwing up. I felt like I was failing. I felt like he was getting the least of me. And now that we've done this work, I feel like that's flipped now. I feel very capable and empowered. Hearing her say that felt especially meaningful.
knowing how unsure those early conversations had felt to her. And I wanted to share this story because so many parents think. They don't know what to do once they get a diagnosis. Sure you have that information, but it still feels really unclear what to do with it. The answer is simple but important.
A diagnosis doesn't come with a roadmap. It isn't the final destination either, and sometimes we as parents just need more support. What this family needed was not. More effort. They needed translation, [00:10:00] timing, and support for them as parents, and that's what made all the difference. Now I wanna pause here and say something important.
This story centered on ADHD and my coaching is not just for families with ADHD, The reason this work helped wasn't because we found the right ADHD strategy. It worked because we did things like slowing down, clarifying what actually mattered, focusing on how this child experiences school specifically and supporting the parent and stepping into more informed, more confident advocacy.
So this kind of coaching can be useful for so many different kinds of families. Maybe you have a child who's bright, that school feels harder than it should, or they have anxiety or learning differences, or they get dysregulated easily at school, or they have behavior concerns that are leading to those repeated dreaded phone calls from school, and you still [00:11:00] don't quite know why they're happening because this isn't about labels.
It's about understanding unique kids and their unique needs. It's about helping parents like Jamie move from. Something feels off to, I can see clearly what my child needs and I know how to move forward. When Jamie said, I feel capable and empowered, I was really excited for her. Genuinely, this is the power of having the support that you need when you need it.
Not because everything was solved, but because she knew she could make a difference for her own child, and that's why I love what I do. Before I wrap up. I have one small ask for you as a listener if this episode or any of my episodes hit close to home, or if you know other families who could benefit from hearing stories just like this, please take a moment to rate, follow, or review the podcast in the podcast player where you're listening.
It helps this [00:12:00] show reach parents who are searching just like you are for the right kinds of support. You never know whose school journey might feel a little less lonely because this episode found them at the very right time. Thank you for being here, for listening and for caring so deeply about your own child.
If you wanna know more about my coaching, you can find it all on my website, reframe parenting.com. Reach out. I give a free complimentary exploration call, or we can talk about how coaching like with Jamie can help you too. Find the roadmap and the next steps that you need. I'll see you next time.
Scotti: Thanks for tuning in to Unlocking School Success. If you're finding these episodes helpful, please hit follow, leave a review, or send it to another parent who's also navigating the school maze because no one should have to figure this out alone. You'll find full show [00:13:00] notes@reframeparenting.com slash podcast and you can come say hi on Instagram at Reframe Parenting.
Thanks again for listening. See you next time.
