I’m often asked what made me wonder if my daughter’s anger and tantrums were more than typical childhood behavior.
For me, it was how intense and unpredictable they could be.
She could be perfectly happy one moment and completely overwhelmed the next, and I often couldn’t figure out what had happened in between.
At the time, I didn’t connect any of it to ADHD. I thought ADHD meant a hyper, high-energy child—not this kind of intense emotional reaction.
I kept looking for the trigger.
People would ask whether she was hungry, tired or overstimulated. Those were reasonable questions, so I started looking for patterns too.
But I couldn’t find a consistent one.
We were already in therapy and talked about emotions often. I could see her trying to use some of the things she had learned. Sometimes she would start deep breathing or counting when she felt herself getting upset.
But once she reached a certain point, none of those things seemed accessible anymore.
That was incredibly confusing to me as a parent. I kept thinking there had to be something I was missing.
If I could identify the trigger, maybe I could prevent the meltdown. If I used the right parenting strategy, maybe I could stop things before they escalated.
Looking back, I spent years trying to solve the wrong problem.
I began to understand that the thing that happened immediately before a meltdown wasn’t always the whole explanation. Sometimes what looked like a tiny trigger seemed to be the final piece of something that had been building underneath the surface.
That changed the way I looked at the meltdowns.
Instead of assuming there had to be an obvious reason for each one, I began to understand that there might be more going on than I could see.
It didn’t stop the meltdowns. But it changed the way I understood them—and my daughter.
I know now that those early years were only one part of a much bigger picture. We didn’t have the ADHD diagnosis yet, and I certainly didn’t understand everything I understand now.
But I was noticing something real.
I just didn’t have the language for it yet.
Related Reading
- When I Knew Something Was Different (Before the ADHD Diagnosis)
- Why Everything Becomes a Battle with an ADHD Child
- How Parenting a Neurodivergent Child Changes You (The Part No One Talks About)
- Advocating for a Child with ADHD: What I Wish I Knew Sooner
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