Imagine a world where your child’s “disrespectful” behavior is actually a cry for understanding, or their “laziness” is a sign of a unique brain at work. What if the very things you’re trying to fix are simply misunderstood expressions of neurodivergence? In this episode, we dive deep with Jheri South, a neurodivergent mother of seven and a coach specializing in ADHD and autism. She shares her powerful journey from personal struggle to professional insight, revealing how a deeper understanding of neurodivergence can transform family dynamics, empower children, and rewrite narratives of “failure” into stories of remarkable potential. Get ready to challenge your assumptions and discover how a shift in perspective can unlock a world of hope for both parents and neurodivergent individuals.
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Jheri South – Certified Teen & Parent Coach, Master ADHD Instructor, Founder Of Headspace Hub
Jheri South is a Certified Teen and Parent Coach, Master ADHD Instructor, mom of seven neurodivergent kids, and a founder of Headspace Hub. Jheri supports individuals with ADHD using practical coaching strategies that work. No therapy, just real results. She also empowers teens, parents, and families to communicate better, build confidence, and overcome habits that hold them back. As the creator of ADHD Simplified, Jheri offers one-on-one coaching, online courses, and in-person workshops to help people take control of their lives.
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Jheri, thank you so much for joining us. It’s delightful to see you again.
I’m happy to be here.
I’m hoping you can get us started by talking a little bit about how you got into the work you’re doing and what drives your passion for it.
Shift To Coaching Neurodivergent Individuals & Families
There’s a lot to it, so I’ll try to condense it a little bit by telling you that I am a mother of seven children, but for quite some time, I was a single mother of six children. During that time, you can imagine it wasn’t easy. I did have a lot of luck in business and entrepreneurship, and so I set out to be a coach. I wanted to work with women. I loved it.
It was great. It was all the things, but at the same time, my oldest son was struggling. He went everywhere to therapists and counselors. He ended up in a behavioral health facility, and I was very worried that we wouldn’t reach him. It was a dire situation. At the same time, many of the women I was working with asked me, “Will you do a class for teens?”
At the time, I thought, “No way. My oldest son hates me.” Teenagers are so hard. I don’t want to work with teens. I love working with women on reinvention. I finally decided to do a pilot program for teens. I had about fifteen kids in that class, and it was a four-week program, and it was the first thing that helped my son. That’s when I knew immediately that what I had was powerful not just for adults, but for children.
As my son was diagnosed and my kids were being diagnosed, and I was diagnosed with ADHD in my 40s, it took me down a path of wanting to learn anything and everything I could about neurodivergence to help my own children. I worked with specialists. I learned everything I could, and it naturally took me down this path of focusing on neurodivergence in my coaching practice.
What did that lead to? You’ve added neurodivergence to your coaching practice. Did it end up shifting you to work more with teens directly, or are you working more with the parents of teens?
Once I shifted my niche to teens, I was working with teens a lot. I developed a curriculum in the school system. I was volunteering my time, doing workshops with kids with higher needs. I started doing a lot of parent workshops as well, because this was interesting. I don’t offer them anymore, but I was doing in-person training with teenagers for a while, and it would be a 3 or 4-week program.
I would always have a parent night where I would ask the parents to come. They would learn some of what I was teaching the kids. We would talk about the different tools that I was giving these kids. I could always pinpoint by the way that the teenagers were showing up in the workshop, which parents wouldn’t show up to parent night. Without fail, I could always tell.
I started to understand pretty quickly that if the parents were not involved in the teenager’s healing, treatment, coaching, or whatever name you want to give it, then this child was going to struggle. You can give them all of the tools, and they’re doing better and they’re saying the right things, and then they go home, and the communication hasn’t changed, or the shame that they feel hasn’t changed. It’s going to be very difficult for a child whose prefrontal cortex is still developing to be able to manage themselves and make some real change. I learned early on that it’s going to be very important that the parents are involved.
If the parents weren’t involved in the teenager’s healing, treatment, or coaching—whatever you want to call it—the child was really going to struggle. Share on XMoving forward, if a parent came to me and said, “Here, fix my teenager because they’re struggling,” versus, “My child is struggling, I want to get them help, but I want to know what I can do to help,” I knew that I was going to have a very different outcome in that family’s treatment plan versus the parents’ attitude, and whether or not they were willing to say, “For as well intended as I am, I’m missing something. Can you help me? Can you help us?”
That was a very promising situation any time I had that happen. I started to incorporate that. It wasn’t just one-on-one coaching sessions with the teens anymore. It was also the parents’ involvement. Whether that meant they came to some of the sessions or they did a couple on their own, there was definitely parent involvement. Still, to this day, I’m working with teens and parents of teens, but I do work with as many adults in this area of neurodivergence. I have a lot of experience working with adults.
As you’re talking, I remember from decades ago when I worked a lot with kids and teens. I had the thought that my first book, or my next book, would be titled Quick, Fix My Kid, I’ve Got to Go Shopping. I would have that pattern of parents who show up and sit in the waiting room, and send the 5 to 15-year-old kid into the office and expect miracles.
When I’m doing a parenting presentation, my opening slide is, “If your child is struggling, start with you. If your child is on drugs, start with you. If your child is being bullied, struggling in school, start with you.” That can be a little bit jarring because parents are coming to learn, “How do I fix my child? How do I fix their behavior?” They’re not expecting to hear, “Start with you.” It is the place that we want to start.
What’s the first step when you’re starting with the parents, when they might have, or they’re even questioning whether they’ve got a child who’s neurodivergent or they’re neurodivergent?
Neurodivergence adds an entirely new level to coaching and what we’re experiencing.
Understanding Neurodivergence
Can you offer a simpler definition to people? What do you mean when you say neurodivergence?
When I’m talking about someone who is neurodivergent, I’m talking about somebody who either falls somewhere on the autism spectrum or somebody who has ADHD or both. That’s the definition that I use. The reason I will say neurodivergent sometimes, not all the times, instead of autism or ADHD, is because a lot of the symptoms will overlap even though they are different. Oftentimes, we see both together. There’s a high comorbidity rate with ADHD, for example. A lot of times, it will fall under the umbrella of both. One thing that they have in common is executive functioning deficits. Until their brains have finished developing, they are going to be about three years behind. That comes directly from Dr. Berkeley.
They are thirteen years old, but they’re actually at an executive function age of ten. If a parent doesn’t understand this, then they are going to have thoughts like, “They should be able to do this. They are old enough to be able to figure this out on their own. I shouldn’t be having to remind you,” but what if they were ten? Does that change?
With a parent, if we’re saying, “Let’s start with you,” we’re looking at how they are interpreting their behavior, and what they don’t know about neurodivergence, whether it’s ADHD or autism or both. What are you misunderstanding? For example, one of the things that’s missed so often is autism. It’s missed all the time. In my office, for a while, I was focusing on ADHD, even though five of my seven children are on the spectrum.
Kids would come in, and their parents would say, “They are so disrespectful. They argue with everything I say. They always have to be right. If I say, ‘It’s 7:15,’ they’ll say, ‘No, it’s 7:17.’” The parent will have a lot to say about how disrespectful this child is. You get them in here, I’m talking to them, and they don’t have a defiant personality, but they do have black and white thinking. They do get frustrated when their parent is saying something that doesn’t make sense.
The biggest issue that I see with teenagers on the spectrum is that they feel so misunderstood. I had one teenage boy, and I thought it was hilarious. I think he was a junior in high school. I said, “What’s your biggest pet peeve?” He was pretty easygoing. He said, “I don’t have pet peeves except for when my mom spreads misinformation.”
His example of that was his mother accidentally suggesting the wrong dose of Tylenol to his sister, and then she fixed it. These things for him were big deals. It was a big deal to hear information incorrectly. He would be one of those people who, if you said, “We got back at 8:00,” he would say, “No, it wasn’t 8:00. It was 8:07.” For a parent who doesn’t know that their child is on the spectrum or doesn’t understand the communication gap, that looks like disrespect. There’s such a lack of understanding.
Also, one-upmanship.
Exactly. It’s working on their communication. The majority of the time, it’s a communication problem.
Parental Involvement & Consistency
As you’re saying here, you begin with the education. You start to educate the parents about what you can learn and what they might learn about what’s actually causing these behaviors to come from their child, and then integrate it into the interaction with them.
That’s exactly right. I have seven children. Most of my kids are adults now. Looking back, if I wanted to punish myself, I could say I did almost everything wrong for a while. I didn’t understand what I understand now. I don’t ever approach this from a place of shame. I don’t blame parents for not understanding what they don’t understand.
Now let’s dive into it and figure it out. You could have a parent who says, “I don’t get it. I love my kid, I’m always telling them that, I hug them, and I give them compliments, but they’re so upset, or they don’t like me.” They don’t have awareness of what they don’t know. It’s education, as you said, and then understanding, “How can I be communicating differently?” That can be a lot of different things.
We spend a lot of time as parents, most of us, saying things to our kids, “Learn how to stay calm. You don’t have to yell. Don’t say things like that because you’re mad.” Most of the time, most of us out there, this was me for sure, when we get mad, we do yell, or we might slam a door, or we say something we regret. It’s important that we learn to manage our own emotions if we’re going to teach our children to do the same.
We can either be blind to that behavior in ourselves or have it thoroughly rationalized, but our kids are not blind to it. They don’t buy the rationalization. “If I can’t do it, you can’t do it.”
They will call them out in here in my office. They won’t call them out to their face, but they’ll call them out in here. This can be difficult if you are a parent who is just finding out that you have ADHD, for example. Most of the time, with ADHD, we’re struggling with task initiation, staying organized, and being on top of things. If there’s too much going on, we are forgetful and we miss things.
Impulse control.
RIght. Now, we’re trying to teach our child to be organized, not to be late, and to stay on top of things. It can be very overwhelming. Figure out how we can put processes in place, because our children are watching what we do, more than they’re listening to what we say. They’re going to be the first ones to call us out for being hypocrites. I have had my kids call me out. I’m not a yeller. I was in my previous mom life, but if I raise my voice at all, “You yell at me, why can’t I yell?” They’ll remember for ten years the one time I yelled at them. It is important that we learn how to manage ourselves and communicate more effectively.
The other important thing that I would highlight is having consistency, being good at having healthy boundaries, rules, and consequences. I would say 90% of the time, the parents that come in here will admit that they are not great at consistency because we’re human and we’re busy, and we have a lot going on, especially if we’re ADHD.
It’s hard to do day in, day out, be consistent, no matter what, stay on top of it. One thing that we’ll do is we’ll examine the way things are working in the home. There are chores, screen time, and homework. I am not big about telling people what to do. For example, I don’t say, “This is how much screen time you should give this child,” or “Here’s the chores they should be doing.”
I offer general information that I think is important for kids to do chores, or you decide how exactly you want to implement it in your home. “Here’s an idea of how this could work.” Helping them come up with something that will work in their home that they can be consistent with. When we’re inconsistent, and I see this time and time again, we rob that child of the opportunity to take responsibility for their wrongdoing.
When we're inconsistent, we rob the child of the opportunity to take responsibility for their wrongdoing. Share on XIf we have a rule and we’re exhausted and the child breaks the rule, and we just brush it off because we don’t have time to deal with it, and then the next week, they break the same rule or even a different rule, and we implement the consequence that we initially said we were going to implement, that child doesn’t think, “That’s fair. I broke the rule.” They think, “Last week, you didn’t do anything. How come last week you didn’t do anything? This week I did something.” They’ll come in here and tell me what a problem their parent is. “They’re trying to punish me. They don’t care about these rules. They were just in a bad mood.” When we’re not consistent, we send a confusing message to the child. Being consistent is very important.
As you say, I believe your phrase was, you rob the child of an opportunity to take responsibility for their behavior.
I believe that.
You’ve mentioned skills, skill building, and techniques. I don’t want you to just open your toolkit and spill it out here for us. Are there 1 or 2 of those that you start with that you find people are shocked by, or that carry tremendous, at least initial, benefit when you’re working with a family for the first time? Specifically, other than what you’re saying about the consistency and the follow-through.
ADHD Brain Wiring & Rejection Sensitivity Dysphoria (RSD)
Especially if we’re talking about neurodivergence, there are a couple of things that can be helpful for your audience and any parent who walks through the door. One of them is understanding the ADHD brain and that it is different. There is a different neurological system that we’re wired with if we have ADHD, for example.
You think about a neurotypical person, if something is in front of them, they’re able to force themselves to complete that task, either because it’s important, it needs to get done, or because there’s a reward at the end. That does absolutely nothing for the ADHD brain. The ADHD brain is wired to turn on when there is novelty, interest, a challenge or competition, urgency, or passion. We have an acronym for that. It’s NICUP so that we can remember. I didn’t make this up, by the way.
Say it one more time. If you can go through that acronym.
It’s NICUP. Novelty, Interest, Challenge or Competition, Urgency, and Passion. Not all of those five things, but one of those five things has to be present every time an ADHD-er is getting engaged. If we can get an ADHD-er to get engaged and stay engaged, they can do almost anything. They can hyperfocus for hours at a time, and they can work faster than the average person. The problem is getting engaged.
Let me give you a quick example of how I see this work against a teenager, for example, with ADHD, and where miscommunication can come in with the parent. For one thing, ADHD-ers are terrible at self-appraisal. No teenager is going to be able to answer the question, “How come you could do this yesterday, but you can’t get it done today?” They’re going to say, “I don’t know.” That’s because they don’t know. They don’t understand why sometimes their brain’s ability to hyperfocus happens, and sometimes it doesn’t.
I see this type of example play out time and time again. There’s a girl who is struggling with math, big surprise. ADHD-ers typically struggle with math. She’s bored to tears. She’s not comprehending the information. Her parents have her going to tutoring. She’s getting an F in math, and she’s having a hard time finishing her assignments.
There was a big exam coming up, and if she didn’t pass this exam, she was going to fail out of this class and have to retake it next year. She did her best to study the night before, and she got a B. She had been failing everything up to that point. Her parents said, “You’re just being lazy. You can do it.” That’s not what’s happening. We don’t want to make that mistake.
What happened was that urgency kicked in. Her brain was able to hyperfocus in a way it couldn’t focus before because it was bored to tears. Boredom, by the way, is one of the most overwhelming heavy emotions for an ADHD-er. It feels like depression. She got a B on her test. She said to me, “I don’t know how I did it. I just did it.” She was grounded after that because now her parents knew, “You can do it. You just refuse to do your math homework.”
Boredom is one of the most overwhelming and heavy emotions for someone with ADHD. It can feel a lot like depression. Share on XIf a teenager doesn’t understand why this is happening, and the parent doesn’t understand why this is happening, you can see the disaster this is with the teacher and the parent. Most ADHD-ers struggle with self-confidence because to have a high self-esteem, a high self-image, or a positive self-image, we have to know that we can show up when it’s important. No one is consistent 100% of the time, but we have to know that consistently, people can count on us. If we say we’re going to do something, we’re going to do it. We can show up.
With ADHD, we don’t know. We’re like, “I hope. I’m going to try. I’m not sure. I tried to do it last week and I couldn’t do it, but a month ago I did it.” We don’t know until we understand our brain why sometimes, we’re turning on and getting things done, and other times, we’re sitting there in paralysis, and we cannot force ourselves to do it.
In the example that you gave, without realizing it, my brain is showing me how the parents punished the very behavior that they wanted to happen. That’s one of the things that I’ve been working with people on for decades now. We don’t have to teach our parents, in general, how to punish kids more effectively. What we need to do is help parents understand how, so often, they accidentally or inadvertently reward behaviors that they don’t want. In this case, you showed an example of how they accidentally or inadvertently punished a behavior that they did want.
I’m always careful not to shame a parent for doing what they don’t realize that they’re doing. Once we know, then we can correct.
Once we shine the light on it, let’s acknowledge what it is.
This is why learning about it is so important. A lot of parents out there don’t believe ADHD is real or don’t think it’s a big enough problem that we need to get any treatment for it. Once we start to understand that there’s so much we don’t understand, you can see the value. Getting a child to help understand their brain is as important for the parent as it is for the child, because we’re all learning together how to help this child thrive.
The average ADHD child has heard over 20,000 corrective messages by the time they’re ten years old. I have never had an ADHD client walk into my office who doesn’t struggle, even if they’re doing it privately, with their self-confidence. They are used to comparing themselves and figuring out why this thing or that thing is such a struggle for them and not other people.
The second thing that I focus on a lot when it comes to ADHD specifically is rejection sensitivity dysphoria. More than half of the clients who walk through my office have never heard of that before. It’s associated with ADHD, and it falls under that emotional dysregulation umbrella. We don’t use the term ADD anymore. It all falls under the ADHD umbrella because H can either stand for hyperactivity or hyper arousal. Hyper arousal is lots of thoughts at one time, not being able to sleep, and overthinking everything. We know that not only is ADHD distractibility, but it can also be emotional dysregulation. Usually, it is the most impairing symptom for most ADHD-ers.
The emotional dysregulation?
Yes. This is why we miss girls so often, because they’re not usually very hyper, and they’re typically better at masking it than males are. It’s the extreme sensitivity to the idea that we’re being criticized or rejected. Nobody likes to feel rejected. When you have RSD, it’s a completely different level that you don’t understand unless you have rejection sensitivity dysphoria.
ADHD-ers are such intense feelers. When they’re up, they’re up. When they’re down, they’re down. Because we’re doing this so much during the day, up and down, it can create a lot of irritability on its own because there is so much energy output that comes from being up and down. We are intense feelers. RSD is being sensitive to the perception of rejection. It could be constructive feedback or criticism. It could be teasing. It could be the idea that we’ve let someone down, failure to meet our own expectations, or somebody else’s.
The point is that when RSD is triggered, it turns into what we call an RSD episode because the spiral is so intense, the idea that we are being rejected, and all we can feel is the rejection. This is usually when parents choose to lecture on correct behavior or try to talk it through. “What’s your problem? Why are you acting like this?”
They’re not identifying that this is an episode triggered by rejection, and this child has no control over their behavior right now. They’ve never learned how to control it. They don’t understand it themselves. It can be so painful. It can feel like an internal wound. I would have described it when I was in my twenties, and I didn’t know what it was, that I felt like I was being clawed from the inside out.
It’s understanding what this is, making sure that the child understands what this is, having awareness, and understanding that this is a wiring issue. It’s not a personality defect. It’s a wiring issue. You’re not RSD. This is just a wiring that we want to learn to overcome. It is so incredibly helpful because now the parent can recognize it for what it is, not try to jump in and fix it all in the moment, but actually let this child go be on their own. By the way, someone who has RSD is the only one who can get themselves out of it. It is not helpful for anyone in that moment to try to talk to them and make sense of what happened. They have to regulate their emotions, and we can have the talk later.
My mind is telling me that knowing what RSD is and being able to recognize it is key and of primary importance. Having a tool or 2 or 5 that you could apply is a game-changer. Now you’re saying that the experience is that when someone is triggered to an RSD episode, they have to be the one from the inside that stops the clawing from the inside. I can feel the benefit of being able to identify that pattern and then hand somebody some tools to be able to deal with it, and how that might transform some lives.
The reason it can destroy relationships is if it goes untreated. A lot of times, I’ll have adults come to me who have impairing RSD. They’re having problems in their intimate relationships. They have problems at work getting along with people because they are so easily triggered. Not only do we want to understand what’s going to trigger us, we want to understand how difficult it can be for other people to be walking on eggshells because something can happen one day and we’re okay with it, and the same thing can happen two days later, and now we have been triggered.
It’s a completely internal experience. You can’t understand it from the outside.
That’s right. I tell this story a lot because it’s a good example of what it can look like with a younger child in the schools. I had a boy who struggled with RSD. By the way, I see the episodes come more often, and they last longer when we’re going through harder phases of life. Maybe our parents are getting divorced or we’re getting bullied at school, because it’s so emotional. It’s the rejection.
This young man struggled with friends. He never had very many friends. He’s at this new school, he’s doing a summer program, and another boy is taking an interest in him, and he is daring him to break the teacher’s pencil. The teacher sees what’s happening. She doesn’t know much about my client. I think he was in fourth grade at the time, and she warns him, “Don’t break my pencil. Put it back.” He ends up breaking the pencil, and the teacher calls him out in front of the class. “I told you not to do that. What were you doing?” He loses it. I’m pretty sure he used some foul language with the teacher. He lost it a little bit. He was kicked out of the summer program. He was disciplined at home.
When he came into my office, he was crying. A lot of these kids put on a tough outer shell, but they are struggling inside. He said, “It was just a pencil. I got in so much trouble over a pencil.” In his mind, that’s all it was. He said, “If the teacher had pulled me aside and talked to me, I would have apologized. I would have said, I’m sorry.” I know this is true because he’s a sweet kid. At school, he has a reputation for being wild because he has RSD. Because the teacher called him out, he said, “She intentionally targeted me and humiliated me in front of everyone.”
He sensed rejection. It was a threat. To this teacher’s credit, as the school year started, I also talked to the principal, and they were responsive to this information that they hadn’t had before. She had a great year with him because she made some small adjustments. She never called him out in public again, and he never behaved that way in class again. That’s RSD.
The second part of it that you said is that he never did that again. It most likely happened because she made the adjustment and created the space where he could make the internal change. If she had kept calling him out, they would have escalated to the point where he would have been out of the program.
We don’t know what people are going through.
It’s likely that it keeps escalating.
I absolutely agree with you. What I was going to say is this teacher doesn’t know about this, but she also didn’t know that this boy had already been kicked out of two schools, that he didn’t have any friends to speak of, that he had been taking chips and money to the playground to make a friend. He didn’t break that pencil because he wanted to break her pencil. He broke that pencil because the kid said so.
He wanted the friendship.
He called him a chicken for not doing it. As teachers, adults, and parents, we’re not thinking about things like that. We are thinking, “I told you not to do that. Don’t do it.” This is why these kids, not all kids, but a lot of the kids with ADHD and RSD, have been silently suffering inside with a lack of friendships. They are the class clowns, and they’re talkative. A lot of times, teachers won’t think this is someone who is struggling.
What they don’t know is maybe they’re too much, and they’re not getting invited to a birthday party. When we can have these private conversations, we benefit from getting to know this child. Sometimes, in an RSD episode, this is not common, but I have had a couple of clients who tell me the impulsivity, the reaction from the RSD is so extreme that all they see is red, and they don’t even remember what they said.
Everybody experiences it on a different level, but understanding that RSD is so important. I wish we were doing more education. One thing I do is go into schools and work with administrators and teachers, but there is nothing in Arizona law and most states that requires teachers to understand neurodivergence at all. There’s no training.
These teachers are working with the limited experience and knowledge that they have. ADHD is not an external disorder. It lives in the mind. We are not learning about how their brains work, what gets them engaged, how they learn, what RSD is, or how to help them regulate themselves. There’s not enough education for ADHD, in my opinion.
ADHD is not really an external disorder. It lives in the mind. Share on XI would have to agree. I want to back up to a point earlier in the conversation where you were talking about reasons people may not either identify their child as neurodivergent or ADHD, or get help for them. I think you mentioned two. Do you remember what two reasons you gave?
Some adults don’t believe that ADHD is real. I’ve also noticed that because most people have heard that ADHD runs in families, I also believe, I’ve seen this in my own family, that if the adult admits ADHD is real, they might have to admit that maybe there’s something going on with them. That’s hard for some adults.
I also think that there is a tough love approach at times, like, “You’re not going to go on medication because medication isn’t the only treatment. You’re going to tough it out. I did when I was younger, I went through hard things. You can go through hard things,” or there’s a misunderstanding that if they try harder and they focus and they don’t add a label to themselves, then they’ll be able to beat this. That’s another reason. Some parents are worried that if there is a diagnosis, it will follow them around.
You’ve got this idea of the stigma and these other pieces. The one I wanted to add, which I think you are a solution to, is that I don’t want to admit or look at something for which there’s no answer. I won’t know what to do with it. If you get introduced to a professional like you who has access, an understanding of it, and an understanding of the tools, now all of a sudden, there’s a whole panoply of things I can do differently.
It’s not so intimidating to acknowledge this and or step into the world of dealing with it. What I would want to say is that that’s why it’s good to find professionals like you who are developing through your own life experience and in the coaching that you do, effective tools that the individual child who is neurodivergent and/or the parents can begin to use. It adds so much hope to the picture.
There’s no one who knows more about a disorder than a mom who is desperate to save her child. One of the reasons that my clients like working with me is that when I decided to do a deep dive into neurodivergence, I started reaching out to the top specialists. One of the very top ADHD doctors in the United States, I took a camera crew to his house, and for four hours, I asked him every question my clients had, every question I could think of. We talked about everything from medication to estrogen to how to parent a child, and about information that wasn’t true.
I have lots of this information and research at my fingertips, and documents on RSD and trials that they had done research for. I’ve done that with lots of different specialists now, interviewing them in the UK, people who have autism, people who have ADHD, so that I could do everything I could to help heal my family from the things that were holding them back, and help them thrive and become the best version of themselves.
Even though I think most of us know that autism is a spectrum, I think of ADHD that way as well. Even within one family, the symptoms will vary from person to person. For example, my ADHD is probably a little bit more on the hyper side. I am constantly on the go. I am a great entrepreneur. I like to be doing things, and I have other family members who are the exact opposite of that.
We can’t look at one person and say, “That’s what it is,” or “I don’t think I have this or my child has this because they do this thing or that thing.” No. It’s so many different things. This is why, if your child is struggling or if you are struggling, look into it because treatment will always help us. Whether it’s medication or no medication, treatment helps us to live the best lives we can live. There’s so much awareness, education, and also tools out there to help us do that.
Are there specific books that you use as a resource that you refer to parents or teens to help flesh out the education you’re giving them about these things?
Dr. William Dodson put out a book. He is the person that I look up to and respect when it comes to his education on ADHD. He is so wise, but maybe not even well enough known. He put out a book that is phenomenal. Every parent who wants to know more about ADHD should be looking at that book.
There are other interesting and fun reads out there. There was the ADHD Is Awesome that was put out in 2024. I’ve read that. It’s good, it’s cute, and it’s fun. For autism, there’s a lot out there. I do want to put out there that when I’m working with an adult, but also a teenager who might have autism or thinks they have autism or has been diagnosed with autism, I recommend the book Look Me in the Eye.
The reason I like that book so much is that it was written by a man who’s quite a bit older now, but he had pretty debilitating autism. Back then, not a lot was known about autism. I can’t even say where he was on the spectrum, like level 1 or 2 or 3, but probably level 2 or 3. He wrote a book, and the people who knew him said that, because of what he was like when he was younger, they would have never ever imagined that he could write a book.
He talks about his childhood growing up. What I love that he does is he looks back at conversations that he might have had. Maybe somebody asked him a question or something that happened at school, and how off his behavior was to other people. He got in trouble for smiling when somebody said something very disturbing or petting a girl with a stick, but he’ll tell you what was going through his mind when he did these things, and then it makes sense, but it made no sense to anybody who was observing.
He made all of this band equipment for Kiss, and he talks about these amazing things. He was a genius. He learned how to adapt to society. As he did that, things changed. His brain actually changed the way that it functioned and processed information, and communicated with the world. He looked back at the work that he had done.
He could not figure out the equations that he had created that let him do such marvelous things. I absolutely love that book.
At the end of the story, he said, “Autism is a gift.” I would love for teenagers to read that because there’s such a stigma. Parents will come to me and say, “I don’t want him to have autism.” I’ve had a teen say to me, “What if I have kids that have autism?” I said, “That would be awesome.”
Especially with what you’re going to be able to learn to help yourself and then grease the skids for them, so their life is going to be so much easier.
There are so many more gifts than there are debilitating symptoms. We would benefit as a society if we could get on board with more education and understand that the stigma is just that. It’s mostly full of mistruths and misinformation. Anyone who doesn’t know enough about autism should read that book because they can see themselves in that book as they’re reading it. There’s such a good message at the end. We don’t have enough of that.
Even most of the books we read are like, “Here’s the likelihood of your child being able to have a full-time job.” I don’t like statistics like that, and I don’t agree with most of them. That sends a negative message that this child has a lesser chance at being married or being successful than anyone else. I don’t believe that that is true for the majority of people who have ADHD or are on the spectrum. In many cases, there’s a higher likelihood that they’re going to achieve some of those things.
I noticed the time, and I’d appreciate it if you take a breath and get centered and think about everything we’ve talked about so far. Is there a part of it or a piece of it that you want to go back and highlight, or something we haven’t even touched on yet that you want to leave us with?
Importance Of Early Diagnosis & Education
Something that I’ve been talking about that I think is important, and we did touch on this a little bit. Why would a parent not want to have a child get diagnosed or get diagnosed for themselves? A couple of things. My experience has been that parents will get the advice, even from doctors, “If this isn’t a problem or you’re not finding that they’re needing this for school purposes, let’s not worry about this right now. When it becomes a problem, then we can address it.” I don’t agree with that advice at all, and I’ll tell you why. I have seven neurodivergent children. I think I have mentioned that already.
With the exception of my oldest, my five children in the middle were so easy. They weren’t emptying out cabinets and drawing on walls, and they weren’t struggling in school. They were involved in sports, and they were actually quite talented, and they all had friends. I thought, “This mom gig is pretty easy.” People would say, “Wow, you have six kids?” Honestly, I would think, “It’s hard.” It’s just wasn’t that hard. I loved it. Being a single mother was hard, but that was not hard.
They’re pretty close in age. They became pre-teens and teenagers, and that was hard. It was like I got smacked in the face. It came at me so quickly. My experience was that by the time things start to manifest, they start struggling in school, and you start to recognize how much they’re struggling with their self-confidence, which is happening. They’re just not telling you.
By the time the behaviors come, we have so much work to do to get to a healthy place. Also, the comorbidity rate is so high. If you have ADHD, there’s a 60% likelihood you’ll have a comorbid condition. There’s a 40% likelihood you will have a second comorbid condition. It is more likely that you would have autism with ADHD than it’s not.
There’s so much that’s being missed. It’s hard to find doctors who can properly treat it. Dr. Dodson says that 93% of psychiatrists do not know how to properly treat ADHD nationwide. It’s hard to find a good doctor. There’s a lot of information to educate yourself with if you choose to medicate or not medicate. If you don’t medicate, we’re just going to learn skills and tools.
I think it’s important that we advocate for our children, that we get second opinions. You don’t have to tell the school. You can get a diagnosis, and if it’s not causing a problem at school, keep it to yourself and learn how to communicate with your child and give them the tools that they need. My first child, who was diagnosed with autism, is eighteen now, but was diagnosed when he was eight years old. He’s a genius. He wasn’t struggling in school until he got into eleventh grade, and he struggled with his organizational skills.
Up until then, I never told anybody. I kept it to myself, and I had it there if I needed it. I learned everything I needed to know to help him. I don’t agree with that advice. I think that we want to help our children and take a lot of preventative measures. Kids on the spectrum are typically going to struggle socially. It’s interesting, the son that I mentioned, who is eight years old, I had him tested first at the school, which was a terrible idea. Don’t go to the schools to get tested. I had him tested twice, and both times, he tested top of the district for his age.
They reassured me that he had lots of friends. He was playing on the playground. It took him until seventh grade, because especially kids on the spectrum, they aren’t usually very in touch with how they feel. A large majority of them experience alexithymia. When they say they don’t know what they’re thinking and they don’t know how they feel, they mean that. It’s hard for them to even communicate effectively about thoughts and feelings.
That’s another thing, not understanding what they’re going through. It took him until seventh grade to one day mention to me, and keep in mind, every day after school, I’m asking him, “How was school? What did you do?” I’m already concerned. I’m asking him, “Did you play on the playground? Who are your friends? What did you do?”
Seventh grade, he tells me one day, “Did you know that I used to walk up and down the playground, not talking to anybody? I wanted to play football, but I didn’t know how to invite myself. I walked up and down, and nobody ever talked to me for this amount of time.” It broke my heart. I had asked him every single day, and I had asked the teachers, and everybody told me, including him, “Good, fine. He has friends. Good. He’s so popular.”
It’s important that we understand, if we are going to look into autism, do some research ourselves. Understand that someone on the spectrum might tell you every day, “Fine, good. I don’t know.” There are some real struggles there that they don’t know how to articulate. Educating ourselves first, and then trusting our gut and getting a second opinion, and getting on top of these things.
Someone on the spectrum might say ‘fine,’ ‘good,’ or ‘I don’t know’ every day—yet still be facing real struggles they can’t articulate. It’s important to educate ourselves first, trust our gut, and seek a second opinion. Share on XKids who aren’t neurodivergent are struggling at record numbers. Neurodivergence adds an entirely new level to that. I think it has become part of our job now as parents to do a lot more investigating into mental health and what children are dealing with. The last statistic I’ll give is that only 1 in 10 children will come to us and tell us what’s going on up here in their minds. Even then, it’s not usually entirely the truth. We have to figure a lot of that out for ourselves.
It’s worth the effort. It’s worth the research. It’s worth reaching out to people like you. I’m thrilled that you are willing to share with us. I’m sad that we’re at the end of our time because we could have talked about a variety of other topics. How do you prefer that people connect with you?
I have a website, JheriSouth.com. On that website, I offer a lot of free resources. I have an ADHD quiz, and most of those questions are derived from an actual evaluation form from some of the top specialists I’ve worked with. I have a free webinar and RSD. I have an online course on ADHD, which is very affordable and tells you anything and everything that you’d want to know, including how I do my mind management, including the module I use when I go into the schools to work with administrators and teachers.
I also have a place where you can sign up for a free consultation with me and learn more about the services and programs that I offer. I’m constantly trying to put as much information as I can out there. When I was struggling as a parent, I struggled to help my children get good information. Even though I do this for a living and I am working with people every day in different capacities, I also tried to be the person I was looking for when I was a struggling parent trying to help my children.
What I was doing wasn’t working. I also believe that if you’re neurodivergent, seeking out people who understand neurodivergence and have, hopefully, even overcome a lot of these things on their own, it is important because there’s a different language that we speak when we’re talking about neurodivergence.
I greatly appreciate your being willing to take the time to share with us. I thank you for the work you’re doing. It’s a blessing. I will be going to the website and looking at the particular ADHD coaching thing you were talking about, and I hope you stay in touch.
I definitely will. Thank you so much for having me and for being willing to have this conversation. I appreciate it.
It’s deeply needed, and I hope you feel the gratitude coming from me for your willingness to talk about it, but also for being there and doing that for your kids and all the others who benefit from this.
Thank you so much. I appreciate all you’re doing, too. You’re getting the word out on all of these important topics that are so needed in the mental health field for parents and for other people who are struggling. Thank you.
You’re very welcome and deserving.
Thank you.
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Jheri South is a Certified Teen and Parent Coach, Master ADHD Instructor, mom of seven neurodivergent kids, and a Founder of Headspace Hub. Jheri supports individuals with ADHD using practical coaching strategies that work. No therapy, just real results. She also empowers teens, parents, and families to communicate better, build confidence, and overcome habits that hold them back. As the creator of ADHD Simplified, Jheri offers one-on-one coaching, online courses, and in-person workshops to help people take control of their lives.
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About Jheri South
Jheri South
ADHD Specialist | Teen & Parent Coach | Headspace Hub Founder
Jheri South is a Certified Teen & Parent Coach, Master ADHD Instructor, mom of 7 neurodivergent kids, and founder of Headspace Hub.
Jheri supports individuals with ADHD using practical coaching strategies that work, no therapy, just real results. She also empowers teens, parents, and families to communicate better, build confidence, and overcome habits that hold them back.
Creator of ADHD Simplified, Jheri offers 1:1 coaching, online courses, and in-person workshops to help people take control of their lives.
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