“My teen says she has anxiety—but she hasn’t seen a professional.” Sound familiar? Here’s how to support teens who self-diagnose through TikTok or Instagram with compassion and clarity.

Remember the old poem about the secret ingredients for boys and girls? Snips and snails for boys, sugar and spice for girls. It wasn't just a silly rhyme; it hinted at a truth: boys and girls experience the world differently. This applies to neurodivergence too. Autism and ADHD can manifest differently in males and females, leading to misdiagnosis or underdiagnosis in women. For parents, this raises a crucial question: how can we ensure that neurodiverse children, regardless of gender, feel seen, understood, and supported? On this episode, our expert panel will discuss how boys and girls experience neurodivergence differently and offer strategies for parents and educators.

You may have heard about the “lost generation of autistic women,” which refers to those women whose diagnoses were missed when they were younger because of the male gender bias in the diagnostic criteria. But that phenomenon doesn’t just apply to autism – the same thing goes for girls and ADHD. There’s actually been a lot written about this in recent years, including a popular 2020 article in The Guardian called The Lost Girls: Chaotic and Curious, Women with ADHD All Have Missed Red Flags That Haunt Us.

We've talked about parenting with her. We've talked about therapy and ADHD. But my favorite episode with Dr. Sharon Saline was all about sinking thinking and self-compassion with ADHD. So, you can imagine that embarking on this series on that very subject would bring her back to the show.

Sharon is the author of the award-winning book, What Your ADHD Child Wishes You Knew: Working Together to Empower Kids for Success in School and Life and The ADHD solution card deck.  She specializes in working with neurodiverse children, teens, young adults, and families and aims to help outside-the-box thinkers improve executive functioning and social-emotional skills while also building practical communication tools and self-esteem.

Sharon says that she, herself, is a perfectionist in recovery, and she offers key insights into perfectionism and its impact on ADHD. How does perfectionism drive self-compassion down? How can you use "just one thing" to turn what seems to be impossible into a daily practice? How do you avoid compare-and-despair? All that and more this week with our great friend Sharon Saline!

We'd never heard of the phrase stinking thinking until Sharon Saline used it with us on the show this week. But we knew what it meant immediately. We live with it. It's the thinking we use about ourselves when we're compromised or when our reserves of resiliency have been tapped, and when what we need more than anything else is just a little bit of self-compassion.

But as ADHDers, finding self-compassion isn't always natural. We have to make a practice of it, integrating the language and behaviors of compassion into our days and hours such that when we need it, it's not so hard to find.

Dr. Sharon Saline specializes in an integrative approach to managing ADHD, anxiety, executive functioning skills, learning differences & mental health in neurodiverse children, teens, adults & families and she joins us again today to talk all about living with ADHD and still managing to find a dose of self-compassion under the weight of it all.

Sharon Saline is a renowned expert on ADHD, anxiety, learning differences, and mental health challenges, and their impact on school and family dynamics. She is a licensed clinical psychologist and author of the excellent book, What Your ADHD Child Wishes You Knew.