When Your Dog and Your ADHD Child Both have a Lot Going On\

There are days when Rosco is running at a frequency the ordinary day can't contain. He's not misbehaving. He's not trying to be difficult. He's a nervous system communicating a need it doesn't have words for. Jennyfer has been here before — just not with a dog.

Topics covered: reactive dogs, ADHD-like traits in dogs, neurodivergent family, autism and ADHD, nervous system regulation, high-energy dogs, reading your dog, family dog mediation, L.E.G.S. model, dog behavior, understanding difficult behavior, two-dog household

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There are days Jennyfer Tan can recognize before they fully arrive.

Something in the quality of Rosco's energy when the morning starts. An erratic, tense aliveness that has nowhere to go. He follows her from room to room while she tries to work, nudging, circling, asking in the only language he has for something he cannot name. On these days, the usual routine is not enough. Something more is needed — or something different. And figuring out which one requires a kind of reading that, in the early days, she could only do by guessing.

In this episode of Under the Same Roof, Jennyfer reflects on what she has come to call her dog's extra days — and the gradual, unplanned recognition that she had encountered this before. Not with a dog. With her son. The same erratic, high-frequency energy that doesn't sit neatly inside an ordinary day. The same need to read what kind of extra this particular day is asking for: more output, or more regulation. The same requirement to hold your patience intentionally, to remind yourself that behavior is communication, that the being in front of you is not trying to be difficult.

She traces the arc from guessing to knowing — how, with her son, that knowledge accumulated over seventeen years, and how, with Rosco, it built faster because she already knew the shape of the problem. She touches on the emerging research on ADHD-like traits in dogs, carefully and without overclaiming, and then sets it aside in favor of the more important thing: what it is actually like to be the human in that household on the high-frequency days, and what prior knowledge changes about that experience.

And she ends with something speculative, held carefully: the idea that part of what made the bond between Rosco and her son possible — what allowed two beings who can both be a lot to eventually find ease with each other — is that they are, in some fundamental way, familiar to each other. That they recognize something. Not in words. In frequency.

She doesn't need that to be scientifically provable to believe it is real.

Under the Same Roof is a narrated essay series about what nobody tells you when you share a home with a reactive dog and a neurodivergent family. Rooted in the L.E.G.S.® Applied Ethology model developed by Kim Brophey, author of Meet Your Dog and founder of Family Dog Mediation. Grounded in the kind of lived experience that no certification can replace.

Understanding before strategies. Always.