Kids ADHD Blog

In ADHD & Me: What I Learned from Lighting Fires at the Dinner Table , Parents of teens with ADHD will not only be informed but encouraged by this book written by Blake Taylor, a college freshman at UC Berkley.  It provides a personal insight into the struggles, and success of a teenage boy with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.

Blake’s memoir, written when he was 17, offers, for the first time, a young person’s account of what it’s like to live and grow up with this common condition. Join Blake as he foils bullies, confronts unfair teachers, struggles with distraction and disorganization on exams, and goes sailing out-of-bounds and ends up with a boatload of spiders. It will be an inspiration and companion to the millions of others like him who must find a way to thrive with a different perspective than many of us.

Blake’s mother first suspected he had ADHD when he, at only three years of age, tried to push his infant sister in her carrier off the kitchen table. As time went by, Blake developed a reputation for being hyperactive and impulsive. He launched rockets (accidentally) into neighbor’s swimming pools and set off alarms in museums. Blake was diagnosed formally with ADHD when he was five years old. In this book, he tells about the next twelve years as he learns to live with both the good and bad sides of life with ADHD.

Summer is that time every kid looks forward to.  It is the “light at end of the tunnel” of a long school year.  It is a time to “let loose” and have a great time.  For kids with ADHD this is a big change.  The day to day structure goes away, the daily routine is gone. 

In just a few days or weeks, this long anticipated break can become a potential nightmare for kids with ADHD.  It becomes a time when these kids are going around whining and saying, “I’m bored.”  They come in complaining about an argument with peers or they are tormenting their siblings.

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Children with ADHD experience one or more neuropsychological impairment of functions such as concentration, memory, impulse control, processing speed or ability to follow directions.  These impairments are no different from those caused by head injury or neurological disease.  It has been standard practice for trauma or neurology patients to go through cognitive rehabilitation to restore functioning.  Recently, research has shown that children with ADHD may also experience improvement in neuropsychological functioning through a similar process.  Also, this procedure is now being recommended for middle age adults to improve and/or maintain cognitive functions as the progress into later stages.

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I have long believed that behavioral therapy is the key to helping kids with ADHD. In fact, a new study on ADHD said that comprehensive behavioral therapy works as well as medication over the long haul. Also, earlier studies showed that after 14 months, 30% of the behavioral therapy group did just as well as those with medication. Of course, there are no side effects to behavioral therapy—except, perhaps, much happier parents and kids.

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Recently, meditation has been featured in Newsweek as a way to help kids to calm down and focus.

For years it was thought that each of us was born with a generous supply of brain cells, but that we were unable to produce additional cells or make changes in how they function. Fairly recently, neuroscientists discovered the presence of something called “neuroplasticity” which enables the brain to actually grow additional cells or modify the function of existing cells.

Amazingly, cognitive exercises have been found to produce desired changes in not only how the brain works, but how it looks. What this means for parents is that you now have the ability to work with your child to help improve their ADHD symptoms.

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For the parents of a child with ADHD, simple, everyday tasks turn into battles—from getting the child out the door in the morning to getting him to bed at night. My son was diagnosed with ADHD at age 6, so I remember what it was like to have a daily tug of war with an attention disordered child all too well. Parents look for help everywhere.  They may read one book after another and hear a parade of behavioral experts speak who give them parenting tips that don’t seem to work. The more books they read and experts they seek out, the worse their child’s behavior seems to get.

In my practice and in my work with my own son, I discovered a number of techniques and strategies that can help parents improve the behavior of a child with ADHD.  

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Science Daily (May 3, 2008) — Ripping out and tearing down to create a divinely designed home, a la HGTV, is all the rage today — and the economic downturn may be leading more families to renovate rather than relocate. But a new study has found that parents need to be aware that all this interior renovation can put their children’s health at risk due to exposure to lead.

A study published recently by researchers at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center found that this process can increase children’s exposure to lead.  Abnormal lead levels have been found to result in ADHD symptoms.  If parents have any concern regarding their child’s exposure to lead, they should discuss it with their child’s physician.  A simple laboratory test can determine the presence of lead toxicity.  If you are considering renovating your house, you can learn more from the Science Daily article.

A recent Associated Press article reports that a study conducted at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center estimated that lead levels of more than 1.3 micrograms per deciliter may account for more than 500,000 cases of ADHD among children ages 8 to 15 nationwide.

This research is consistent with previous findings.  A recent article in Science Daily on a similar study conducted in 2007 by Michigan State University provides additional information on this topic.  Parents who suspect their child may have been exposed to lead around their home or some other location should share their information with their child’s physician.

When someone hears the term ADHD the first thing that usually comes to mind is the boy they saw running all over the place or a boy having a major meltdown at the mall much to the chagrin of his parents.  Unless one knows personally of a girl struggling with this disorder, the wound-up boy is the image that instantly appears.  Of course one reason for this is the fact that boys with the diagnosis outnumber girls 3 to 1.  Another reason is that ADHD in girls is more often associated with impaired attention and concentration rather than hyperactivity and impulsivity. 

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Have you ever been in a situation in public where your ADHD child continues to annoy others (or you) with their inappropriate behavior, even though you’ve given them every cue that they should stop? A recent study* conducted by The University of Western Australia found that ADHD boys had a hard time correctly identifying the emotions of facial expressions in drawings they were shown.

So if you’re the parent of an ADHD kid, be aware of the fact that your child might not be picking up on a lot of non-verbal cues that most of us take for granted. He or she could be reading something entirely different into a facial expression–or perhaps not reading anything into it at all! One way to tackle this problem with your child is by using drawings and photos of people or characters. Ask your child what emotion the person is displaying in the photo, and talk about it together. This can be done while reading a picture book or magazine, or looking through a family photo album. Point out the expressions of the people you see, and ask your child how you think that person is feeling. There are other resources for this activity as well. For example, the pbskids.org website has a game in its “Arthur” section that gives younger kids points for correctly identifying what emotion a character from the show is feeling.

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