Family Matters

Posts Tagged ‘attention deficit add adhd’

Success depends on the ability to move forward and requires persistence. We succeed at work, in our social life, our parenting, relationships, love life, finances and health only if we can keep moving forward in spite any setbacks.

Many parents around the world are having to deal with something they call “ADHD”. This behavioral disorder is socially unacceptable, thus creating embarrassment to the family on top of the challenges of handling a hyperactive child. From my experience, many ADHD parents believe this problem is genetic or otherwise unchangeable. Well, I am here to tell you there are many causes for ADHD and they are all things parents can control.

Last week, I wrote about the natural treatment of ADHD through diet. Today, I would like to talk (well, actually write) about a research done by Dr Feingold, an allergy specialist who found in the mid 70′s that 30-50% of hyperactive kids improved when they switched to a diet free of artificial colors, artificial flavors and a group of substances called “Salicylates”, which occur naturally in many fruits.

Many times, I have protested against the inflation in ADD and ADHD diagnosis. I believe way too many kids are labeled with ADD or ADHD when there is some other explanation for their behavior. In this post, I want to share with you some things you can do to greatly help kids with learning difficulties and perhaps un-label them.

The good news: changing the kids’ diet can help!

If you are a teacher or a parent of a child who struggles with writing, here are some things you can do to help make life easier for them. Remember, they do not need to be labeled. They do not need a stamp of “Dyslexia” or “ADHD”. If you find they are struggling, lend them a helping hand and change some of the classroom rules to suite their need.

Even though most people think that being the eldest in the family is stressful, being the middle kid is tough and being the youngest is pleasurable, in actual fact, to be the youngest kid in a family is not all fun and games. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that out of my three kids, the youngest one gets less of me than the others do.

Children’s behavior is the concern of many parents. Kids can be diagnosed with ADD, ADHD or ODD, when in fact, it is the various choices their parents have made throughout the course of their kids’ lives that make kids act the way they do. Yes, I know this is hard to accept, but I believe that if you were to give me a normal child – boy or girl – I could, by making a simple choice to act in a particular way, single-handedly turn this child into a problematic beast with social problems, difficulties with authority, declining academic achievement, lack of motivation, depression, anger and anxiety, just to name a few.

Opposition Defiance Disorder (ODD) is another name people who like labels use when they need a budget for helping children. Someone has worked very hard and probably spent many dollars to research kids and teens (they say ODD can start as early as 1-3 years of age) and come up with a nice label. Since ADHD worked so well, ODD should work quite well too. Labels are a good way to attract funds, but I am not sure they are good to make things better.

Let me make myself absolutely clear: I am against the use of labels and medication to “cure” concentration problems and hyperactive behaviour. In 22 years of professional work, I have met plenty of people with these challenges, and there were ALWAYS other ways to make them perform better and feel better. Always!

Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder (ADHD) is very trendy. If you search on Google, you will see that there are 34,800,000 hits for it (this is today, but I am sure tomorrow it there will be more, if only because I am adding this post…). It is amazing that as the years goes by, the percentage of kids and people with ADHD goes up. Do you have an explanation to this?

In this post, let me try to give you some explanation to this inflation in the diagnosis of ADHD.