Family Strategies

Today I wanted to focus on what strategies families can use in the home to help with their ADHD child. I found the website livingwithADHD.com, they give some tips about what you can do to manage the behavior. i wasn't really all that impressed with it. the tips they had, you would use with any child. 'Use incentives before punishment to reinforce desired behavior', 'consistently enforce discipline', and 'reduce stress in the family'. If these tools are so helpful, why isn't everyone talking about how great they work, and what miracles they've wrought with these children? This just reinforces my bad opinion of ADHD. Maybe children diagnosed with ADHD, are just the victims of bad parenting. I was also thinking about how diet can be very helpful in dealing with ADHD. I talked a little bit about it in an earlier blog, but I didn't go all that in depth with it.

I was reading on everydayhealth.com, and their advice was to have a diet with complex carbohydrates, magnesium, omega-3s, vitamin C, and B complex vitamins. I'm sorry, but this made me very angry, because I just thought this was incredibly dumb. All they're saying is to have them eat healthy. The diet would be beneficial to anyone who wanted to have a healthy lifestyle. Of course if a child ate a bunch of sugary, fatty food, it would make them hyperactive, and who can pay attention, when they've got all this junk food flowing through their body?

I was also thinking about how ADHD is said to be on the rise, and i wanted to see why that is, so i went onto medicinenet.com and their take was that it was due to greater media interest, heightened consumer awareness, and availability of effective treatments. So, they don't really believe that more people are acquiring ADHD.

Anyways, I'm sorry this blog is a little all over the place, I started with one idea, that made me think of something else. I was trying to focus on strategies for families. i was looking at helpquide.org/mental/ADHD_ADD_teaching_strategies.htm, and this sort of goes along with families. It's about how a teacher can help a student with ADHD. School is a big part of a child and their families life, so these strategies would be helpful at school or home. This first one was, have the child sit somewhere that's not distracting. So, at home, you would want to do homework in a quiet place away from interruptions. Give instructions one at a time, so if you want them to do chores, just tell them the first one, and let them complete that before they do the next one. Work on a difficult task first. so, if you want them to do a variety of things, tell them to the hardest one first. and use charts. I think most families have a chore chart, where they put it up so that their child can work on things around the house. I really thought these were easy things that could be done for the child in the home.