Experts estimate
that between 4-10% of our youth are now diagnosed as having
Attention Deficit Disorder. It can be frustrating and
discouraging to deal with symptoms of ADD. Here’s the great
news: there is nothing "wrong" with your child or with you as
the parent; there is nothing that needs to be “fixed”. You and
your child have ALL of the resources within you to experience
success in school, at home and in the world.
If
your child is not succeeding in school or at home, it simply
means that she doesn't have effective tools for doing so. Once
we teach her world-class skills for succeeding at home and in
school, she will no doubt be successful.
A diagnosis can be helpful in
giving us a framework for understanding what the reason is behind
the challenging behaviors or the poor school performance. You can
understand the behavior better when you understand where it is
coming from. When you understand that it’s not a matter of whether
or not your child is trying hard enough, rather that it is simply a
matter of her not having the tools to be successful in learning,
then you can respond differently to it. ADD, Dyslexia and other
learning “differences” are a way of describing how a person’s brain
is wired or the way in which they process information. It doesn’t
mean that they don't process or learn information; it simply means
that they do it better using certain strategies or processes than
with others, as we all do.
In order to help you understand your child's
experience of the world, you need to understand exactly what goes on in the mind
of a young person with ADD. Here’s a way in which you can begin to understand
the experience of a child with ADD. I want you to imagine that you’re driving in
a rainstorm without the windshield wipers on. Pretty frustrating, isn't it?
Imagine the effort it would require to keep your mind focused on the road ahead
just in order to keep yourself and others feeling safe and protected. Yet, that
is precisely what goes on in the mind of a young person with ADD. The screen
simply becomes blurred without the ability to use the wipers to get rid of
unnecessary cloudiness. She is trying as hard as she can to process all of the
information coming into her experience. Of course, what often happens is that
the conscious mind becomes overwhelmed and she may simply shut down, stop paying
attention, and give up or it might be played out physically in the body which
might be seen as anxious, aggressive or hyperactive behavior.
The first step in helping your child to learn
effectively is to help her determine what her particular strategy is for
learning and then to teach her very precise, effective strategies for learning
information most effectively. A visual learning strategy is the most effective
strategy for learning academic tasks like spelling words, math facts and
vocabulary words; learning visually makes learning fun, interesting and much
less time-consuming.
In order to teach a young person a visual
learning strategy, she must first believe that she CAN learn by making pictures
in her mind. Often, young people who are diagnosed as having ADD or some other
"learning difference" feel that they can't control their own mind, but rather
that their mind controls them. In order to begin to teach effective learning
strategies, we need to begin with helping the child to see that indeed she CAN
control her own mind and the pictures that she makes in her mind.
The first step is to assist the child in
slowing down the pictures in her own mind and slowing her body down so that she
can learn and implement simple, effective learning strategies and begin to
experience more success at school as well as at home. In addition, we want to
provide her with the kind of environment that will best support her and her
particular needs; for most kids, and especially for kids with ADD, the
environment that is most supportive of their needs is one that is unconditional,
structured and consistent while providing them enough freedom to learn to
negotiate the world on their own.