Celebrate your ADHD Child

Healing Play

I'm working on my third book, A companion to the Gift of ADHD: 110 Activities for Transforming Problems into Strengths.  The book will be filled with activities that are not competitive and have no performance demands but contain within them implicit lessons that will help ADHD kids in particular, but any kid really!

One activity I'm developing is to help your child develop a healthy wince or a hearty WHOOPS! response. Here's a rough sketch:

Practice having your child make silly mistakes and practicing an exaggerated whoops response. Like a clown. The teaching of this activity is the “healthy wince”. Don’t waste your time teaching  your child to be perfect. Don’t try to teach your child not to fail. Teach your child the healthy rebound – resilience. Every life will face disappointment, rejection, failure. You don’t want to teach your child to be failure phobic. Play at failing and making a quick recovery. This way your  child won’t be tempted to make small dreams to avoid failure. They also won’t be stopped when they do encounter failure. This is the key recipe for success – big dreams plus not being stopped by rejection, disappointment or failure. The actual activity where they are encouraged to make a mistake could be anything from slipping and falling (a pratfall) to spilling water or dropping a ball while playing catch.

www.visionarysoul.com

ADHD and Depression

Many people with ADHD also suffer from depression. It may be that the difference of ADHD means living a life without all the approving nods that come to others so easily. ADHD often means living a life of self-reliance (what other people call defiance).

I'm gearing up with lots of excitement for the upcoming release of my new book, Listening to Depression: How Understanding Your Pain Can Heal Your Life. 

When I tell people about my book, they have a hard time believing that depression can be a gift. The book doesn't say that depression isn't painful, it says that there are treasures to be found if you listen carefully to your depression for guidance.

Make no mistake! The book will show you how to heal your depression but goes even farther than that. The book will tell you that depression will heal your life. If you listen to depression,  you won't just go back to normal. The guidance in depression will transform  your life to bring it into greater alignment with your deepest gifts, values, interests and needs.

I just saw the movie - Click - with Adam Sandler.  This is one of the best movies I have ever seen! It illustrates perfectly the idea of how easy it is to live a life totally off track from what we really want for ourselves. The main character wastes much of his life fastforwarding from one much wanted promotion to the next.  Luckily he gets a chance to do it over again because when he gets to the end, he realizes he missed everything that really mattered, and lost what was most important to him.

Because the idea of a gift in depression can be hard to believe at first glance I interviewed many people who tell stories of living through devasting crises and dark depressions and not only recovering from it but creating a life that is guided by a vision rather than passively following a life pushed and pulled by fears.  On my psychjourney blog, Listening to Depression, you can hear some interviews with these people profiled in my book including the President of Psychjourney - Deborah Harper.

more later,

Dr. Lara Honos-Webb

www.visionarysoul.com

Top Ten Tips for Parenting ADHD and Spirited Kids

From The Gift of ADHD by Dr. Lara Honos-Webb

www.visionarysoul.com

1. Advocate for your child. This means you need to “spin” your child’s behavior to friends, family and teachers. Has your child’s antics been any worse than our leading politicians? Probably not. Imagine the spinmeisters on talk shows who try to get their politicians elected. Do the same for your child.

2. Coach your child to name and feel ok with all their emotions. Kids act bad when they are mad, sad or “ascared.” When you coach your child to tell you what she feels, her bad behavior will heal.

3. Look inside yourself. Sometimes kids act out unexpressed conflicts of their parents. Are you struggling with depression, anxiety, rage? Get help for yourself and your kids will shape up.

4. Think of yourself as a coach. Your job is to coach your child to success in social, emotional and educational settings. Sometimes the answer is practice, practice, practice. Don’t get discouraged if you have to repeat yourself over and over again.

5. Ask yourself: “If my child’s most frustrating behavior was meant to teach me something – what would it be?” Many parents find themselves half distressed and half impressed at their child’s indifference to people pleasing. Sometimes this is just the lesson parents need to learn in their own lives – many parents have become imbalanced in attending too much to seeking approval from others.

6. Forget about the competition. Your child can still strive to be outstanding without it being about comparisons to other children. ADHD and spirited children are sensitive to tension produced by parents’ competitiveness and the fear based motivation inhibits them.

7. Keep Yourself Alive! It takes a lot of energy to keep up with ADHD and spirited kids. You need to become your own energy source. Feed your own passions. If you are married work to increase your intimacy with your partner. If you are single, keep your own love life alive.

8. Honor the kernel of self-reliance in all acts of defiance. Every time your child doesn’t do what you asked them to do, ask them for an explanation. Honor their independent thinking and consider what part of it you may want to incorporate into your discipline. Continue to insist that your child respect your rules while demonstrating respect for their own rhythm and logic.

9. Practice preventative medicine. Many times children’s bad behavior is a misguided attempt to get some precious attention. Fuel your child up with the highest octane energy you can early in the day. Spend a few minutes being entirely present with your child. Look them in the eyes, touch them lovingly and listen closely to your child. This intense presence will give them what they need and head off desperate pleas for attention. Sometimes just a few minutes will prevent large energy draining hassles.

10. Connect with your child’s teacher. Research has shown over many decades that your child’s educational outcomes are very closely linked with how much the teacher likes your child and how much they expect from your child.  This is why you need to advocate for your child at the same time as you connect with your child’s teacher. Show enormous respect for your child’s teachers and try to forge a close alliance with him or her. They will go the extra mile for your child.

Lara Honos-Webb, Ph.D., is a licensed clinical psychologist.  She is author of The Gift of ADHD: How to Transform Your Child's Problems into Strengths, the forthcoming Gift of Depression: How Listening to Your Pain Can Heal Your Life and more than twenty-five scholarly articles. Her work has been featured in Newsweek, The Wall Street Journal, and Publisher's Weekly as well as newspapers across the country and local and national radio and television. She specializes in the treatment of ADHD and depression and the psychology of pregnancy and motherhood; she speaks regularly on her areas of expertise. Honos-Webb completed a two-year postdoctoral research fellowship at University of California, San Francisco, and has been an assistant professor teaching graduate students. Visit her website at www.visionarysoul.com.

ADHD and Entrepeneurs

Today, April 9, there is a great story in the Chicago Tribune business section profiling successful business people who attribute their success in part to ADHD. It is a wonderful source of inspiration for those who are trying to overcome their "disorder deficit"

Happily the story by Kathy Bergen mentions my book The Gift of ADHD.

here is the link to the story:

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-0604090280apr09,0,6482242.story?track=mostemailedlink

and an excerpt:

Lara Honos-Webb, author of "The Gift of ADHD," said, "there is substantial overlap in what it takes to be an entrepreneur and the traits [often are] associated with ADHD," among them high energy, a tendency to do many things at once, a proclivity for innovative thinking and taking risks.

The Chicago landscape is dotted with success stories so varied that it seems almost impossible to make broad generalizations about where individuals with learning issues will find success. Some of the highly accomplished have been honored by the Rush Neurobehavioral Center in Skokie, including Jacobs, Swonk, futures industry leader Jack Sandner, former Chicago Public Schools chief Paul Vallas, chef Charlie Trotter, real estate executive Harvey Alter, Molex Inc. co-Chairman Frederick Krehbiel and Illinois Appellate Judge Anne Burke.

Nationally, business leaders with learning differences include brokerage innovator Charles Schwab, JetBlue Airways Corp. founder David Neeleman, Kinko's founder Paul Orfalea and John Chambers, chief of Cisco Systems Inc.

Rocky starts

For many of today's business leaders, childhood was peppered with frustration, humiliation and a sense of being different. When many of them were growing up, there was very little public awareness, if any, of learning differences, and very little help was available.

For more resources on The Gift of ADHD and changing the way parents, teachers and schools look at this diagnosis, stop by my website at

http://www.visionarysoul.com

ADHD Child: Parents Stop Apologizing

Parents, when you start advocating for your child and stop apologizing for them, you can transform bad behavior. Why? Your child's bad behavior is often an expression of their feeling of distance from you. The closer they feel to you the better they will behave. The harder they will try to tame their own wild child if they feel you are out there going to bat for them.  Read more to see the synergistic cycle you set in motion when you stop apologizing for your ADHD child.

Starting a Synergistic Cycle

            By becoming an advocate for your child, you start a synergistic cycle that transforms symptoms into talents or at the least – lovable eccentricities. This will contrast with the danger of developing a vicious cycle that easily develops when negative views are taken of your child’s symptoms. The synergistic cycle you can develop is that 1) as you advocate for your child you feel empowered and you maintain your positive view of your child, 2) as you feel better about yourself and your child your interactions with him are loving and rewarding for your child, 3) as your child feels loved and rewarded he tries to show his love through increased efforts at home and at school, 4) as your child tries harder at school he begins to experience more positive feedback at school, 5) as your child interacts with you in more loving ways you find it easier to maintain your positive view and loving interactions and finally 6) the result of this synergistic cycle is that you and your child have a loving, close connected relationship where you are working with each other, and are on each other’s side.

           The opposite to the synergistic cycle is the vicious cycle. The vicious cycle that is set up by being an apologist for your child looks like this: 1) You apologize for your child’s behavior after a teacher gives you negative feedback about his behavior, 2) by accepting this negative feedback your own view of your child is that there must be something wrong with him, 3) you feel like you must have done something wrong and feel worse about yourself as a parent, 4) you are more likely to become angry with or frustrated with your child, 5) as your child gets negative feedback from you and feels a lack of closeness he behaves in problematic ways to express his own distress, 6) the more your child acts in problematic ways the more negative feedback he gets at school and the more frustrated you feel, 7) the more frustrated you feel the more difficult it is to feel connected to your child, 8) you and your child both feel a growing distance between the two of you and you begin to feel helpless and hopeless.

You can transform your child's ADHD symptoms by becoming an advocate. 

ADHD and Nature

The Chicago Tribune just did a story on ADHD that featured The Gift of ADHD: How to Transform Your Child's Problems into Strengths. The story highlighted the part from my book on the role of time in nature for reducing symptoms of ADHD.  I quoted a study in there that showed improvements in ability to focus and to follow directions following time spent in nature. I include  below an excerpt of the article and two links to the article and the sidebar.

Writing about the benefits of nature is probably one of the most "radical" treatments talked about in my book, but it also comes with some science to support it. The thing that seems crazy to me, is that its obvious to any parent that any child - ADHD  or otherwise - responds to being in Nature. In a conversation I had with Roger Housden, author of the series of 10 Poems to Change Your Life, I asked him what parenting advice the great poets would have for parents today. He said that Wordsworth writes about how Nature is the second mother to any child, that no mother can raise a child without nature. I wonder if the rise in ADHD diagnoses is related to how far we have gotten from understanding the importance of Nature.

One direct suggestion for parenting an ADHD child that comes from some of these thoughts and preliminary scientific findings on Nature is to

1) Never take away recess in school as a form of punishment. If this is what kids need to stay focused and follow directions, then you will be setting up  a vicious cycle which will lead to more and more behavioral disturbance. Parents need to get in the schools and advocate for their kids. You might even recommend "preventative interventions" and ask the school for occasional nature breaks to recharge your child's capacity to pay attention.

One of the most heartwarming stories I heard about turning around the punishment dynamic and giving a child what he or she really needs was about a school that stopped punishments for a child that was disruptive (diagnosed with ADHD) and gave him the Responsibility of taking care of a Remembrance Garden. It was a garden that was built to remember a child who had died. This ADHD student got to feel very worthy as he was given such an important responsibility and he got to get his nature fix. His behavior improved.  Parents and schools need to come together to start coming up with creative interventions like this rather than just going along with the vicious cycle of punishment.

here is the excerpt from the Chicago Tribune, by Julie Deardoff.

"Some studies have shown that children were more able to concentrate, complete tasks and follow directions after spending time in natural, especially green, settings, according to psychologist Lara Honos-Webb in "The Gift of ADHD" (New Harbinger Publications, $14.95). Camping, fishing or playing soccer outside were all considered green activities.

Activity alone couldn't explain the findings, because "playing basketball in paved surroundings didn't result in the improvements in concentration that even passive activities in green settings did," Honos-Webb wrote. Still, other studies contradict this to some extent.

Pros: Getting some outside exercise is good for you anyway, whether you're trying to treat attention deficit or another modern malady: obesity.

Cons: Not enough research to prove whether it works as a sole treatment."

here are the links to the  Chicago Tribune article, November 20, 2005.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/lifestyle/health/chi-0511200423nov20,1,5695885.column?coll=chi-health-hed

http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/lifestyle/health/chi-0511200402nov20,1,4385162.column?page=2&coll=chi-health-hed

What Labels Can Do

I received an email from a young author Michael Zowoiski who has written a guide, Pay Attention! Whadya Say? - a guide for teens with ADHD. he tells me about his own experience with being told he has ADHD:

I remember in 10th grade, I grew so angry with people only referring to me a label and not a human being, I acted out on purpose that whole year just to be mean to people. Furthermore, i just read in the lastest Scientific American about a person who saw a doctor for a  check up- and it was discovered the man had a shadow in his chest. It was cancer, and he died a few months later. The doctor went back and looked at his past medical records and it turned out that the shadow was there for at least 10yrs. The diagnosis killed him. I think a situation like that has a lot of truth for ADHDs

I think this a very powerful commentary on what the label of ADHD can do to kids. Michael tells us that he acted out BECAUSE he was so angry at the label. This is exactly what I talk about in my book, The Gift of ADHD. Many of the behavior problems result from the diagnosis, from kids having their differences called disorders. These kids know at some level that their differences make them excel at things other kids can't do. Then they get told they have a Deficit Disorder - It Makes Them Mad as Michael so clearly says. His is a powerful testimony for parents to consider. You might want to question labels before taking them on too quickly.


Lara Honos-Webb, Ph.D.
www.visionarysoul.com

link to Newsweek article featuring "The Gift of ADHD"
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7102727/site/newsweek/

Listen to a Heart-to-Heart on How to Find Your Life Path and Heal Yourself
http://www.byoaudio.com/play/WWTXckS4

ADHD Success Stories

Here is another story of a successful adult who was tormented in school because of ADHD but went on to do great things.

What I love about what he says is that failure is a necessary ingredient to success: Experiencing failure is the only way to breakthrough success, otherwise others would have gotten there before you. Parents work so hard to protect their children from failure. Fail is the dirtiest four letter letter word that starts with an F in the parenting world. What this successful person has to say, should help parents relax. Take the long-view. Your child's differences may be the very key to their contribution to the world. I read somewhere the other day that the over-protectiveness of parents in not letting them navigate through the world on their own merits is leading to a generation of kids who have great childhoods, great adolescents but completely ill equipped to be adults.   here's a gifted adhd adults story:

I am a 59 year old male who never got above C- in school. I was always in trouble for testing the limits of everything. I did go to MIT ("Good Will Hunting") but they were really glad to see me dropout. I have 75 US Patents and am responsible for 100's of millions of dollars in successful products.

One of my strengths was all the adverse life experiences, coupled with parents who said "don't worry about it", find a way around. It made me able to take risk, try new things and bring others to new horizons. I often have had people quit working for me because they could not take day-after-day of failure, only to be sorry later that they left too soon.

Experiencing failure is the only way to breakthrough success, otherwise others would have gotten there before you.

I raised two like-minded daughters who in contrast were discouraged by the school systems and their teacher mother. I pleaded to let them feel good about themselves but to little avail.

Many people who read your book really don't get it. I want to say to these people … To change these children is to eliminate the person who might find the cure to the common cold. Let these children do their thing and make them feel good about it.

Adult ADHD Skyrockets

See this new story in Newsweek about the skyrocketing rates of use of ADHD meds in adults

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9630257/site/newsweek/

I think one of the reasons ADHD diagnoses are skyrocketing is because adult's attention is exhausted. Of course we will have a deficit of attention if our attention is exhausted by being drawn in too many different directions or by having to focus our attention on things that are not interesting to us, or not in line with our deepest strengths and values. If you spend all day paying attention to stock quotes, but you want to be hiking with your kids, your attention will get exhausted and look like ADHD.  Adult ADHD can be a reflection of overstimulating lives, too many demands, and being out of whack with your own deepest values.

A darker side to the explosion of ADHD could be the lure of the medications themselves. Most of these drugs are stimulants, some have amphetamines in them, aka speed. Some people see a dealer in the doctor. I think its a bit crazy the way prescribing doctors and the FDA fail to see what any person who has ever worked in the substance abuse field sees so easily: These are highly addictive drugs.  Think of the episode on Desperate Housewives, where the mom was addicted to her kid's ADHD meds.  Even investors know this, Jim Cramer (short guy who yells a lot) on his show told investors to invest in these ADHD med companies. He said not only is use skyrocketing in kids, its skyrocketing more in adults. He flat out said, "plus these drugs are basically speed, these customers will be addicted and the demand will only increase"... Its very strange that the voice of sanity about the use of many of these ADHD drugs comes from a financial guy, while psychiatrists look the other way.....

Differences Not Disorders

I received permission to post some success stories of adults with ADHD symptoms. Here is one that highlights how the symptoms are interesting differences not disorders.

here it is, with a helpful tip that follows

Lara,
     I read your article about ADHD on MSN and I want to thank you. It's about time someone spoke up because I have never thought I "suffer" from ADHD. I always considered it a blessing and reveled in the fact my brain goes a million miles and hour in different directions all the time. Being able to harness that and control it to a degree has led to my success in a variety of interests. Also, I find everything in the entire world fascinating. I'm never bored because everything is just as interesting to me now as when I was 18, 10, or 7 years old. I have always thought "outside" the box and I have a staff of people, and some have Masters degrees in computer science, from all over the world working for me. I have no education whatsoever. But I do have ADHD. And because of this, I am able to solve problems that no amount of education can resolve. It's as though I can feel my subconscious churning and working things out, and when it arrives at the solution, my conscious mind is made aware of it and I see the answer as if it was on a movie screen, or held in my hand and completely tangible to me.
>     For the past few years though, I have become frustrated because I can appear rude in conversation. I can't focus longer than 4 or 5 seconds on what anyone is saying. It has nothing to do with how important the conversation is either. A single word can create an image in my head and then my  mind goes shooting off in some other direction. Or, a gust of wind suddenly has me thinking about wind pressure and the flexibility of tree branches, or if the branch scraping our window is slowly knocking molocules off the glass as it moves back and forth and how many years would it take to carve a hole through it. It's affected my friendships, my relationship with my wife, and sometimes hurt me in meetings with my boss. I have learned that I simply -cannot- focus longer than that. I may as well lift a mountain. Because I am the bread winner for my family, I considered some medications to help me focus, but after talking with other people who have manic depression, obsessive compulsion, and ADHD, they all say that it changes your ability to think. I never want to lose my creativity. My abilility to innovate new ideas based on all the fragmentmented,  random knowledge I have is truly the one thing I enjoy most about being alive. It is who I am and I will never give it up. So, I still take no medication, and after reading your article, I never will. I really hope other parents out there, like mine did, nurture their childrens creativity and interests. It seems like these days they want to turn them into zombies just because they find contemplating the aerodynamics of the plane flying outside the window far more interesting that who won what war, when, and with what army.

In response to the difficulty with listening to others' in conversation I suggested the following:

here is a simple experiment,  imagine your raring energy as a motor, and focus on the motor feeling rather than just being driven by it, then imagine a speedometer and mentally lower the speed your engine is revving at. these sorts of guided imagery can really work and if they don't you just entertained yourself for about 15 seconds and probably kept your mouth shut for the same amount of time. ;)

LHW

www.visionarysoul.com