While behavioral therapy and parenting methods can help kids overcome their ADHD-induced habits, books are still a powerful resource for tips on how to get things done, stay focused, and find motivation. Here are some children’s books that will inspire your child understand and overcome the limitations of ADHD without the use of medication. All of them can be found at your local bookstore or through Amazon.
The words “electro” and “therapy” often bring to mind cruel psychiatric treatments that seem more fitting in haunted asylums than in hospitals. Cranial electrotherapy stimulation (CES) is nothing like that. This fairly new technology involves administering very low electrical volts on the head to relieve depression, anxiety, and the symptoms of ADHD. Instead of going to a mental hospital to receive the treatment, CES can be done at home using a small handheld device. CES is approved by the Food and Drug Administration in the United States as a medical device, and recent studies show that it can improve attention spans and behavior among kids with ADHD. But is it really safe? Are there any side effects to CES?
The causes of ADHD can come from the most unlikely sources. A groundbreaking new study published in the American Journal of Epidemiology shows that preschool children who had more gas appliances at home had lower cognitive abilities and are more likely to have ADHD symptoms than their peers. The relationship seems strange, until you realize that gas appliances can be a source of indoor pollution. They release an odorless gas called nitrogen dioxide, a toxic pollutant that can interfere with the body’s ability to carry oxygen to the lung. If the ventilation at the kitchen is poor, this toxin can stay trapped inside the house and slowly waft up to the bedrooms. Young children do not have the immune system defenses to properly guard themselves against toxic substances. As a result, the smallest exposure to toxic chemicals may interfere with their nervous system growth and development.
Most parents are at a loss as to how to discipline their ADHD child. Your warnings go unheeded, the house rules are ignored, and threats seem to make no difference to their behavior. Managing the behavior of kids with ADHD definitely has its challenges, especially since traditional parenting skills do not usually work on them. But with a little help from experts on ADHD, you might become more effective at helping your child overcome ADHD while keeping their behavior in check. Below are five books that offer handy hints on parenting kids with ADHD.
Parenting Children with ADHD: Lessons That Medicine Cannot Teach
This book offers easily digestible information on how nutrition and certain therapies can improve the concentration, attention span, and behavior control of kids with ADHD. Although the book sometimes advocates the use of medication to treat ADHD, it also offers practical advice on behavior management. The author provides a well-rounded approach to teaching essential life skills, improving school success, and building compassion for others. There are also questionnaires, checklists, and homework at the end of every chapter for easy application.
Kids with ADHD can be very difficult to buy presents for. Like many parents, you are probably at a loss as to what to get for your ADHD child this holiday season. If you buy an expensive toy, there’s a high chance that they’ll accidentally break it or lose interest in it after a few days. But if you get them something too simple, they may not even glance at it, leaving the present to gather dust at the back of a closet.
Before you head out to go Christmas shopping for your ADHD child, take the time to know your child and what hobbies or topics is he or she interested in. Children with ADHD may be fickle and easily bored, but they only behave this way when faced with tasks or subjects that do not interest them. But give them a present related to their real interests, and you’ll find that your child is actually capable of sitting still and staying quiet for hours – and using your present until it naturally falls apart. Here are some gift suggestions that might help you decide what to get your kids this Christmas.
Getting your kids started on a gluten-free casein-free diet (GFCF) or the Feingold Diet can be difficult. After all, these diets forbid children from eating candy, cookies, pizza, and other foods they love. ADHD diets make cooking and doing the groceries difficult for parents too; gone are the days when you can just buy bags of potato chips or whip up a plate of pasta to ease your children’s hunger pangs. But you don’t have to come up with gourmet dishes to cook for ADHD kids, and implementing an ADHD diet does not mean restricting your children to bland, uninteresting food while their friends feast on tasty morsels. With the help of these ADHD cookbooks, your kids can eat delicious, nutritious meals without becoming uncontrollably hyperactive and inattentive after.
The Kid-Friendly ADHD and Autism Cookbook: The Ultimate Guide to the Gluten-Free, Casein-Free Diet
This book is an excellent primer for parents who are new to the gluten-free casein-free diet. Not only do the pages contain kid-friendly recipes without milk or wheat, but the authors also explain how and why the diet works. The ingredients used in the recipes are also explained, along with tips on how to find them.
The Autism & ADHD Diet: A Step-by-Step Guide to Hope and Healing by Living Gluten Free and Casein Free (GFCF) and Other Interventions
Yet another useful guide for parents who are unfamiliar with the GFCF diet. This book also contains advice on where to buy GFCF foods, tips on avoiding cross-contamination, understanding ingredients labels, and how to make the GFCF diet work for your child and your family.
Family vacations are a great opportunity to bond with the children, and with winter break fast approaching you’re probably deciding where to go. But some vacation destinations might not be suitable for kids with ADHD. Long lines at theme park rides and restaurants, rainy days spent in a hotel room, hours in an airplane seat, noise, crowds – these are difficult for anyone, but especially if you’re traveling with someone who has ADHD. Kids with ADHD are very distractible, restless, impatient, and sensitive to bright lights and loud sounds. Although you might have gotten used to helping your child manage these symptoms at home, handling them in a strange new place is a different story. Vacations mean change and if you already had a routine set up for your child, the lack of structure during the trip might make the symptoms return full force.
While there’s no guarantee of a smooth-sailing vacation, planning ahead is one of two keys to having a great time. The other key is to know what your children want – are they more comfortable with quiet surroundings or the bustle of a big city? Do they prefer the ocean or do they flourish in the fresh mountain air?
There’s more to childhood ADHD than just chronic hyperactivity and inattention. Children with ADHD are likely to experience other psychiatric conditions like depression and anxiety. What is less well known is the relationship between ADHD and motor coordination problems, particularly in the spine’s postural muscles and ocular (eye) muscles. For this reason, ADHD falls under an umbrella category called developmental delay syndromes (DDS), which encompasses conditions like learning disabilities, dyslexia, and dyspraxia. In fact, researchers discovered that dyspraxia, or poor motor coordination and muscle strength, is a common denominator of these four conditions. If these conditions persist in one child, can treating the co-morbid motor impairment problems have a positive effect on attention problems, hyperactive behavior, and impulse control?
The answer to this may lie in chiropractic treatment. Chiropractic is a profession that specializes in the correction of spinal dysfunctions called “vertebral subluxations”. Those spinal problems lead to neurological dysfunctions that can lead to symptoms similar to ADHD. The brain relies on a spine with proper structure and movement for it to function well, and any problems with the spine can affect how the brain receives and transmits information. By addressing these structural problems, chiropractic can treat both the motor coordination issues and cognitive deficits found in ADHD. The last decade has seen a number of studies on this subject, but a new long-term study published in the Journal of Manipulative and Physiological Therapeutics shows how a multi-modal chiropractic treatment can help.
For many kids with ADHD, the biggest challenge they confront everyday is the inability to pay attention – in the classroom, while doing their homework, sometimes while watching a movie. Of all the human faculties, attention used to be one of the least understood. It’s neither a skill nor a talent; it seems to be an inborn ability that cannot be taught or acquired. However, the latest developments in neuro-imaging and genetics provide us with a wider and more sophisticated understanding of how attention works. Studies show that attention is critical to more practical life skills, like the ability to organize things, make deep connections with others, even developing a conscience. More importantly, researchers have discovered that people can be taught how to pay attention, even if they suffer from ADHD.
Brain retraining programs are designed to correct old habits of thinking that lend itself to distractibility, inattention, and lack of focus. Using imaging technology and foundations in neuroscience, brain retraining programs are an alternative treatment that can target the same deficits ADHD medications seek to correct. Although these technologies have not been around long enough to determine if their benefits will last, kids and adults who have tried them found that brain retraining helps in the here and now. The following brain retraining programs are particularly helpful for children with ADHD, but they come with their own drawbacks and limitations.
Neurofeedback
What it does: Neurofeedback is based on the principle that individuals with ADHD have abnormal brain wave pattern that are either over-stimulated or under-stimulated. Beta waves should appear in tasks that require concentration and focus, but individuals with ADHD usually have large theta wave patterns, which indicate a state of daydream. Neurofeedback can retrain the brain until they emit beta waves, thus eliminating symptoms of inattention and distractibility.
How it works: The practitioner will take the medical history of the child and identify the symptoms that need to be treated. Then electrodes will be strapped on to the child’s head while he or she performs a cognitive task like reading out loud. The brain wave activity will be mapped out so the practitioner can figure out the abnormalities in the pattern – which is the theoretical source of the child’s ADHD symptoms. Through a computer game, the child’s brain will then be retrained. The computer game will only work if the child concentrates and emits beta waves. If there are too many theta waves, the game stops working and will only resume when the child concentrates once more. The positive benefits of neurofeedback training remain for months and years after the last session. After a year of therapy, patients tend to reduce their medication dose by 50% or stop taking them altogether.
Costs and drawbacks: The sessions are only 30 minutes long and completely painless. However, the average cost of a treatment course can range anywhere from $2,000 to $5,000. Neurofeedback practitioners are also only available in certain areas. Finally, neurofeedback can only address the inattention issues of the ADHD spectrum and should be used in combination with other treatments.
Bottom line: If you can afford to pay for the neurofeedback treatments, it seems to be worth a shot, especially if your child cannot concentrate on schoolwork.
Poor academic performance and problems with peers are not the only difficulties faced by kids with attention deficit hyperactive disorder. New research shows that children and teens with ADHD are more likely to get frequent and severe injuries than children without.
The inattention and hyperactivity plagued by children with ADHD place them at higher risk of getting injured while crossing the street, riding a bicycle, or playing in the playground. They are also more likely to injure more than one part of their body, receive concussions and other head injuries, or get hospitalized for accidentally ingesting poison. Although the average child is also likely to receive these injuries at least once, children with ADHD experience these accidents more frequently. Often, the extent of their injuries tends to be more severe and result in temporary disability or admission to intensive care units.
Researchers peg the occurrence of these accidents to the ADHD symptoms at play and other co-morbid disorders that occur with ADHD. For instance, a child with ADHD may engage in high-risk games without thinking of the dangers, or cross the street without looking for oncoming traffic. For ADHD teens that drive, car accidents and other traffic violations are a real concern. In fact, some studies observe that young drivers with ADHD are more likely to have their license suspended due to accidents and traffic violations. Other high-risk behaviors for teens with ADHD are engaging in premarital sex, drug experimentation or abuse, and dropping out of school.
Of course, the more serious accidents tend to occur if the ADHD is left untreated or if the treatment is insufficient. It’s not enough to simply medicate children and teens for ADHD; one must implement a holistic treatment and teach them injury prevention tactics. Experts recommend taking these safety precautions around children and teens with ADHD: