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?

Choosing a vacation destination

Some kids thrive in a more natural environment. Open fields or a body of water to swim in are a great outlet for pent-up energy. Another reason why trees and fields make good ADHD medicine is that they provide fewer distractions than the bright lights and noise of a city. The tranquility of the great outdoors also relaxes and revitalizes crucial parts of the brain that handle concentration and attention.

However, not all children enjoy the woods. If your child is sensitive to heat, bug bites, and has low stamina, going camping or hiking might not be the best idea.

Wherever you decide to go or whatever you choose to do, just make sure the destination has something that interests your child. Kids with ADHD are bound to enjoy the vacation if they have a hand in planning, and will be more patient and tolerant about getting there.

Tips on traveling with ADHD children

Once you’ve decided where you want to go, try to keep these guidelines in mind so your child’s ADHD symptoms stay under control.

Stay consistent with diets

Vacations may seem like the perfect opportunity to indulge in a sweet treat or two, but the only way to keep symptoms at bay is for your child to stick with his or her diet. You probably noticed that your child is more hyperactive or irritable without the diet, and you certainly don’t want this to happen during the vacation. If your child is intolerant to gluten and casein, stay away from quaint stores that offer baked goods. If your child is on the Feingold diet, keep avoiding foods with artificial additives.

Bring ADHD-friendly snacks

Hungry children tend to be cranky and whiny, but even more so when they have ADHD. Chances are, the restaurants you’ll encounter on the road won’t have many ADHD-friendly foods. For healthy on-the-road snacks, bring a bag of walnuts or dried fruit instead of chips. Don’t forget to pack bottles of water or natural fruit juice in the car with you too.

Familiarize your children

Kids with ADHD may have some fears or anxieties about going to a strange new place. Get them excited about the trip by talking about your destination, how you’ll be getting there, and showing them photos of the vacation spot. If your child feels anxious about riding a plane for the first time, take a drive to the airport. Watch the planes take off and land to show your child how perfectly safe they are.

Maintain the structure

Children with ADHD need predictability and may be stressed or anxious by an overly-spontaneous trip. Stick to regular mealtimes and bedtimes as much as possible; ADHD symptoms won’t improve if they get too little sleep or forget to eat. You don’t have to keep a timetable of each day, but let your child know what activities to expect.

As a parent of a child with ADHD, you’ve probably noticed something I observe among my patients: kids with ADHD don’t do well in the winter.  As fall turns to winter and a blanket of snow covers the streets, kids with ADHD tend to:

• Become more hyperactive or impulsive as they grow increasingly restless. In the winter, they have fewer opportunities to burn excess energy or do activities they enjoy outside of school or at home.
• Become more argumentative and oppositional due to the inability to use their regular coping skills, such as outdoor activities or sports, to help them vent their feelings and burn off excess energy.
• Become more distracted and inattentive, resulting in difficulties doing homework or completing errands and chores.
• Experience more disciplinary or legal trouble as their frustration, restlessness, impulsivity, and hyperactivity increases.

Does this sound like your child?

Like everyone else, children with ADHD develop habits, skills, or behaviors that enable them to cope with their feelings, highs, lows, and the obstacles caused by their symptoms. Perhaps you’ve helped your child develop some of these healthy habits.  While the average child can easily cope with the changes caused by the seasons, most of those with ADHD do not handle change well.  They overreact to these disruptions because they perceive a threat underneath the change. Because of their symptoms, their reactions to change tend to involve the behaviors described above.

What can you do to help your ADHD child cope with the winter blues?

• Keep the house as well-lit and cheerful as possible. In the daytime, draw back the curtains and bring in as much natural light as you can. At night, use lamps or light up the room with a string of Christmas lights. Dark, dreary environments can aggravate ADHD symptoms or trigger seasonal affective disorder.
• Enroll your child in a gym or a winter camp. These programs will provide your child with enough activities to keep him or her occupied, happy, and fit.
• Turn a spare bedroom or garage into a homemade gym for days when your child has no choice but to stay indoors.  You don’t have to buy state-of-the-art exercise equipment for this; your homemade gym have a hula hoop, exercise balls, a tension band, a trampoline if there’s enough space, or a television with a Wii sports console.
• Spend some quality time with your child. Ask about how your child’s day went and what he or she is feeling.  Make it a real bonding session by sharing similar stories from your childhood.

Most children with ADHD will show significant improvements with these interventions but if your child’s symptoms continue to persist, check with your health care provider immediately.  Kids and teens with ADHD are more likely to experience depression during the cold winter months.

If children with ADHD are more likely to get injured in the playground, are ADHD teens of driving age at higher risk for motor vehicle accidents as well?  It seems that the answer is yes.  Teenage bravado coupled with distractibility, impulsivity, and difficulty with self-regulation can make the ADHD driver a force to reckon with on the road.  Even though a teenager with ADHD may have good knowledge of driving rules, applying these rules may be challenging, especially if he or she gets easily overwhelmed by new stimuli, increased responsibility, and distractions from gadgets.

Studies have also confirmed that teenage drivers with ADHD are indeed more accident-prone than peers without. According to the research of psychologist Russell Barkley, people with ADHD speed four times more often than those without the disorder.  ADHD drivers are also two or three times more likely to get into an accident, three times more likely to have their licenses revoked in their first five to eight years of driving, and five times more likely to get a parking ticket. The latest research on the subject comes from Central Michigan University, where PhD candidate Michele Oliver was able to compare the driving skills of young motorists with ADHD and without.

Oliver’s research is currently being done in cooperation with Professor Richard Backs, director of the Driving Evaluation Education and Research Center.  The Center is equipped with an AAA Michigan driving simulator, which allows driving instructors and researchers to test people’s driving abilities without endangering the driver and motorists on the road. Oliver has been able to test two groups of young drivers using the simulator – one with ADHD and one without. Both groups had displayed the same awareness of driving rules and possessed the same skills.  However, those in the ADHD group ran more stop signs, stop signals, and had more crashes and multiple crashes in the simulator.  Oliver is still determining the reasons for these outcomes and hopes to confirm these by the end of fall.

These grim facts don’t necessarily mean that your teenage ADHD driver will get into an accident. For one thing, the risk is greatly reduced once your child has managed to control his or her symptoms. There are also several things you can do to keep your child safe on the road.

Prolong driver education

The conventional practice is to delay driving education only until a he or she is old enough to get a license at sixteen.  However, the opposite approach might work better for those with ADHD. As young as 14, start explaining driving rules, demonstrating driving skills, and establishing safe driving habits. Depending on your child’s ADHD symptoms, it may be wise to delay licensure until he or she turns 18, when your child is more mature and careful.

Practice driving together

Use practice driving time as an incentive for good behavior.  Spend at least 30 minutes each time driving and use this as an opportunity to address the challenges faced by your child.  Ask your child if there’s anything that distracts him and find a way to overcome these distractions.   When your child gets a learner’s permit, don’t sign it unless you agree upon certain rules, such as no cellphone use while driving or limit music sources to just one CD or tape.

Restrict your child’s driving

Once your child gets his or her license, draw up driving restrictions or conditions where your child receives driving privileges in increments.  Here are some examples of rules you can enforce:

• Plan every trip ahead of time and inform a parent in advance.
• Driving is only restricted to necessarily trips, such as school, after-school jobs, or team events.
• Keep your cellphone on silent mode to avoid getting distracted by text messages or calls.
• For the first three to six months, no passengers are allowed except for parents.
• For the first six months, no night driving is allowed without a parent on board.

Remember, driving is a privilege, not a right.  Evaluate your child’s overall behavior and determine if your child really is ready to drive.  If he or she consistently throws temper tantrums or breaks rules, there’s a chance that your child is not mature enough to get behind the wheel.

Nothing damages a parent’s trust and creates tension more than habitual lying from their child.  It’s normal for kids to tell the occasional white lie, but compulsive lying is a habit that many children with ADHD can’t get away from.  Lying tends to come with ADHD symptoms, especially if the child has not learned to control them.  For instance, a child with ADHD might lie because his distractible nature made him abandon an important task; when asked about his progress, he quickly saves face with a lie.

However difficult it might be to deal with this behavior, try to understand that most ADHD kids who lie don’t mean to be dishonest.  All children (even those without ADHD) keep a few lies in their tool boxes of responses.  It’s just that children with ADHD (and related disorders) take longer to realize that lying is not a desirable trait for relationships and character building.  Disciplining your child for his or her untruths is one way to stop the habit, as is finding a way to treat the symptoms that triggered the lie in the first place. Meanwhile, here are a few tips that can help you get your child to tell the truth.

Learn the difference between lying and exaggeration

Children often exaggerate, and kids with ADHD are no exception – they have colorful minds and view the world differently from other children.  They are also more impulsive and spontaneous when they tell stories or explain situations.  Try not to confuse this with lying; a child’s embellished stories are a sign of a creative imagination rather than the inability to tell the truth.

Don’t call your child a liar

Lying is a frustrating habit to deal with, but try not to verbally or mentally brand your child a “liar”. A liar is part of a person’s essence – it is something a person is.  The occasional lie does not mean your child is a liar.  It is a response your child chose, but it is not a permanent part of who he or she is.

Show the consequences of lying

Take away privileges if you catch your child lying – and stay consistent. For instance, if your child loses two days worth of TV privileges for lying, make sure that he or she goes nowhere near the TV for exactly two days.  At the same time, don’t promise your child lighter consequences if he or she tells the truth. For instance, let’s say your child broke the window and owned up to it, but tries to wiggle his way out of punishment by pointing out that he told the truth.  This is a type of plea bargaining that confuses children. Praise your child for telling the truth, but he should be held accountable for breaking the window.

Be honest about your doubts

If you’re not sure whether or not your child broke the window, be honest. Say, “I don’t think that’s how it happened.” This way, you don’t accuse your child of lying outright; you are simply sharing what you think about the situation.

Don’t assume that your child is lying

It’s hard to trust a child who has lied more than once, but try not to assume that your child is lying every time.  Your child will lose the motivation to tell the truth; there’s no incentive for being honest if you’re going to assume that what he or she says is a lie.

Transforming behavior takes time

Lying is a habit that won’t disappear overnight, especially if your child is still adjusting to treatments.  Don’t focus on eliminating the habit; instead, look for small improvements in your child’s behavior. As your child’s symptoms improve, he or she will regain more control over behaviors and actions, and the lying will eventually diminish.

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.

Books

Your child probably has a variety of interests, but he or she might be especially fond of one specific subject. Get your child a book on this subject. Non-fiction books on insects, pirates, magic, and other topics that interests kids can be easily found at any bookstore. Many kids with ADHD are also avid readers and have certain books they enjoy reading, whether it’s comic books, teen romances, or horror stories. Find out what your child enjoys reading about then find a fiction book that follows this theme.

Arts & Crafts

Kids with ADHD are known for their original thinking and creativity. Encourage this part of your child’s personality by giving them art supplies. You can easily find paints, clay, paper, and markers at office supply stores and craft stores. Make sure you check toy stores for toys that promote creativity; for instance, Crayola has a play set that allows kids to make their own crayons. Consider giving the art supplies along with a book that details simple projects they can do with their materials.

Toys with wheels

By this, I mean a bicycle, a pair of Rollerblades, or a skateboard. Movement addresses the hyperactive component, and toys like these will give your child a chance to release some of this extra energy. Did you know that riding a bike or skating counts as exercise too? And that exercise is the cheapest, natural way to manage ADHD?

Musical instrument

If your child shows interest in a particular instrument, why not give the opportunity to learn this instrument? Music lessons are great for kids with ADHD because they address the creative component, attention component, and behavior component all at the same time.

Fidget toys

You can actually reduce hyperactivity by giving your child fidget toys – tiny toys that provide sensory input or engage your child’s attention during “quiet” events. Fidget toys allow kids with ADHD to attend to an interesting activity without excessive movement or talking. Try giving your child a bag with fidget toys and carry this with you to family gatherings to control your child’s behavior. Examples of fidget toys include small manipulative toys, textured toys, a squeezable toy, or a handheld video game that can be muted.

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:

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Australian epidemiologist Dr. Michael Abramson discovered that text messaging can rewire young people’s brains and train them to become careless. One of the main culprits is a feature called predictive text messaging, where the phone’s software guesses the word the user wants to type and completes it with a keystrokes. It’s fast and efficient, but horribly inaccurate. Experts believe that a developing child’s brain can be vulnerable to this sort of carelessness with frequent use.

In a pioneering study, Dr. Abramson and his colleagues from Monash University in Melbourne examined the cellphone use of 317 non-ADHD adolescents aged 11 to 14. 25% made more than 15 calls a week, and another 25% sent over 20 text message weekly. This data was then compared these to their scores in a battery of computer tests. He observed that students who used text mobile phones accomplished the tests faster, but their answers were considerably inaccurate.

The findings of this study seem to support the observations of cognitive scientist Laura-Ann Petitto from the University of Toronto. She points out that adolescents today are more vulnerable to behaviors promoted by cellphone use because their dependence on these gadgets occurs at a critical age of brain development. During the pre-adolescent and early teen years, the mind is still open, changing, and growing. When confronted by a technology that demands speediness and automatic behavior, it increases the likelihood of making careless errors and impulsive responses.

Dr. Petitto adds that text messaging in particular addresses a brain function that is central to human beings – language. Although text messaging is visual, it also makes use of language, and features like predictive messaging may stunt the language growth of adolescents. Researchers observe that heavy cellphone use makes young people likely to commit spelling errors in everyday words like “occurrence”. They are also more likely to be more tolerant of grammatical mistakes and incorporate these into their lexicon.

Fortunately, young minds are also very resilient. Dr. Pettito says that the bad habits instilled by text messaging can easily be reversed. But first, you need to pry the child away from the cellphone.

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