You’re probably familiar with the benefits of meditation for stressed out adults, but have you heard about the ways meditation can help children with ADHD? As an ADHD natural treatment, meditation teaches children to reign in their impulses, provides them with clarity, and helps them recover from the pressures of school. All children need to find ways to center themselves so they can focus, learn discipline, and feel positive about themselves. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if your ADHD child could have better focus in the classroom and feel at peace?  Here are a few tips that will show you how to make meditation a part of your ADHD child’s life.

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Taking care of a child with ADHD is a 24-hour challenge. From getting your child out of bed in the morning to making sure he sleeps at night, it feels like you’re engaged in a tug-of-war all day long. While there are certainly many resources that can help parents cope with ADHD behavioral problems, it seems that the more they read, the more confused they become as to how to discipline their child. The key to ADHD parenting is to realize that your child’s brain is wired differently from his peers. One-size-fit-all parenting approaches won’t always work with your child, but here are five secrets that do.

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Stimulant medication may be the most widely-used treatment for ADHD, but more and more parents are looking into natural ADHD treatments after learning about the debilitating side effects of these drugs.  Still, the transition from ADHD medications to natural treatments isn’t always easy. A lot of lifestyle adjustments have to be made, and it takes weeks for any positive changes to appear.   For this reason, parents prefer the quick fix of medication over drug-free treatments, especially if the symptoms are severe. But if there was a way to beat your child’s symptoms without medication and its side effects, wouldn’t you take it?  Here are the most popular ways to beat ADHD without medication.

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Video games have long been thought to worsen ADHD, but current research seems to be turning the tables on popular opinion. L. Eugene Arnold, M.D. of Ohio State University is working to develop a video game system that improves ADHD through neurofeedback.

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In the morning rush before school, it’s perfectly natural for kids to skip out on breakfast. However, try to make sure your child gets a bite of a high-protein meal in the morning. A new study published in the Environmental Health Journal discovered that a healthy breakfast is good for children with ADHD, not only for the energy it provides, but because it reduces the body’s absorption of lead. As you may already know, lead is one of the leading ADHD causes in children today.

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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?

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Several months ago, I blogged about how ADHD can be caused by retained primitive reflexes.  For those who missed this, let me give you a brief recap about this condition. Primitive reflexes are an infant’s automatic reaction to certain stimuli, which are designed to protect them from harm and facilitate their neurological development. A baby’s tight grasp on your finger is a good example of a primitive reflex. As the baby grows, the brain integrates these primitive reflexes so they can evolve into higher brain processes like logic and reasoning. However, the integration process can sometimes be problematic, and the baby ends up “retaining” the primitive reflexes into childhood. These retained reflexes can cause symptoms of ADHD and other neurologic problems.

A group of experts from Purdue University recently discovered a simple technique to treat retained reflexes and reduce hyperactivity among children with ADHD.  This technique is no other than re-learning to crawl!

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It’s not uncommon for doctors to prescribe powerful stimulants to children who cannot focus at school. In fact, many teachers suggest using Ritalin to control ADHD symptoms in the classroom, even before a child is properly diagnosed.  While it’s hard to blame overworked teachers who have to deal with noisy, hyperactive children every day, a Scandinavian study shows that adding white noise to a classroom is just as effective at helping kids focus than drugs.

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It’s difficult to quantify what the most effective ADHD treatment is. Because a child experiences more problems than hyperactivity, impulsivity, and inattention, it’s not uncommon for parents to use more than one method to treat ADHD.   But which of these treatments have the most impact?  According to a new survey from Consumer Reports, stimulants are the most effective ADHD treatment for kids, but parents still think it’s not enough.  In fact, the survey notes that kids who tried alternative treatments besides medication did better than kids who were on medication only. As for the most effective non-medical treatment for ADHD, it turns out that sending children to a school better equipped to deal with ADHD made all the difference.

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When we think of possible ADHD natural treatments for children, tonsil removal is hardly the first thing that comes to mind. After all, ADHD is caused by the interaction between genetics and the environment. What does removing tonsils have to do with reducing hyperactivity, impulsivity, and inattention?  The answer is more surprising than you think.

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