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.

Adapt your parenting techniques to ADHD

There’s a reason why discipline techniques that seem to work for all kids aren’t quite as effective among kids with ADHD. Research discovered that the socio-emotional development of these children is slightly delayed.  A six-year-old boy with ADHD has the emotional development of a four-year-old.  If this is the case with your child, try to find parenting techniques that work with his stage of development rather than his biological age.

A popular example is the “time-out” technique, a discipline tool recommended to help ADHD kids overcome impulsive behavior like hitting or talking back.  Parents are told to look at a child’s age, then add one minute of time-out for every year.  Hence, your six-year-old should spend six minutes calming down in timeout. However, your six-year-old also has ADHD and will react more like a five-year-old.  So five minutes in timeout may be more appropriate.

Motivate with rewards

Tempting as it may be to punish a child who constantly misbehaves, studies show that children with ADHD respond better to rewards instead.  Going back to the timeout example – if your child refuses to stay quiet during timeout, say that the timeout will be twice as long, but he can reduce it to the usual 5 minutes by staying quiet. By placing the focus on reward rather than punishment, you speak a language someone with ADHD can understand.  Another tip is to help your child correct mistakes by showing the proper way to accomplish the task, rather than getting hung up on what went wrong.

Work on motor skills

Make a habit to work on your child’s motor skills. Studies show that many children with the disorder also experience delays in motor development, which can explain poor handwriting or “clumsy” behavior. Fun games like playing catch helps develop motor skills while enhancing you child’s ability to follow directions.

Focus on your child’s strengths

There’s a silver lining to having childhood ADHD. Current research reveals that children with the disorder tend to be more creative and have a knack for finding out-of-the-box solutions. Encourage your child’s hobbies and talents, and teach him to use these to compensate for the shortcomings of the disorder.  Give your child a smile or hug when you see him working on his hobbies, and be present during your child’s games or recitals.

Stay consistent

Exhausted parents want a quick solution to their children’s hyperactive behavior, so they tend to experiment with different strategies every other day. Just as it takes time for ADHD natural treatments to take effect, so do disciplining techniques need time and consistency before you notice any results. Remain consistent with household routines, rewards, and punishments.   The first week or so is the hardest, but children eventually learn to adapt to these strategies as time goes by. Just make sure that your child continues his or her ADHD treatments in the process.

Join a support group

One of the best ways to cope with the diagnosis is by joining an ADHD support group. Fellow parents of children with ADHD are more than happy to give you tips and advice on managing your child’s symptoms and dealing with the challenges of the disorder.  At the very least, a support group will provide you with a sympathetic ear when things get especially stressful.

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.

Create a routine

Did you know that many ADHD symptoms can be avoided with a good routine?  For instance, lack of sleep normally makes adults cranky and fatigued during the day, but this brings about hyperactive behavior in children. To make sure your child gets at least 8 hours of sleep each night, establish a regular bedtime and waking time.  Having a regular dinner time also helps; the closer dinner is to bedtime, the harder it will be for your child to fall asleep because the body is too busy digesting.

Eliminate “bad” foods

Artificial flavoring, coloring, and preservatives can trigger ADHD because of the chemicals they contain.  Parents observe that eliminating foods with artificial additives have done much to improve their child’s behavior. Start by using 100% fruit juice instead of juice boxes, juice mixes, and soft drinks, which are artificially colored and flavored.  Avoid all brightly-colored foods, as these are definitely full of food dyes. As much as possible, cook from scratch and avoid bottled sauces, which contain artificial preservatives.

Exercise and sports

ADHD kids – especially the hyperactive ones – need a physical outlet for all their pent-up energy. Studies show that thirty minutes of exercise and physical activity is just as effective at reducing symptoms as medication. Enroll your class in an after-school sport, or buy equipment like a trampoline or a skateboard.  Unstructured activity like jumping and skating is just as beneficial as participating in organized sports.  

Provide supplements

Many case of ADHD are caused by a lack of nutrients in a child’s diet.  Even with a healthy, balanced diet, your child might not be getting the nutrients he or she needs.  With the advice of a health care professional, supplement your child’s meals with an omega-3 fish oil capsule, multivitamin, or amino acids.

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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.

How Neurofeedback Video Games Might Help with ADHD

According to Dr. Arnold, it’s all about the child’s brain waves. Studies have reported that children with ADHD tend to have slower brain waves than others. Their minds tend to linger at the theta frequency, which is associated with the tuning out of stimuli. As a result, ADHD kids tend to be unable to focus on certain tasks at hand.

What neurofeedback gaming hopes to achieve is stimulating the brain to operate at the beta frequency, which is associated with calm, focused states. Dr. Arnold, with the cooperation of Smartbrain Technologies in California, is developing a video game system that attaches painless electrodes to the gamer’s scalp, allowing the machine to read the frequency of the player’s brain waves. If the waves operate at the beta level, the game plays smoothly. If they drop to the theta frequency, however, the player loses control over the game and cannot progress.

What this hopes to achieve is to develop a method of training ADHD children to work more at the beta brain wave frequency, improving their ability to focus. Dr. Arnold notes that although his current findings seem promising, there is much more research to be done before he can determine whether or not his system is effective in improving ADHD.

Criticisms

Not all experts are convinced by Dr. Arnold’s research, however. Numerous studies have identified video games as a major distraction for children; a study conducted in Iowa State University found that children and adults had more attention problems the more often they played video games. Although many supporters of video games argue that modern games actually require a lot of focus and reward the player for performing structured tasks, video games continue to distract children from their real-life responsibilities.

In addition, video games tend to deprive children of two important developmental activities: physical outdoor play and interaction with peers. While some video game developers have taken steps forward by encouraging cooperative play and incorporating motion controls in their games, these continue to be inadequate replacements for real play and real communication.

Video Games and Your ADHD Child

So what does this all mean for your child? Should she be allowed to play video games, or should she be kept away from them? The answer, according to experts, is balance. Video games can be used as a reward for responsibility fulfillment, or as a small treat during the weekends. Some kids show an amazing degree of focus and concentration when they play video games, and studies have found that the right types of games can be very mentally-stimulating. The key is to limit playtime so that kids can prioritize more important behavior; the American Academy of Pediatrics, for example, recommends limiting television and video game time to a maximum to two hours a day.

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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.

According to the Environmental Protection Agency, lead is the primary environmental health threat to children today because of its harmful neurological impact. Aside from causing ADHD, lead is responsible for learning disabilities, violent behavior, and hearing loss. Children absorb more lead than adults because of their underdeveloped immune systems, and the study discovered that lead absorption is ten times higher on an empty stomach.

The study looked at blood samples from 1,344 children and assessed the amount of lead, copper, iron, magnesium, zinc, and calcium. The parent of each child also filled a questionnaire about their child’s diet and eating habits. After looking at the data, the researchers observed that children who ate regular breakfasts had lower blood levels of lead at 6.1 micrograms per 100ml. Those who had irregular breakfasts had higher lead levels at 7.2 micrograms per 100ml. Interestingly enough, the researchers also discovered that low amounts of lead is also related to high zinc levels in the blood.

How do children get exposed to lead? Even though lead-based paint and leaded gasoline has been banned, traces of this heavy metal can be found in most foods and drinking water because of lead in the soil and industrial waste containing lead.  Lead can sometimes be found in toys and certain cosmetics.  So aside from providing a good breakfast every morning, take a few minutes to wash all new toys, filter water, and use organic products to protect your child from lead’s harmful effects.

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.

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!

According to Nancy O’Dell, a professor in child development and specialist in learning disabilities, ADHD hyperactive behavior is due to a symmetric tonic neck reflex. This is the reflex babies use when they assume the crawling position – they bend their knees and extend the arms, head, and neck.  Normally, the symmetric tonic reflex disappears when the child’s neurological and muscular development lets limbs move independently for actual crawling. But if a child did not crawl enough or crawl properly, there may be problems with the integration of this reflex and cause issues in childhood.  Some of these issues include ADHD-like behaviors like difficulty writing, inability to sit down, and short attention span.

Right now, Nancy O’Dell is training four teachers on crawling exercises that they can use to help their students stay attentive and calm in class.  The teachers will work with four hyperactive students 15 minutes each day for the next eight months and if they prove to be successful, the exercises may be a regular part of the school curriculum.  The crawling exercises are actually more challenging than they seem because they require the child to hold the neck up while moving on hands and knees.  However, the discomfort is said to go away with time, and results so far have been encouraging.

I’ll be looking into the results of these exercises once the eight-month period is over. You can learn more about this unusual treatment at the Miriam Bender Achievement Center.

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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.

The study was lead by Dr. Goran Sunderland from Stockholm University and involved the participation of 51 students at a school in Norway.  Before the experiment took place, their ability to pay attention in class was properly assessed.  Then, the students took a test where they had to remember as many items as possible for a list.  They were then asked to read out all the items they remembered, with white noise in the background or without.  The final results showed that those who had trouble paying attention and remembering items performed better with white noise turned on.

While the study could not explain exactly why white noise was able to help inattentive students, Dr Sunderland theorizes that it may have a positive influence on brain chemistry.  Children and adults with ADHD have low levels of the neurotransmitter dopamine, which makes the brain under-stimulated and moving at suboptimal levels.  One common symptom of ADHD is fidgeting – children and adults with the disorder can’t stop moving their feet or tapping their fingers. Dr Sunderland believes that this activity is their way of creating the neural noise that the brain needs to increase attention and arousal. Similarly, white noise – a random combination of different sound frequencies – is thought to boost neural activity, allowing the brain to work more effectively and helping the child focus and pay attention.

The study authors predict that their findings could help parents who are uneasy about medicating their child for ADHD. However, more research needs to be done before white noise can be recommended for classroom use, especially those with a mixture of students with and without ADHD.  For children who have no trouble paying attention, white noise is simply distracting noise. Additionally, different brains need different levels of white noise in order to work properly.

However, parents who are looking for ways to help their ADHD children can try to use these findings at home.  If your child has trouble concentrating on homework, try to keep an electric fan or air-conditioner running in the room.  These two appliances are one of the best sources of white noise.  For ADHD children who have trouble sleeping, sleep experts suggest playing a CD or mp3 of beach waves or falling rain to quiet their minds and lull them to sleep.

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.

Consumer Reports spoke to 934 parents of children with ADHD and asked them about various topics, from the impact of ADHD medications to the effects of alternative treatments like behavior therapy and diets.  It was discovered that 84% of parents medicated their children at some point, and that 67% of them reported that the stimulants were helpful.  What’s surprising is that not all of the parents were satisfied with the effects of medication, even those who reported that they reduced hyperactivity and inattention.  Only 52% of parents believed that if they could do it all over again, they would medicate their children, whereas 44% also wished there was another way to treat ADHD.  It’s likely that these findings were due to the various side effects of stimulants, which were reported by 84% of parents.

As for treatments beyond medication, 45% of parents discovered that switching their kids to a school that can handle ADHD helped their children “a lot.” Hiring a tutor also worked for the 37% of parents who did so, as did providing a structured schedule of activities.

Diet and nutrition is another approach some families had success with. 17% of families found that adding multivitamins and supplements helped “a lot”, while fish oil supplements got very satisfied marks from 12% of families that tried them.  It looks like these parents might have found validation from the recent study that demonstrates the impact of Western diet on ADHD.  Fast food and junk food not only contain high concentrations of sodium, fat, and refined sugar; they drain the body’s nutrient stores when they get converted into energy.

Although there is no single ADHD treatment that is universally effective, natural remedies and alternative treatments are always worth looking into.  Medication will make it easier for a child to behave and learn because he or she is not as distracted, but popping a pill everyday is like applying band-aid to a wound. It won’t make the disorder get any worse, but it won’t treat the root of the problem either.  At the end of the day, ADHD is a complex condition that requires various treatment methods if you want your child to overcome the disorder for good.  As to what these treatment methods are, it depends on the possible causes of the disorder, what your child needs, and what your overall treatment goals are.

As for narrowing down these treatments, Consumer Reports suggests that parents keep all copies of test results, psychological records, and other medical records related to their child’s ADHD.  It also helps to make a list of every professional who treated your child, the treatment strategies you have tried, and your child’s responses to each. That way, you’ll have an easier time figuring out the next step when you seek a new professional for your child.

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.

Tonsils (two clumps of tissue on both sides of the throat) and adenoids (a single clump of tissue behind the nose) are made up of lymphoid tissue, the same kind of tissue found in the gastrointestinal tract and the tongue’s base. This lymphoid tissue is made up of lymphocytes, which works with the immune system to produce antibodies – a type of protein that fight against germs and bacteria.  Antibody production is normally considered a good thing, but tonsils and adenoids are not designed to handle the sheer amount of viral infections children are exposed to.    And kids get exposed to at least five kinds of germs once school starts.

Normally, tonsils and adenoids swell when they prepare to neutralize germs. Once they’ve done their job, the tissue should shrink back to their normal size. In many cases, however, tonsils and/or the adenoids fail to do so and become large enough to impede breathing. The tissue blockage can be especially problematic at bedtime, when they block the air passages during sleep and cause snoring and overall poor sleep as a result. This interruption of the air flow during sleep is called sleep apnea, which literally means “without breathing”.  This is because the trachea’s entrance is completely blocked, cutting off the air flow to the lungs.

Lack of restful sleep produces daytime sleepiness in adults, but not in children – they become more hyperactive and inattentive as a result.  A study of the sleep habits of 5- and 7-year olds discovered that children with mild ADHD are more likely to snore than the general population. They also discovered that children who snore have lower scores on tests of attention, overall intelligence, and language ability than children without.

Hyperactive and aggressive children with enlarged tonsils seemed to benefit from getting their tonsils and/or adenoids removed via surgery (also called an adenotonsillectomy). After the procedure, they became noticeably more calm and behaved, especially when other treatment options failed to achieve these results.  Researchers from the University of Michigan observed that children who had their tonsils and adenoids removed had behavioral problems and sleep problems before their surgery. When their behavioral test scores were compared to another group of children with unrelated surgery, the researchers noted very little difference between the two groups.  Of the twenty-two children with ADHD from the adenotonsillectomy group, 11 no longer met the diagnostic criteria of the disorder one year after surgery.

This is why a comprehensive physical exam is an important component of the ADHD evaluation process. Detecting enlarged tonsils and adenoids at this stage can immediately narrow down your treatment options and get to the root of your child’s hyperactive symptoms.  If you notice that your hyperactive child snores during sleep or keeps getting up in the middle of the night, this is also a good time to get him or her checked for enlarged tonsils.

Are you tired of punishing your ADHD child for impulses that he or she cannot control? Most parents who have impulsive ADHD children are often at their wits’ end. Children with ADHD hyperactive/impulsive type are not only unable to learn from past mistakes; their tendency to act before they think often gets them into trouble or places themselves and others in dangerous situations.  Besides natural ADHD treatments like neurofeedback, what else can you do to teach their child control their impulsivity?

Some parents have been able to curb their children’s impulses with a simple game called Remote Control Impulse Control.  This card game aims to reduce impulsivity in children (grades 1 to 9) by imparting skills based on remote control symbols:

STOP what you’re doing and consider alternative actions
REWIND and learn from old mistakes
FAST FORWARD and consider the possible consequences before acting

During the game, the players pick a card and read out the true-to-life situation printed on it, which is based on case studies of actual impulsive children. For instance, one card reads, “You see yourself in the bathroom mirror and notice that a few strands of hair seem unruly. You have the impulse to cut them off.” Then, every player should to choose between one of the three impulse control strategies mentioned above.  If you choose “stop”, you should say what you would do instead of the impulsive behavior (e.g. get a haircut at the barbershop). If you choose “rewind”, you should share a similar impulse you gave into in the past, what happened afterwards, and what you learned from the experience (e.g. you cut a bald spot and had to have your head shaved completely, thus teaching you never to cut unruly hairs by yourself). If the “fast forward” option is picked, you should describe what might happen if the impulse is carried out.  Every player can take turns sharing their impulse control strategy and talk about how they might respond in any given situation.

Aside from better impulse control, the game aims to teach kids to learn from old mistakes, anticipate consequences, think before acting, work cooperatively with others, and improve problem-solving skills.  It’s also a great way for the kids to bond with the family. Together with other ADHD treatments, practicing these impulse control skills in a fun way may help your child make better choices in real life situations.

The Remote Control Impulse Control game can be purchased at Amazon and Toys R Us. Have you ever tried this game? How has it helped your child?