Good morning everyone! Well, now I understand completely where "Il pochi il fiero i blabbermouths" came from.... wow you guys are chatty!!!!!
Diana, hope things go very well for your nephew. The docs I work for saw an amazing number of skateboard related head injuries this summer. How do we get these kids to wear their helmets?????
As for the ADD topic, my son is also inattentive ADD... they are the ones that usually slip through the cracks because they don't really display any of the "outward" behaviors of ADD or the hyper behaviors of ADHD. My son's doctor explained it to me REALLY well, that it isn't that they don't pay attention to anything, but that they can't pick and choose what they pay attention to, trying to pay attention to everything at once. she said for my son it is like driving in a rain storm and trying to focus on each individual raindrop as it hits the windsheild. (this made me so sad for my son... I can't imagine what it is like for him trying to live like that!!) Trying to add a consequence into the mix is just giving them one more thing they can't focus on. She said different kids respond to different things, but that medication HAS to be combined with behavior modification (mostly at school) in order to work. And that sometimes you have to go through a few different medications before you find one that might work right... all kids are different, there isn't one drug that is going to work for all of them. We started out on Adderall (which is a stimulant like Ritalin) and ds was able to focus much better, but got terribly emotional, would cry if you looked cross eyed at him. We switched him to Strattera, which is a non-stimulant. It has worked wonderfully for him. It is a little different.... he does have to take it every day, weekend or not, because of the way it works, it is not an "instant med" like a stimulant is, but the upside to that is when he wakes up in the morning, he still has some of the medication in his system, so we no longer have to remind him thirty times that he is suppose to be getting dressed!! As for behavior modification at school, his first grade teacher instituted a catch phrase at school... during worksheet time, she would come over to his desk and quietly say "are you working" and he would have a strip with working on one side and not working on the other side, and he would have to make a check mark on the appropriate side. Each week, he had a few more check marks in the "working" side.... it was pretty amazing to watch. His second grade teacher this year said he is doing much better staying on task, but she is aware of the catch phrase and will start using it again if needed. As for the behavior modifications at home, we instituted manditory homework time with the same catch phrase... one hour at the table every night as soon as he gets home from school, whether he brings any homework home or not. (I went to a teacher's store and got a bunch of grade level workbooks, so if he doesn't bring something home, I just pick something for him to work on) During this time, the TV is off and his sister has to be in a different room, but as long as distractions are minimized, it works wonderful.
Amanda, I wonder if your daughter realized she had to do "homework" every night no matter what, she might be more motivated to bring home the school work?? But as I said, the same things don't work for every kid... mostly you just need to keep trying til you find something. And as someone else said, get your school guidance counselor involved if you are not getting enough assistance from her teacher. You need to be in partnership with her teacher for any behavior modification to work!!!!
Well, gosh.... I don't post for a whole week, and then I write a book.
Guess I am a blabbermouth too!!
)
TFD
