ADHD

Natural Approaches to Managing ADHD

July 1, 2013 by Carey Jane Clark

Some of the “hard places” I’ve faced in my journey were when my children were small. I’m certainly not beyond those hard places—we’ve added a foster daughter to the mix! But one difficult period invovled a child diagnosed with ADHD.

Before I was a parent, I taught a group of children every week. In that class was one young boy who had been diagnosed as ADHD and who was on Ritalin. In those days, I would have reacted with some outrage at that idea and insisted that there was no such thing as ADHD, and that parents were copping out to allow their children to be labelled with that diagnosis. Especially when managing medications were involved, I would have insisted that all the child needed was some parenting with backbone.

And I would have been wrong.

When my second child was born, I knew something was different. She rarely slept. She was easily overstimulated. She had a hard time settling down. I had to remove the mobile from her crib because she’d stare at it for such a long time, she wouldn’t be able to get to sleep. After the mobile was gone, she lay there picking with her tiny fingers at the little flower pattern on the crib bumpers.

There were other issues, like the fact that she seemed to get sick so much, but it was hard to put a finger on what was wrong, until during homeschool, we began doing Kindergarten math and phonics with Explode the Code Online. Math facts she knew well and would race through one day, the next day she simply couldn’t recall. And I found myself spending 80-90% of my time trying to keep her on task and only 10-20% actually educating her.

The problem showed up most clearly when she did Explode the Code Online. While my son’s progress showed a steady upward climb, my daughter’s showed an erratic pattern that demonstrated the same kinds of problems as she was encountering with math—mastery one day, failure the next. It was a frustrating and discouraging time.

Some time later, I was having a conversation with someone from our church. She and her husband had adopted more than one special needs child through international adoptions. I asked her, “How did you know you were ready for that kind of commitment?” She referred to her firstborn and said, “We had already dealt with my son’s autism.” I was astonished. I had no idea he was autistic!

Then she told me something else I’d never heard before: ADD and ADHD were on the autism spectrum, meaning whatever therapies were helpful for one had the potential to help the other.

She shared the therapies she’d used to help her son function at such a high level. The thing she was most convinced had been helpful for him was something she called enzyme therapy.

Soon afterward, we began enzyme therapy with our daughter. The change was almost instant and very dramatic. The first thing we noticed was she stopped getting sick all the time. This was huge. During our first six months in China, she had been sick most of the time!

We also noticed some notable changes in her behavior, but the big proof was in her Explode the Code results. Instead of the erratic pattern, we saw a steady upward graph. She was learning!

We have employed some other strategies as well. Here are some things that we have found helpful for her:

hands-on learning
building up the attention span with lots of cuddle and read-to-me time
drawing – this has been very therapeutic for her
playing with modeling clay (She seems to need to do something with her hands. This has given her an incredible outlet.)
a gluten-free diet

People who meet my daughter today rarely guess she was diagnosed with ADHD. She’s thriving and very intelligent. We rarely deal with attention or focus issues anymore, and I try to listen to her about the things that contribute to a difficulty in focusing (like lack of regular routine or a cluttered workspace).

I hope this post offers families dealing with these issues some hope. What have you done in your home to manage symptoms of ADHD?

Why Gluten Free? Part II

April 13, 2012 by Carey Jane Clark

{Note: This week’s episode of Hold the MSG, Mandarin Lessons 4 Kids, is now live.}

In yesterday’s post, I began to explain why our family chose to eat gluten-free.

As I spoke with this woman about her family and her son’s autism, she mentioned that I might consider therapies she used for her son to help with what she thought might be ADHD in Sweetpea.

This was something I had never heard, although I confess I had wondered about ADHD. As it happened, we were about to head back to Canada for a visit. While there, I had Sweetpea diagnosed by our family doctor as ADHD, but the diagnosis process was troubling. There was a checklist, and much of it was done by observation.

At any rate, I thought I’d give the therapies a try. They were simple enough, although somewhat expensive. To learn about them, there was a book and a website, although everything I learned, I later discovered, was available through the website.

We had already started Sweetpea on the foundational nutritional elements for good brain function: a comprehensive multivitamin, probiotics and essential fatty acids.

Now, we started her on enzyme therapy. This launched the first radical change in our daughter. The first change we noticed was that she was no longer getting sick all the time. Since three weeks of age, she had seemed susceptible to every illness going around. They hit her harder and hung on longer than with our other children. Now, she hardly ever gets sick (if she remembers to wear her coat when it’s cool)!

The next change we noticed was observable. Remember those reports on Explode the Code I mentioned yesterday? The erratic pattern stopped, and her scores began to rise steadily, just like her brother’s!

Explode the Code

And Math was suddenly more memorable. In fact, she began to excel, doing two-digit addition in her head.

At approximately the same time, we switched Math curriculum to Math-U-See after reading about it on a forum for homeschool parents discussing ADHD in children and how to best help with their learning. We have since added complementary approaches from Right Start Math and Dreambox Learning, but Math-U-See is our core. Our kids love math and they “get” it. Math-U-See works because it’s visual, it’s explained very well, and it uses manipulatives–engaging the kinesthetic learner.

But as I talked to different people about the issues I had experienced with Sweetpea, over and over again, people suggested a gluten-free (GF) diet. I kept dismissing the idea, since we already ate very well–organic wherever we could, no dairy, and whole grains like spelt and kamut for breads and pasta, brown rice if we ate rice. Did I really need to make another change?

Then, last April, when we were back in Canada, I had the opportunity to attend a homeschool convention. At the convention, there was a seminar entitled, “Homeschooling Is so Hard, and I’ve Tried Everything.” I almost didn’t go. The seminar title frankly sounded whiny to me, and really, homeschool USED TO be hard. It wasn’t any more. Things had improved radically.

Sweetpea’s focus was better–where she couldn’t seem to hold extended eye contact before, she had improved. Her retention and memory seemed better. I wasn’t giving nine instructions out of 10 during math time just to keep her on task. Things were better, really.

But attending that seminar unlocked some things for me. I began to understand what some of the roots of the issues we’d dealt with could have been. The speaker, Sylvia Funk, talked about essential foundations for proper neurological development. Things I might have dismissed if they didn’t ring certain bells.

Like if your child has difficulty visually tracking while reading (losing his or her place at the beginning of a line of text), it could be they didn’t spend enough time crawling. Hmmmm….Sweetpea started walking at nine months!

And the solutions were relatively simple. For example, for tracking, take the child back through some crawling exercises twice a day to help their visual tracking improve, because the brain can pick up where it left off.

Ms. Funk doesn’t believe in ADHD either. She believes a myriad of these labels stem from missteps in neurological development.

And Ms. Funk had another suggestion: go gluten-free. I gave her the standard excuses about it being difficult for us in China, but she made a reasonable suggestion: try it for six months and see if it makes a difference.

Believe it or not, I still didn’t listen. It took a chance encounter with some new friends and some old friends to bring me around. We were with some friends at their home, and other friends of ours were visiting, one of whom was gluten intolerant. As we began to talk about her challenges, the other mother spoke up. “It’s okay, we understand,” she said. “We ate gluten-free for two years to help my daughter with her behavior.”

She began to relate how her daughter, now a lovely teenager, with no evident issues, would defy them and how they were at a loss with what consequences to give her for misbehavior. JavaMan and I looked at each other. This rang a huge bell. Although things weren’t as bad as they had been, we wondered if they could be better.

And so we began to eat gluten-free. The very next day.

And a miraculous thing happened. The little girl who since infancy would ball up her fists and shake when she was upset–or even sometimes when she wasn’t–who would seemingly rather disobey and put up a fight than cooperate, suddenly became the sweetest, most obedient girl you’ve ever seen. Instead of an argument or refusal when asked to clean her room, or called to come, she responded immediately with “Yes, sir,” or “Yes, ma’am.”

I still believe in healing. I still believe that we were designed to live whole and healthy in every respect, but I also have learned that the reason so many are struggling with issues with gluten is because the wheat supply in North America in particular was genetically modified in a misguided attempt to provide more protein to the diet. This resulted in more gluten in our food–more gluten than our bodies were designed to cope with. There are a myriad of side-effects that have been connected to gluten consumption beyond the ones you hear about with Celiac disease. Did you know that gluten can cause infertility? Hmmm…

I’ve realized that eating gluten-free isn’t all that difficult, or even all that expensive. It gives me a challenge in the kitchen, and it can be very tasty. (The best brownies ever are gluten-free. Seriously, you’ll thank me.) The rewards are amazing.

Sweetpea Today

How is my daughter doing today? Check it out for yourself. She took the lead in this week’s episode of Hold the MSG.

For more resources on gluten-free living, including a checklist to see if a gluten-free diet may help you, check out this helpful eBook.

Why Gluten-Free?

April 12, 2012 by Carey Jane Clark

A reader wrote to ask more details about our family’s choice to go gluten-free, and I realized it was something I hadn’t given a lot of time to explain, and perhaps the explanation might help someone else.

So I’m going to do my best to share the reasons behind our choice to go gluten-free, and what brought us to this point.

First of all, no one in the family that we know of has Celiac disease, nor does anyone have a known digestive issue with gluten, although my nutritionist would tell you that everyone would benefit from a gluten-free diet. And it’s true, as we have all gradually switched to make life easier for the one in our family who benefits most, it has helped all of us.

Part of the reason I haven’t shared some of this here before is that Sweetpea, who is the child who benefits from a GF diet, doesn’t like to feel different or centred out, and I haven’t wanted to talk about her situation on this kind of public forum. But as I’ve shared with other parents, I’ve realized that this kind of issue is not uncommon, and other parents might benefit from the path we’ve taken.

When we first moved to China, we had already been homeschooling for a couple of years. We started when Sweetpea reached preschool age because it was very apparent that more than Pumpkin, she needed routine and structure and something to keep her busy during the day. Seeing the way Sweetpea engaged with the world made me wonder if I was up to the task of homeschooling–something I’d decided even before my children were born was what I wanted to do for them.

At that point, I did the right thing. I called Sonlight Curriculum and spoke to one of their curriculum advisors. The lovely person on the other end of the line–to whom I am forever grateful–suggested that maybe what my very active daughter needed was more time with mommy, more attention, and some structured time sitting on the sofa reading together. She encouraged me to take advantage of their money-back guarantee and give it a try, starting with their Preschool curriculum.

I’m so glad I did.

The Preschool curriculum, which we took two years to work our way through, was just what the doctor ordered.

But that did not mean that my challenges were over. During the kindergarten year, we moved to China for the first time.

And we began math. I do believe part of the problem was the particular curriculum we chose–full of little pictures, and not strong on building understanding of patterns. Sweetpea spent most of her time looking at the little pictures and coloring them in, and very little time learning math.

old math curriculum

And I was frustrated. About this time, we also had some huge behavioral challenges on our hands with her. It seemed that no strategy for correction worked. Instead, she seemed to feed on any negativity–any form of correction–and come back for more.

And the next year, math continued to be more and more frustrating. One day, she’d whiz through her math problems. The next day, it would be as though she had no idea what 1 + 1 meant or that we’d ever discussed it before.

Because we were in China, we had abandoned the book-based Explode the Code for phonics that was part of the Sonlight program, and moved to the online version. The program contains tracking information to show the student’s progress. A similar phenomenon to her math “progress” seemed to be showing in her scores in ETC. While Pumpkin’s scores rose on a steady incline, Sweetpea’s were erratic, with no discernible pattern.

I knew something wasn’t right, but what?

About this time, I had a discussion about adoption with a fellow expat here in China. She and her husband had adopted special needs children. Since they already had children of their own, I asked her how an adoption agency had approved them (since in exploring the idea of adoption previously, I’d learned that it was difficult to be approved for adoption if you already had three children). Her statement was, “If you want special needs children, the requirements aren’t as stringent.”

Now I wanted to know, “How do you know you’re ready to take on that kind of challenge?”

She shared with me that her firstborn–a son–was high-functioning autistic. This is something I never would have guessed.

I don’t remember how the subject changed to Sweetpea, but at some point, she said, “You know, ADHD is on the autism spectrum. Your daughter might benefit from some of the therapies we’ve used with our son.”

ADHD? My Sweetpea? ADHD was one of those conditions I’d always figured was a figment of parents’ imaginations–an excuse for bad parenting.

And what were these therapies?

More tomorrow.