ADD Moms

Although I have been an ADD Coach for many years, and have had a website for almost as many, it is only recently that I have started doing things differently. I have a new, different website, under a new business name. I have a blog now, too, and I’m writing more than I ever did.

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ADD Moms, along with thousands of other blogs, is participating today in a fundraising event initiated by BlogCatalog. BlogCatalog has partnered with DonorsChoose.org, a non-profit organization that “provides students in need with resources that public schools lack”.

Here’s a quote from the BlogCatalog site: “Let’s come together on May 28th. and prove that bloggers can do a whole bunch of good and that we aren’t limited to chronic complainers, contrarians or people who just want to hear the sound of their own voice.

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You may be wondering where I’ve been the past few days. Well, I haven’t posted in a while because I have been working on a very exciting project. It’s my first ebook: Raising An ADD Child: 6 Things You Absolutely MUST Do. It’s a short guide to those things that I believe are essential to life as an ADD mom; the things that will make life with Attention Deficit Disorder easier as well as the things that you must know as a parent.

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Parenting in general can be tough; parenting a child with Attention Deficit Disorder is even tougher. That’s partly due to some characteristics common to most ADDers: they are naturally inquisitive, impulsive, and prone to taking risks. Here are a few tips to help you meet the parenting challenge:

• Stay vigilant and engaged. Keep a close eye on them, preferably on your feet instead of the sofa. Yelling “What are you doing?” and getting “Nothing” as a reply won’t cut it. You are asking for trouble; get up and go find out what kind.
• Be alert to things in the environment that may be attractive to your child, and address them immediately and repeatedly. For instance, my son is an avid hockey player; when he was younger, all he needed was a frozen puddle to practice his stick-handling and he was happy. So, when we installed an above ground pool in the backyard, I could see right away that this was potential trouble. I told him when we installed it in the spring that there would be no skating on it, and I repeated that reminder when fall and then winter came.
• Think outside the box, because they will. If you don’t understand this one, you will soon enough. (See the example, above).
• Make sure they’re really listening, especially when you tell them something important. Ask them to repeat it back to you. (Our son found out early on that we had a stock set of things we routinely told him. This came to light one day when we asked him to repeat back what we had just told him, and he gave us something totally irrelevant. We learned from this experience; see below.)

The other night I watched a prime time episode of Dr. Phil. The show was about a father who has been accused of locking his son (then 3 years old) in his room for 3 years, only allowing him out long enough to go to the bathroom once a day. The father’s explanation for this was that his son had ADHD and that locking him in his room was for his own safety.

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