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attention deficit disorder in his own son. “I had worked in an ADHD clinic during my residency, and had strong feelings that this was overdiagnosed,” he said. “That it was a ‘savior’ diagnosis for too many kids whose parents wanted a medical reason to drug their children, or to explain their kids’ bad behavior.
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Michael Lewis (The Big Short)
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For one second I thought I saw it and I reached down and snatched up a little flesh-colored round thing, but ti was just a used round Band-Aid. My mother slapped it out o fmy hand and that was the first moment I realized she was mad at me too. And suddenly it was as if my heart was as uncontrollable as my legs. All this time I thought she was on my side, because I wa son her side. But maybe she had given up on me too. So I didn't say anything more because I was scared she was going to be against me like everyone else.
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Jack Gantos (Joey Pigza Swallowed the Key (Joey Pigza, #1))
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I know an American family that spent several years living in England. They had one son, who was an average student: not great, but not terrible. When the family returned home to the United States, the parents enrolled him in the local public school. Mom was startled by the continual drumbeat from teachers and other parents: “Maybe your son has ADHD. Have you considered trying a medication?” She told me, “It was weird, like everybody was in on this conspiracy to medicate my son. In England, none of the kids is on medication. Or if they are, it’s a secret. But I really don’t think many are. Here it seems like almost all the kids are on medication. Especially the boys.
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Leonard Sax (The Collapse of Parenting: How We Hurt Our Kids When We Treat Them Like Grown-Ups)
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Cogmed Working Memory Training because of the solid independent research supporting its effectiveness.
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James W. Forgan (Raising Boys with ADHD: Secrets for Parenting Healthy, Happy Sons)
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running back and forth along a line of stacked shields, banging his goblet on them like they were a xylophone. “ADHD,” Percy said. “You don’t say.
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Rick Riordan (The Son of Neptune (The Heroes of Olympus, #2))
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Your five-year-old son wanders around his kindergarten classroom distracting other kids. The teacher complains: he can’t sit through her scintillating lessons on the two sounds made by the letter e. When the teacher invites all the kids to sit with her on the rug for a song, he stares out the window, watching a squirrel dance along a branch. She’d like you to take him to be evaluated. And so you do. It’s a good school, and you want the teacher and the administration to like you. You take him to a pediatrician, who tells you it sounds like ADHD. You feel relief. At least you finally know what’s wrong. Commence the interventions, which will transform your son into the attentive student the teacher wants him to be. But obtaining a diagnosis for your kid is not a neutral act. It’s not nothing for a kid to grow up believing there’s something wrong with his brain. Even mental health professionals are more likely to interpret ordinary patient behavior as pathological if they are briefed on the patient’s diagnosis.[15] “A diagnosis is saying that a person does not only have a problem, but is sick,” Dr. Linden said. “One of the side effects that we see is that people learn how difficult their situation is. They didn’t think that before. It’s demoralization.” Nor does our noble societal quest to destigmatize mental illness inoculate an adolescent against the determinism that befalls him—the awareness of a limitation—once the diagnosis is made. Even if Mom has dressed it in happy talk, he gets the gist. He’s been pronounced learning disabled by an occupational therapist and neurodivergent by a neuropsychologist. He no longer has the option to stop being lazy. His sense of efficacy, diminished. A doctor’s official pronouncement means he cannot improve his circumstances on his own. Only science can fix him.[16] Identifying a significant problem is often the right thing to do. Friends who suffered with dyslexia for years have told me that discovering the name for their problem (and the corollary: that no, they weren’t stupid) delivered cascading relief. But I’ve also talked to parents who went diagnosis shopping—in one case, for a perfectly normal preschooler who wouldn’t listen to his mother. Sometimes, the boy would lash out or hit her. It took him forever to put on his shoes. Several neuropsychologists conducted evaluations and decided he was “within normal range.” But the parents kept searching, believing there must be some name for the child’s recalcitrance. They never suspected that, by purchasing a diagnosis, they might also be saddling their son with a new, negative understanding of himself. Bad
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Abigail Shrier (Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren't Growing Up)
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Where Does It Go? Don’t know where something belongs? Here is a quick Q&A that can help you identify an appropriate permanent storage location (home) for your possessions. Q: Where would a stranger look for this item? A: Your clothes belong in your closet because that is where a stranger would look for them—not your son’s closet, the guest room, or a bin in the attic. Q: At what kind of store do you buy this item? A: Office equipment purchased from an office supply store should be stored in the home office. Items purchased at a hardware store, belong in a utility closet. Match store origins to related home areas. Q: Who does it belong to? A: If the item belongs to your husband, then it belongs in your husband’s space. Don’t allow possessions of various family members to bleed into each other’s space. Q: Where does this item most often get used? A: The blender gets used in the kitchen and should therefore be stored in the kitchen, not the laundry room, the basement, nor the hall closet. Consider donating possessions that can’t be stored where they are used.
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Susan C. Pinsky (Organizing Solutions for People with ADHD, 3rd Edition: Tips and Tools to Help You Take Charge of Your Life and Get Organized)
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You say to yourself, He was a son of a bitch, but I am not going to waste one more second of my precious life being angry
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Edward M. Hallowell (ADHD 2.0 : New Science and Essential Strategies for Thriving with Distraction—From Childhood Through Adulthood)
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You say to yourself, He was a son of a bitch, but I am not going to waste one more second of my precious life being angry at him.
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Edward M. Hallowell (ADHD 2.0 : New Science and Essential Strategies for Thriving with Distraction—From Childhood Through Adulthood)
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Parents know that it can be hard to forgive or move on when there is little or no accountability from their kids or genuine apologies. Their kids want to get it over with, say a quick sorry, and move on. The best option for you is to have a conversation with your son or daughter in a quiet moment, within their twenty-four-hour memory window, about what happened. Say what you need to say, see that it is heard, and ask for some accountability. When the conversation is over, you are finished; you reset and move forward. Compassion creates alliances that are the heart of successful parenting. Drs. Edward Hallowell and Peter Jensen, in their book Superparenting for ADD, emphasizes its importance
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Sharon Saline (What Your ADHD Child Wishes You Knew: Working Together to Empower Kids for Success in School and Life)
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I wish I was ADHD or dyslexic. All I got was lactose intolerance. And I love ice cream.
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Rick Riordan (The Son of Neptune (The Heroes of Olympus, #2))
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Accepting that my son had ADHD required a huge re-adjustment of my own mindset. I needed to understand his challenges and limitations and to change my own expectations. Simple parenting strategies which had so far largely failed needed to be abandoned. And from within I needed to find the strength to be consistent, the patience to constantly work at these new challenges with him and the faith to believe that all would indeed be fine.
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Emma Adams (ADHD Parenting: A Mother’s Guide to Strength, Organization, and Beautiful Living with an ADHD Child)
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A particularly inspiring story was told by a mother whose autistic son just wanted to play with shapes and shadows. He was failing in his “Special Ed” program, where he was being forced to do things he didn’t want to do. She found that the more she encouraged him to do what he enjoyed, the more his shell cracked open. And when she followed his interests and made resources available to him to support those interests, he began to talk and to thrive. When he was three years old, she was told that he would never talk. At eleven years of age, he enrolled in a university and began studying mathematics.
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Anne Maxwell (Would You Teach a Fish to Climb a Tree?: A Different Take on Kids with ADD, ADHD, OCD and Autism)