ADHD in 1955

First: I've got a big announcement! My new totally free weekly "ADHD Answers Now" telechat starts Tuesday night, April 29. The first one's called: "The Calm after the Storm," and I'll be giving you three quick, effective tricks for helping kids down--even helping you calm down.

So go sign up right now. You'll get handouts, web audio, and its FREE. But you do need to register since I can only take so many people on the call before the conference bridge line cuts us off.

I’ve been thinking about ADHD when I was a kid. How those of us “diagnosed” with the “disorder” as adults managed to get through school in the 1950s and early 60s? What did our families and teachers do right?

So back in the dark ages of my childhood, nobody had heard of ADHD? No stimulant drugs, no ADHD TeleChats, no ADHD forums or chat rooms, no support groups, no help for teachers or parents, no Brain Gym.

But, don’t let the experts fool you. ADHD did exist, I know cause I had it!

Impulsive, hyperactive kid who couldn’t focus. Poor coordination. A total dunce in arithmetic. Forget anything so advanced they called it “math.”

Here’s what parents and teachers did—and funny thing, it’s exactly what the ADHD books and the experts, and the “Managing ADHD” TeleChat are telling us to do today to help ADHD kids.


For starters the world moved more slowly and a lot less stimulation. So ADHD kids didn’t get quite as overwhelmed quite as quickly. We lived with boundaries, routines, and schedules. And at my house, the routine was pretty extreme!

We watched less TV. Ate less sugar and junk food. Took piano lessons. Had music and PE in school and fewer outside activities. Got more sleep. Weren’t allowed to skip breakfast EVER.

And talk about exercise. I walked . . . and walked and walked everyday.

That’s when I wasn’t riding my bike or roller skating--a primitive form of roller blading requiring a skate key and done without so much as a knee pad or a helmet. (I still have a scar on my left knee from roller skating.)

For me with ADHD, I wouldn’t have made it through school without the boundaries, routines, schedules, music, walking, bike riding, and skating.

Although I never did get the math stuff. However, there’s hope now for math illiterates. A program called Cog Med. More about that in the next post.

Don’t get me wrong here. There’s plenty of stuff they botched up big time in the ‘50s and early ‘60s. But that’s another story which I don’t think I’ll bother telling.

MaryJo

P.S. And another reminder about the next TeleChat coming up soon: "They're Driving Me Crazy: How to Manage ADHD at Home and in School. Starts Thursday, May 1 to help you help these ADHD kids and keep your sanity.

Includes discussion of dozens of non-drug strategies from how to raise dopamine levels to Brain Breaks for classrooms, from TV tips to standing desks. Check out the whole list of topics covered at http://www.adhdchildrentoday.com/telechats.htm

ADHD Drugs: Do They Really Cause Heart Attacks?

Do ADHD stimulant drugs such as Ritalin cause heart attacks? Yes, they can--in a small number of children. Children who have a pre-existing heart condition.

Since 1999 thirty kids have died from sudden death attributed to stimulant drugs. And more have suffered heart-related problems. Again, all of these children had a pre-existing heart condition. The drugs didn't cause the heart condition!

As my readers know, I’m not crazy about giving drugs to kids for ADHD Lots of strategies help enormously with ADHD that don’t involve Ritalin. However, I don’t want to be part of the over-reaction and scare tactics running amok on the Web. Most children will not have a cardiovascular problem with ADHD stimulant drugs.

But the American Heart Association's doing the right thing! They're recommending that every child have an electrocardiogram (ECG) before a prescription for a stimulant drug is written. Some people--mainly bean counters--think this is extreme and way too expensive.

Total cost could be as high as $250 million--that's assuming 250 million kids have ECGs at the cost of about $100 per child. Hmm. Am I missing something here? A hundred bucks per kid sure doesn't sound all that expensive to me--given that it could save a child's life!

Keep in mind that a child can have a heart "problem" that your pediatrician isn't aware of. Exactly the reason the AHA's saying "get an ECG" first before taking an ADHD drug. And, yes, there's a strong possibility of a false positive since children's ECG's are hard to read. So have a second ECG, a second opinion, more cardiac screening. But don't skip this important evaluation.

In addition to an ECG, an ADHD cardiac checklist would also include

• Patient and family history with attention to fainting, palpitations, dizziness, difficulty with exercise
• Physical exam including blood pressure and a check for abnormal hearbeats.
• Consultation with a pediatric cardiologist if necessary.

For me, that a drug requires an ECG first is enough to "just say no." I say do Brain Gym, Brain Breaks in the classroom (we'll have some of those in future posts), get dopamine-increasing foods on the table, establish routines and schedules and boundaries. Look into non-drug programs for ADHD like Tomatis, Dore, and Cog Med. Let drugs be the very last resort.

MaryJo

P.S. The next "They're Driving Me Crazy: How to Manage ADHD at Home and in School" telechat starts Thursday, May 1. Includes discussion of the non-drug strategies mentioned above and lots more. Check out all the topics covered at http://www.adhdchildrentoday.com/telechats.htm

ADHD Trick: Left Up, Right Down, Leg Around, and Nod

Try this: Draw a triangle with one hand and two squares with the other hand while tracing a circle on the floor with one leg and nodding your head twice forward, then twice backwards. Switch hands and legs.

Helps you pay attention and organize tasks and desks. (Well, I don't know about desks. Mine is still a mess.)

On the other hand I don't quite have this exercise down. I get the two hands doing something different at the same time but somehow I can't get the leg part down without stopping one or both hands. And forget the nodding! Practice makes perfect they say. Maybe I'll be able to do it next week.

You're using a Zaltsman Exercise to improve your attention and organizational abilities. You'll find all ten of them toward the bottom of the article section at ADHDChildrenToday Of course there's more than ten once kids get the hang of it and start making up their own. Fun and challenging.

When Edward Hallowell, M.D. needed a personal trainer, he hired Simon Zaltsman, a world-class Russian athlete who moved to the U.S. as an adult.

Zaltsman showed Hallowell the exercises. Zaltsman said the exercises were commonly used in Russia to help improve athletic performance. The Russians have long known that mental acuity is linked to physical well-being. Hallowell discovered, difficult as the exercises may be at first, that they help with ADHD.

Ned Hallowell, by the way, is my favorite "how to manage ADHD" author and has ADHD himself. Says he still struggles with reading even though he graduated from Harvard and then went on to Tulane Medical School. I recommend his book Delivered from Distraction which he co-authored with John Ratey.

For kids, try the exercises with music, with colored markers, standing up at the white board. Out on the playground in soft sand.

You can always start with Brain Gym's Double Doodle. It's a similar concept but much easier. Using both hands simultaneously, draw a picture or design in which the left side is the mirror image of the right side.

Once you've mastered Double Doodle, you can progress to patting your head and rubbing your stomach at the same time. Then you're really ready for Zaltsman.

MaryJo

P.S. Get lots more tips 'n tricks with a free subscription to ADHD NewsTips

ADHD or Too Much Chocolate Cake

My favorite chocolate cake--not pictured here although this one looks pretty scrumptious--has a whopping 3 cups of sugar, not including the frosting.

Just writing about it makes me swoon! (It's the Southern Georgia Chocolate Pound Cake from a 1967 issue of "Gourmet Magazine.")

Email me at mjw@mjwagner.com and I'll send you the recipe! And then if you're worried about protein, I'll also send you the recipe I picked up at a health fair for a chocolate cake made with garbanzo beans and a skimpy 1/2 cup of sugar.

Given it's nutritional value, the garbanzo bean cake is actually quite good. And there's no reason you need to tell anyone about the garbanzo beans!

Sinfully rich or protein-packed nutritious? Your choice. Just let me know what you want. Yes, you can have both recipes.

BTW, dark chocolate's actually good for you but that's for another post. And speaking of chocolate, Milton Hershey, himself, was said to have ADHD. Or did he just eat too much of his own company's candy for a sugar high?

Talk about ADHD rambling, lets get to the point here. After all this isn't a chocolate cake recipe exchange blog or a story about Milton Hershey.

Too much sugar causes hyperactivity and insomnia. A child can end up with the ADHD label simply from eating too much sugar every single day. Although scientists are slow to "prove" this, nearly every teacher and parent I know attests to having kids who're hyped up on sugar.

Take my grandkids. There we were happily making a 3-D cookie Christmas tree. Lots of fun and lots of sugar. Making it look like a "real" tree involved FOUR tubes of ghastly green icing.

Each kid had to have their own tube of green gunk to use for decorating--the cookies, the table, their grandmother, and themselves. And then making it look like a "real" Christmas tree involved several small jars of sprinkles, red hots, and other sugary miniatures.

Finally to get the cookies to stay stacked on top of each in some form that vaguely resembled a tree involved using more of the green gunk--sugar-rich edible glue.

I'm here to tell you that eating a chunk of tree caused not a little hyperactivity! (Just between us, the thing wasn't nearly yummy enough to sacrifice calm or calories.)

Sugar's everywhere. Not just in candy, soft drinks, cake, and cookies. It’s also in most cereal, several brands of yogurt, some bread, muffins—just about anything that comes in a box or a carton. And kids are eating way too much of it. (As are their parents, grandparents, and teachers.)

Don't be fooled by the health food section at your grocery store. Plenty of sugar in lots of stuff called health food or organic or natural. And beware: high sugar often substitutes for low fat.

So what’s a parent to do? What’s a teacher to plan for party or snack time?

Read the label! Teach kids how to read the label. Make a label-reading game. A contest. Who can find the cereal at the grocery store that has the least amount of sugar? Or the cereal that has sugar closest to the bottom of the list of ingredients.

If sugar is first or second in the list of ingredients, it’s too much sugar.

And teach kids all those sneaky sugar words like glucose and sucrose. If it ends in “os” or “ol,” it’s probably sugar. I thought I knew all the code words for sugar until I found the list of no less than 30 sugar words.

Now ask yourself: Does this child have ADHD or is it an ongoing sugar high?

MaryJo

P.S. And yes, the grandkids also devoured a garbanzo bean chocolate cake. So kids will eat something that's good for them as long as you don't call it broccoli.

P.P. S. Looking for a bunch of tips to tame ADHD--from Brain Gym to nutrition, from what to sit on to computer games that help ADHD? Subscribe to the ADHD NewsTips. They're free.

They're brain boosters that benefit kids who don't have ADHD--and you too. You'll get a short, use-it-right-now tip every 3 days in email for a whole year. That's 156 tips for taming ADHD!

ADHD: Geniuses, Millionaires, and Presidents

We may whine and complain about ADHD. Wish our kids didn't have it. And look for ways to get over it.

But, a lot of ADHD folks have been fabulously successful. The most famous is Einstein himself!


Then we've got other geniuses like Mozart and Leonardo da Vinci.

How about millionaires? Bill Gates has ADHD and so did John D. Rockefeller.

Five U.S. presidents, including John F. Kenney and Abraham Lincoln, got elected and governed well despite ADHD.

Some football players, basketball players and baseball players played ball extraordinarily well with ADHD: Terry Bradshaw, Magic Johnson, and even Babe Ruth join the list.

Tom Cruise, Walt Disney, Danny Glover, Steven Spielberg and Robin Williams in Hollywood all have ADHD.

Telephones, airplanes, and light bulbs were all invented by ADHDers.

And some famous guys had ADHD so badly they did poorly in school (or at least got bored with it). Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard. Thomas Edison's teachers told him he was too stupid to learn anything. Einstein couldn't talk until he was four. Werner von Braun, the famous rocket scientist, flunked 9th grade algebra.

Lots more successful folks appear on the famous ADHDers list.

And what ADD qualitities did these ADHDers take advantage of? Creativity, outside the box thinking, persistence, ability to hyperfocus on a passion, intuition, and thriving on chaos.

So the next time you're feeling blue about ADHD or a kid in your class is driving you crazy or your child's having trouble in school, just remember that ADHD isn't all bad!

MaryJo

P.S. And speaking of ADHD, the ADHD TeleChat with oodles of strategies for helping at home and in school is still available. Even includes some Brain Gym for taming ADHD. If you've missed the first couple calls, you can listen to the audio recordings on the web and pick up the rest on the phone.

ADHD: Gift or Curse?

As an expert in ADHD and someone who reads everything she can get her hands on about ADHD, I often run into the hardline approach. Either we need to "fix" ADHD kids, if not punish them, or we need to celebrate their genius. Give me a break. Isn't it a bit of both? Can't we reach a middle ground here?


As a person afflicted with ADHD--way better now than years ago but , as you can see, still suffering from "ADHD Desk"--I can tell you first hand, I didn't need to be punished. But I certainly appreciated every tool I could get my hands on the would "fix" it. A+ to Brain Gym for helping me. (Although the Brain Gym philosophy certain isn't about "fixing" anything.)

The self-esteem stuff never made me feel better. "Oh, MaryJo, you have such potential. You're
so wonderful."

Really? So how come I was just an hour late to a presentation? Got nothing done today because I couldn't focus? Couldn't find a speech outline because of the piles and piles on my desk? These things sure didn't feel wonderful, much less demonstrate potential.

And I'm certainly not a genius, an Indigo child elder, Crystal child elder, hunter-farmer, or any of these other feel good, raise self-esteem interpretations we've put out there for ADHD. Maybe ADHD kids are Indigo children or Crystal children, or have IQs of 170. And I'm not against raising self-esteem--my own and those of the children around us.

High self-esteem's essential, but without real tools, effective strategies, and "how-to's," those of us with ADHD, Indigo or not, would still be floundering around. Adults who can't hold down a job. Talk about low self-esteem.

Hold down a job? Good grief, some days in my past ADHD life, I couldn't go to the grocery store and come home with what was on my list, much less do it in less than a couple hours. Now tell me that wandering around the grocery store for hours, unable to focus, was fun, a sign of genius, something to celebrate? It was a real pain that wasted tons of time. Drove me and those around me crazy.

And how about kids who can't settle down long enough in school to learn to read? Can't control the impulse to hit another kid . . . every day, several times a day?

Admit it--these kids drive all of us crazy. Are they wonderful and loveable and deserve the very best? You bet. But deserving the best means stopping the "feel good" chatter long enough to give them real tools to change their brain patterns . . . without drugs. Now that raises self esteem.

O.K. enough of my soap box. Funny how passionate we can be when the subject's our own "stuff." (Yes, I was one of those ADHDers who did well in school. But by graduate school, what a struggle! I just kept at it. Lots of us ADHDers have ridiculous amounts of persistence! And that's a real gift.)

So if you, or a teacher or parent you know, are looking for dozens of non-drug ADHD tools and strategies (from an expert and somebody who's been there), it's not too late to sign up for the four 90-minute sessions ADHD TeleChat.

It's called "They're Driving Me Crazy: How to Manage ADHD at Home and in School," and comes with listen-at-your-convenience web audio recordings or every call. (Yes, teachers can get university credit for salary upgrade and recertification credit.)

MaryJo

P.S. And you can get free email ADHD NewsTips too.

ADHD, Ritalin, and the Feds

O.K. so I've been gone for awhile. Sorry. But there's good news and a reason for my absence: ADHD Children Today is up and running. Yahoo! (Wouldn't say the kids in the picture are ADHD, but they're sure multi-tasking!)

Now, I hope you'll excuse me for just a bit of shamelss self-promotion which I know I shouldn't be doing on my blog. But I'm just too excited about the ADD Kids stuff to keep from telling you all about it. Then I promise to get to the news about the Food and Drug Administration's warning about ADHD stimulant drugs.

You can subscribe to ADHD NewsTips for free--and the tips are really for all kids, even adults, not just ADHD. You'll get quick, easy, use 'em right now, tips that help kids focus and parents and teachers relax!

And there's a packed-full-of-great-information-and-strategies TeleChat that's part of ADHD Children Today too. It's called "They're Driving Me Crazy: How to Manage ADHD at Home and in School." And yes, a bit of Brain Gym in the TeleChat. Go ahead and check it out.

The website, the NewsTips, and the TeleChat are drug-free. No Ritalin.

I took Ritalin once for a few weeks. Interesting experience. And I certainly could focus like never before. I didn't like how it felt. So even though I wanted to stop being so ADHDish, somehow I knew taking such a powerful drug couldn't be good for me in the long run. I stopped taking Ritalin.

Then in 2005 Steven Nissen, M.D., a cardiologist, became alarmed at the number of heart-related problems and even deaths associated with stimulant drugs prescribed for ADHD. He presented his findings to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, and the FDA considered a black box warning on all prescriptions.

The FDA eventually decided against a black box warning, much to the disappointment of many who felt that such was warranted.

However, in 2007 the FDA did direct drug manufacturers to notify children's parents in writing of the possibility of serious side effects of these drugs, particularly cardiovascular and psychiatric problems. The FDA lists 15 of these drugs including Adderal, Ritalin, Concerta, and Strattera.

You can read or listen to my article and the FDA's list of concerns and side effects for Ritalin in the April Brain Boosters for Your Kids Newsletter

MaryJo