Comment by slipperlobster
2 years ago
My issue with reading is that my eyes will continue on while my brain has already left the station, so to speak. I'll end up having to go back and re-read sentences/paragraphs.
I started doing some research (prior to speaking with my psychiatrist) and started noticing some ADHD-esque behaviors in my toddler. I'm not looking to get them diagnosed (yet?), because who knows what is "normal young kid inattentiveness and hyperactivity" versus anything else, but ADHD is absolutely hereditary and a family history is one aspect that is/was used to diagnose.
This is a good resource I've read (well, listened to the audiobook of..): https://www.amazon.com/Driven-Distraction-Revised-Recognizin...
I have a 9 year old dyslexic boy with solid ADHD (impulsive). It’s been quite the journey (so far). He is heading back to ‘normal’ school next semester with no special support and fully integrated almost like a neurotypical. Sort of.
I have the same ADHD style:
Overall lessons: 1. Sleep. Melatonin. Transformational 2. Love. Love and more love. 3. Forgiveness and understanding 4. Throwing the kitchen sink at him for finding the outlet (sport) he loved. Gave him a sense of direction. 5. Ritalin: assists with ability to concentrate and therefore learn. Used only for education. 6. Educate yourself and get diagnosed yourself if you have. 7. Be the change in yourself and mirror and explain what you know (and don’t know) 8. Full spectrum intelligence test. Know where the issues are (processing speed, etc) and also where the strengths are.
We got a semi diagnosis at 5, then year on year assessments to see what we could know.
I wish there was a better support and road map for the steps to go through as a parent. I feel very lucky to be a dad of a child with ADHD in this time though.
This is good to hear that you have a solid foundation of how to best work with your son. I definitely wish I had that level of support growing up! I'm hoping to do the same with my kid.
The challenging kids split you apart and help you work out what needs to happen. THE definitive life experience for me. Good luck!!
I think your situation (especially with your child) outlines one of the insidious challenges we face in our modern society: breaking through the confusion and understanding the nuance of an issue (in this case, ADHD).
We've all heard the misinformation tropes "Back in my day, a kid was hyper because he wanted to play, nowadays $BOGEYMAN says those kids need to be medicated so they can get a 4.0", and they sound so alluring to large groups of people, so they write off ADHD altogether. Yet I distinctly remember kids from my childhood who could not hold a conversation, they would literally break off into a new topic while you were mid-sentence with them. Tell me how that kid can possibly learn anything if he doesn't even know that he vacated a conversation.
This is a parallel to George Carlin's "It's called shell-shock" spiel, or used by people to deny the existence of depression. It's very difficult to both convey nuance, and get people to accept it, even though it (the nuance) abuts life-threatening issues.
For people my age it was "Back in my day, people applied good old fashioned discipline. That's all ADHD is, a lack of discipline." Often discipline came via the strap or similar.
> Yet I distinctly remember kids from my childhood who could not hold a conversation, they would literally break off into a new topic while you were mid-sentence with them.
I have some variant of this - I'm constantly, subconsciously cutting in during someone else's sentence just to blurt out what immediately came to my brain, because I usually forget it by the time they are done. It's something I'm really working on, but it gets better day-by-day.
take good care of the kids nutrition. read up on it. take it serious. let it eat clean. don't fuck this up.
the connection between ADHD and nutrition is brutally underrated, in terms of amounts per meal, intake of food additives and the mix as well. if starchy carbs, then very little fat and little protein. if meat, then no bread, no potatoes, no noodles or similar stuff at all. veggies are always fine except if the digestion of the kid says otherwise. sugar is a tricky thing. timing is important in terms of time of day and time after food intake but it works bad after some foods, which is different depending on geographical origin of grandparents.
you don't need to point a camera on the kid or anything. the effects of foods and the stuff that the body releases to digest the different compounds on body and brain become obvious within an hour or two. but you need to know the baseline(s) of your kid, e.g. time of day, after activities, around certain people, in places, crowds, moods, etc. make sure you do.
this is something I have long thought about. carbs make me batty.
doing keto made my skin look much better, but also helped me focus, and I found it was easier to sleep. whenever I had cheat days and crushed like half a pizza I found I immediately was exhausted and had trouble focusing.
also coffee vs. tea. switching to tea every other day instead of coffee really dove home how much of an impact coffee has on things like serotonin[1].
[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35345760/#:~:text=Excessive%....
interesting. will definitely take a look at caffeine's effect on serotonin. thank you.
most tea brands have a bad impact on my digestion and while I thought it must be the theine, which, as I learned, is just caffeine, I now believe it's connected to residue pesticides[1] since "homegrown teas" don't have the same highly undesirable impact.
[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36537161/
anything that screws with my digestion makes my gut, the literal and metaphorical one, itchy and I get nervous. similar things happen when I eat short-chained carbs in amounts over 100g in one meal but the negative effect disappears after an at least 13h fasting period or 16h+ if I drank liquor the night before. so I assume it has to do with enzymes released in the mouth and in later stages of digestion since I sometimes start to feel itchy even though I only started chewing oats for example.
I believe my sensitivity and ADHD are linked to the amount of enzymes produced by my body during digestion and or some genetic mutation in an enzyme associated with the respective metabolisms.
somewhat related: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?type=printabl...
https://www.nysca.com/index.php?option=com_dailyplanetblog&v...
the lack of focus and the exhaustion after eating carbs are relatable, but again , only if the fasting period wasn't long enough.
I tried Keto, but it made me quite a bit slower, which wasn't bad in terms of performance, but my cognitive processing speed was so much slower that I could not get used to it.