A.D.D.: Disability or Difference?

This page is included in the Earth Soul Science website in recognition of the many New Children in our world who are misunderstood by the existing mainstream institutions of education, health and law.

If you are a parent of a child with learning problems who has been tagged with the label ADD or ADHD, I want to assure you at the outset that your child is in great company, namely that of Einstein and Da Vinci.

Your child does not necessarily have a disability! Your child is most likely just different! If your child had to learn to read and write in pictorial form such as Japanese, most likely your child would be successfully literate. If your child could learn through doing and watching, rather than talk and chalk, your child would most likely be an active participant in education.

And if your child were not learning in a confined space shared closely by around twenty-five other children, from nine till three five days a week, there wouldn’t be such a problem.

Your child has different abilities from those children who succeed in the mainstream learning environment. Specifically, your child may be described as having heightened “Multiple Tasking Function”. If your child were in an environment that allowed mobility, that allowed learning through doing several projects at the same time, and learning in socially compatible small groups, the likelihood of successful learning experiences would markedly increase.

For many children however, there may still be some problems in learning and behaviour, even in an appropriate environment.

Learning disability is a term broadly used to describe a wide range of evident problems loosely lumped together and usually resigned to the “too hard” basket. They include attention deficit hyperactive disorder, attention deficit disorder, dyslexia, and also vision, co-ordination and behaviour problems.

Indicators of Attention Deficit Disorder.

The child with “ADD” may evidence any or all of the following:

·      Short attention span

·      Frequent task switching (moving from one thing to another, doing several things at once)

·      Distractibility (easily involved in interaction with other children or seeking interaction)

·      Impulsivity (doing or speaking without thinking)

·      High risk taking behaviours (acting at risk to the self and/or others without thinking about possible consequences)

·      Inappropriate social behaviours including speaking and acting without thinking

·      Highly active/always on the move/in a hurry

·      Literacy problems and/or numeracy problems (problems with reading, spelling, writing, maths)

·      Co-ordination problems (clumsiness, accident prone, movement problems, problems with writing, ball skills etc)

·      Dreamy and lethargic when confined without activity, but bright and alert after exercise

·      Intense focus where there is personal interest

·      Proficient computer and technology operation

·      Chaotic pattern of lifestyle

·      Inconsistent patterns of attention and behaviour (good days/bad days)

·      Obvious intelligence (even if cleverly employed to avoid!)

·      Obvious creativity, often inventive

·      Mild to severe behaviour problems developed as coping mechanisms to avoid inappropriate, embarrassing and failure oriented learning environments

·      Parent/s and/or siblings who also evidence some or all of the above, particularly male.

The setting in which the child is expected to learn, and the methods of that learning environment are often the strongest factors disabling the child.

I say this with the greatest empathy for the teaching profession, having been a teacher myself. I often say to parents, “How would you manage if you were expected to keep twenty-five or more children happily occupied in a space the size of your lounge room every day?” That’s the reality.

Helping the Child with “A.D.D.”

The reality is also that this is a world operating through information and the audio-visual, particularly the printed word. We still need to educate our children so that they can function effectively in this world.

Many of the children do have very real problems with the processing of input information, and with communication and co-ordination.

The most important first step is to gather as much accurate information about the child as possible and in the process, inform yourself with appropriate input. Beginning with reading Thom Hartmann’s work on ADD will give you an excellent grounding on the genetics and help you to validate your child as being OK.

I urge you to do this! It may mean the difference between your child being an active and happy participant in his/her own life as a teenager, or hanging out on the street, dropping Speed and creating destructive chaos with the other kids they are hanging out with. This is happening! I suspect that the horrific increase in the use of drugs to medicate children to fit the existing education environment is a major contribution to this problem.

Thom Hartmann’s description of the frontal lobe activity of the brain helps us to understand the lack of restraint around consequences of behaviour, not thinking before speaking or acting. See the list at the end of the page for his books and website. Scientific research is now validating Hartmann’s theories. Websites that give this information may be found at the end of this page.

References to helpful books and other interesting websites are also at the end of this page.

The process of gathering accurate information about the child is greatly assisted by involving the child in a validating manner. Rather than say, “We need to find out what’s wrong with you”, we might say to the child, “There are some things we need to know about how you learn best”. The child’s willing participation will increase the likelihood of a successful outcome.

Professional Assessment.

The following course of action has proved very helpful in assisting children with indicators of A.D.D.

Arrange assessments by an occupational therapist, a hearing specialist, and a behavioural optometrist. Your child needs to be assessed by a behavioural optometrist rather than an optometrist. You’ll find a reference to a website for this field of optometry at the end of this page.

You’ll know a lot about your child from these assessments. Ensure that the child’s teacher and learning support staff have copies of the reports from these assessments.

Develop a good rapport with the child’s teacher and be open to negotiation with her/him and the learning support staff. Your child may be able to do work that is more project oriented, or have more computer time for example. You may be able to give some voluntary time to the whole class, to allow more time for the staff to help your child.

Your behavioural optometrist will identify the vision problems. The majority of children presenting with ADD have vision problems that are about the behaviour of the eyes, rather than the limited function of the lens of the eye. Add to that the fact that many are longsighted and expected to learn in a short distance vision mode. The behavioural optometrist often will provide vision training to assist the child.

The occupational therapist will usually identify problems affecting learning and co-ordination and will also offer helpful training exercises to assist the child.

The hearing specialist will be able to identify any audio problems, but problems with interpretation of the information received through the ears may be missed. Is the child perceiving or interpreting with accuracy, what he/she is hearing?

There are many modalities emerging that provide appropriate options for assisting your child. Please don’t be put off by suggestions from the mainstream that these have not undergone sufficient research to warrant funding. The mainstream has few answers that they can offer and we need to simply try what has worked for many children in a positive way.

Seek out a Brain Gym trainer, or buy the handbook and do it yourself. To be effective, it needs to be done every day. Just 10 mins every day before your child goes to school would make an enormous difference.

If there is a Steiner Eurythmy teacher in your area, get a group of children together for regular Eurythmy work. Both Brain Gym and Eurythmy assist with the development of brain hemisphere integration and midline crossing, which most children with learning problems related to ADD need.

Exercises to help your child orient themselves in space physically are helpful. Details of a program I personally developed for younger children containing Matrix Exercises, Brain Gym, physical games for learning literacy kinaesthetically, integrated with regular audio-visual learning may be obtained by clicking on Matrix Program and downloading the information. The program has been developed from my experiences with children and adults with learning problems over the last twenty-eight years. It is offered without cost or obligation.

Clean up your family diet so that it is free of additives and has peak nutrition. Reduce the sugar intake, particularly white sugar. It isn’t just the sugar that’s the problem. It’s the effect of the chemicals used in refining the sugar that is possibly creating haywire brain activity. Check out Dr David Schweitzer’s comments on sugar in an article on water on the website

To aid the function of neurotransmitters in the brain, there are positive responses reported from professional naturopathic treatment. Ask about fish oil emulsion combined with thyme oil. Do not self prescribe as there is danger of toxicity if the dose is not accurate. Ask about flaxseed oil. Check out the alternative health magazines.

There’s some excellent science based information on behaviour and on nutritional supplements related to ADD on the website www.iwr.com/becalmd.

What about Medication?

Inform yourself fully about the long-term effects of Ritalin or any other medication your child is taking. Do some research so that you know the facts. In a world of increasing litigation, we may even see children with ADD today mounting class actions against drug companies twenty years down the track.

If you are sceptical, take a look at the website of a parent of a child who died at 14 years of age, cause of death on the Death Certificate being given as Long Term Use of Methylphenidate (Ritalin).

Short sharp exercise regularly spaced throughout the day may reduce the dosage of Ritalin and other drugs. The exercise brings the child’s brain into focus mode. It would enhance brain function for all children in fact!

You may wish to seek out alternative therapies. In my personal experience of working with many people with learning problems associated with ADD, I have found homeopathy, Frequency Medicine and kinesiology to be very effective. The Irlen coloured lenses and overlays are helpful to some children for reading.

Try meditation and relaxation techniques to help your child relax and learn to focus from a relaxed state. Doing this with your child benefits the relationship and everyone’s peace of mind. I would guess that it would alter brain chemistry as well.

Introduce your child to games that require multiple thought processes, such as chess. You’ll be delightfully surprised at the ability. Your child needs experiences of succeeding.

Establish routines as much as possible that provide appropriate and reasonably flexible structures for your child’s lifestyle at least at home. Look for fun ways to do this.

Brush up on parenting skills. Take a course in positive parenting to help yourself to cope with the pressures of the role. But don’t punish yourself if even the best parenting techniques sometimes don’t work well. The dynamics of what you’re attempting to cope with make huge demands upon a family.

If you are going to use reward systems, remember that the reward must happen within half an hour of the successful behaviour or it will be lost in the distractibility.

Don’t accept the “outside the door” punishment or time-out response to your child’s behaviour from school staff. This only encourages the development of behaviours that succeed in exclusion from the classroom. It is successful avoidance behaviour.

If you’d like to explore more appropriate education settings for your child, you might begin with Steiner Schools, or seek out alternative schools in your area and enquire into their methodology. Children with ADD are often highly gifted. They have the potential to be the entrepreneurs and visionaries of our world’s future.

Use the Internet for resource and support information. Do a general search by typing in “Attention Deficit Disorder” or “Attention Deficit Australia” for example to find local supports. Also explore the websites listed below.

If the texts below are not on your local library shelf, you might ask the librarian to consider purchasing them or sourcing them through an inter-library loan.

Finally, I’d like to add a few thoughts from my experiences both in the classroom and in the field of Frequency Medicine as a Healing Practitioner. It is my observation that children with ADD are often not well grounded. In a number of experiences, the child’s psyche has been quite dissociated from the body. It seems to be difficult for the child to accept being here on planet Earth in a physical body.

There may be many reasons for this. I do think that there is a difficulty in adjusting to the drop in frequency experienced in coming into the solid state from much higher consciousness states of indigo or violet frequency as many of them do. They do possess psychic abilities and kinds of intelligence that are not acceptable to the mainstream and so experience lack of inclusion and belonging.

They also experience very difficult emotional pressures caused by their avoidance behaviours when attempting to survive in inappropriate educational settings.

It is quite possible that these children are Nature’s answer to the need for change on planet Earth. Chaos is often the precursor to change.

If you’d like to know more about Frequency Medicine and Healing, click on Healing with Science and Soul on this website first to give you the basic understandings, read through and then click on Frequency Medicine.

Matrix Program

The Matrix Program for Children with Learning Problems is a program based on kinesthetic activities to assist the development of brain function in relation to learning. The program is available online by clicking on Matrix Program.

Reference Texts

 “Healing ADD”, “Attention Deficit Disorder: A Different Perception” and “ADD Success Stories” by Thom Hartmann published by Underwood Books, California.

“Brain Gym: teacher’s edition” by Paul E. Dennison, Ph D and Gail E. Dennison.

“Righting the Educational Conveyor Belt” by M.Grinder, Metamorphous Press, Oregon.

“The Indigo Children” by Lee Carroll and Jan Tober, Hay House Publications, USA.

Websites