ADHD Posted by:Ken Sutton--Sunday, October 18, 2009

Posted for a parent named Linda

As a parent of an ADHD child, I have always been a bit confused by the diagnostic label since my son could focus on quite a few different activities from reading to sports to computer games for long periods of times. Attending to boring (for him) math was a different issue altogether. But was that an attention problem or an interest problem? From my perspective, what I always felt my son lacked was self regulation and impulse control.







A social worker sent me this website for LD OnLine a resource for learning disabilities and for ADHD information. The page this link takes you to is written by Dr. Sam Goldstein who explains that ADHD is more a problem of self-control than attention. FINALLY, an explanation that makes sense and matches perfectly what we have observed in our home all these years!

http://www.ldonline.org/article/32632


The LD OnLine website has lots of articles on it as well as forums for readers to discuss common issues.

One article I found on the website was a review of the research on kids with learning disabilities that looks at their high rates of involvement in risk behaviors, school failure, substance use and abuse, and juvenile delinquency. The article casts a critical eye at the research findings and asks good questions about whether the learning disability (ADHD and many other diagnoses seem to be lumped together in the category of learning disability) caused the other problems or if something like the lack of success in school triggered low self esteem that triggered the other problems. The article points out that of course most kids with LD do not end up as juvenile offenders, but if you are reading my post here and have a kid with ADHD or a LD, it might be safe to say that our kids could have qualified to be in these studies. Anyway, the writers of the article found that the most promising resiliency forces for the kids included awareness and knowledge. The more we know, the better we and our kids can help ourselves.

http://www.ldonline.org/article/Risk,_Resilience,_and_Adjustment_of_Individuals_with_Learning_Disabilities