Pills Don’t Teach Skills

Are you a parent who has ADD? Do you know a parent who has ADD? Welcome to the club!! Unfortunately, there are no loyalty points in this club.

Raising children at the best of times is a lot of work and presents a lifetime of challenges for any parent. Challenges can be magnified when a parent has ADD. Fortunately, the majority of adults respond well to treatment. It is estimated that upwards of 6% of the adult population has ADD. 40% of children who have ADD have at least one parent who also meets the criteria for diagnosis, so say the folks at BestSyndication.com.

If ADD is part of your parenting equation, or someone you know, I just may have a tip that could help out. Are you ready? Here it is…….be proactive.

Yup, that’s it. Seems more like commonsense doesn’t it? That’s not the case when dealing with ADD. As I have worked successfully through the challenges of ADD, one topic that has come up with my ADD Coach Pete Quily (yes, this is an endorsement and shameless plug) is having a parenting plan with my kids. I’m referring in this case to planning in one week increments, exactly what I plan on doing with my kids. Taking a proactive approach eases the stress of last minute planning, keeps you focused and maximizes the experiences with the kids.

You may have experienced just hanging out with your kids and a conversation that includes the comment “what are we going to do”? I have found it very effective to plan these one week periods with my kids and the results are clearly saying, it works! I take 5 minutes on a Sunday to plan and schedule activities with my kids for the week. This includes things like reading night, games night, games related to homework, social get togethers, play dates and most importantly………….some down time to give them a well deserved break too.

All too often people in general don’t proactively plan. This is also true when it comes to interacting with kids. To sound like a cliché or maybe even a bad Whitney Houston song, the children are our future!! We plan business meetings proactively, we proactively plan construction projects, flight paths of airlines, a dinner party and even the errands to do on the weekend. Yet for some reason, why don’t we consider planning activities with kids as something that should be done proactively? It works, really!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 25th, 2007 at 7:58 am and is filed under Thoughts on ADD. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.