Is Your Child on the TEAM?

TEAMS: A New ADHD Treatment for Preschoolers

Guestpost from David Rabiner, Ph.D.
Associate Research ProfessorDept. of Psychology & Neuroscience, Duke University
ATTENTION RESEARCH UPDATE – April 2012

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I have been a huge fan of Dr. David Rabiner’s ATTENTION RESEARCH UPDATE since its inception in 1997. Not only do I count on his comprehensive, plain-English explanations of up-to-date research trends and developments as key resources in my drive to keep my information base current,  I also archive them for future reference.  

For those who aren’t already among the over 40,000 people currently subscribed (sponsored now by CogMed, so no longer a charge to you), at the conclusion of this post I tell you how to get your own monthly copy in your very own email box.

I urge any professional working with individuals on the Attentional Spectrum — whether teachers, counselors, coaches, therapists or physicans — to sign yourself up the second you see those instructions, before it falls through the cracks.  (Parents and ADDers themselves can benefit too!)
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TEAM Training

In this month’s issue of Attention Research Update I review a recently published study that examined a new intervention for preschool children with ADHD called TEAMSTraining Executive, Attention, and Motor Skills.

The premise of this interesting and important study is that through regular parent-child engagement in games designed to exercise important neurocognitive skills, it may be possible to affect enduring reductions in core ADHD symptoms.

Thus, in contrast to current evidence-based interventions like medication treatment and behavior therapy, the goal of TEAMS is to produce more fundamental and enduring change.

I think this is very important work for the field and I believe you will find this to be an interesting study.

Sincerely,
David Rabiner, Ph.D.; Associate Research Professor
Dept. of Psychology & Neuroscience; Duke University; Durham, NC 27708

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mgh note:
 Although this post is longer than usual, I chose to present the entire April issue instead of writing a summary, in answer to the many requests I have received for more information about non-pharmaceutal treatment alternatives.

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ACO Conference 2012: reflections on my return

Amazing! Start saving NOW to BE there next year!

I just returned from speaking at the 5th Annual ADHD Coaches Organization [ACO] conference at the at the beautiful Crowne Plaza Hotel in Atlanta.  WHAT an experience!  

Congratulations to 2012 conference chair, Judith Champion, and her conference team, along with my gratitude for a simply stellar experience.  What a banquet!

I have to second Dr. Charles Parker’s comment in the post-conference article on his Corepsychblog, “If you are an ADHD coach and haven’t yet connected with the ACO  . . .  now is the time to get on it and get cracking.”

Silver and Gold

As always, I made new friends as I connected with long-time friends and colleagues. I also had the pleasure of seeing former students “all grown up,” giving those of us who are “old-timers” brand new inspiration.  I am still grinning ear-to-ear now that I am home and [partially] unpacked.

As usual, ADD Coaches came from across the United States and, as expected, many of our Canadian colleagues made the trip.

The surprise was attendance from as far away as Stockholm, Germany and Shanghai, eager to add their voices to the mix and to ask for our help bringing ADD Coaching to their countries.

As the founder of the world’s first ADD-specific coaching curriculum and co-founder of the ADD Coaching field itself, I was and am overwhelmed with gratitude for the beautiful garden that is growing now from seeds I planted decades ago.  I stand amazed at all the “new varieties” being developed all over the world — without my having to lift a single shovel!

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Homage to Kate Kelly

A bit of background on the article below Saturday, January 21, 2012 – 2 AM

UPDATE Sunday-2/19/12

For anyone who hasn’t already heard, dear friend, ADD Coaching colleague, and Interfaith Minister Kate Kelly was in Christ Hospital in Cincinnati when I wrote the article below. She is now recuperating at home, between rounds of chemo for what turned out to be renal shutdown due to a mass in her bladder, which turned out to be cancer.

After a very scary couple of weeks in January, we’re as certain as man is allowed to be about these things that she will ultimately be fine, but her body’s got a bumpy road ahead to carry her to glowing health once again. (This all serves as background for the insight which was the reason for this post – be patient, or scroll down for Small Blessings).

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Even if you think you don’t know Kate, you probably know OF her. I’ll bet you’ve read the ADD classic Kate and co-author Peggy Ramundo wrote.

Cover of "You Mean I'm Not Lazy, Stupid o... Do yourself a favor and beg, borrow or buy a copy now if you haven’t already read it – this is one you will definitely want in your ADD library.

If you already have one in your library, and can afford it, buy a brand-new copy as a gift for a friend or to donate to your public library or local Youth Group.

Not only will you be saving somebody’s quality of life, you will be offering support to Kate in a very practical fashion. Cancer-care is EXPENSIVE, and book royalties will probably be her primary source of income for some time to come. Any published author will tell you that the authors see VERY little of the price of each book sold. So let’s put it on the Best Seller’s List together.

Peggy Ramundo is another dear friend, with whom I am working on the ADD in the Spirit Coach Training. Peggy and I have already been dervishes in the past month, setting aside nearly everything else to get materials fluffed by deadline for our presention at the upcoming March ACO Conference in Atlanta. Our session together expands upon the importance of spiritual coaching concepts in a field as pragmatics-focused as ADD Coaching.

Before we had time to refocus on day-to-day work objectives, Kate took a sudden turn for the worse. We have practically lived at the hospital since Kate was taken by ambulance to the Christ Hospital’s Emergency Room,  over a week ago. If you missed me, that’s where I’ve been!

So, in 2012, I’ve barely had time to edit drafts of older content to post here, much less time to write anything new!  Since it’s likely to be another week or so before I am able to resume anything resembling my “normal” schedule — and then comes catch-up I believe I’ve come up with a novel way to fit it all in: blogging about my hospital insights (very big grin).

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Tracking the Days of our Lives

By George, I think she’s GOT IT!

English: 2011 Calendar

just got off the phone with Kay Odell, the delightful genius who created a brand new way to track time for increased follow-through and productivity: WeekDate: a calendar like no other.

Her relatively new paper-format calendar is the first totally new take on planning and tracking I’ve seen in YEARS

– and this one’s ADD-friendly!  

Here on ADDandSoMuchMore.com, I have already introduced a pending Time Management Series (excerpts from some of my books  in preparation to become e-Books).

In one of the articles in draft, I describe how my own calendar system works for me “out of the box,” and what I need to tweak to fit my own personal flavor of ADD.

(One size never fits ALL very well; that’s why movie stars have tailors!)

That particular article is still on the schedule, but I have a feeling I’m going to have to revamp the “how I use my datebook” portion totally.

My own WeekDate is on order.

I’m going to go way out on a limb here . . .
and say that, sight unseen, Kay Odell’s system just might be
THE answer for a great many of us.

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Who’s Martin?

Noooo . . . not “Martin” –
Phillip Martin!

I’ve been getting more than a few “Who’s Martin?” questions and it finally dawned on me who everybody was asking about.

He is the heartwarmingly generous and world-changing artist and educator who created (and has allowed me to use) the adorable graphics that accompany the majority of my posts here on ADDandSoMuchMore.com.

Since there’s a link to his website on the sidebar of every post on this blog (scroll down to the links on that skinny column to your right), I don’t always caption his artwork — especially since his copyright is already incorporated into the graphic.

Oops! - sometimes sizing makes it tough to read “Phillip” clearly –
thus the repeated “Who’s Martin” questions.  Now you know.

Some of you will CLICK HERE to read his own version of his resume on his site.
The rest of you can read my version below (essentially his, with a few nip-tucks – permission requested and received from his FaceBook page)

IF YOU ARE AN EDUCATOR, you REALLY want to take the time to click around over there – he’s got really cool, totally free, no-strings-attached resources for you as his gift to education.  What a guy, huh?

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Reframing Task-Completion

ADD/ADHD and Unfinished Personal Projects
Guest blogger: Bryan Hutchinson

I have hundreds of unfinished personal projects and I have ADHD.

From what I understand about ADHD, and from what I have read, I should be upset about unfinished personal projects.

However, I am a writer and writing has taught me an extremely valuable lesson, and that is:

 •  Finishing everything I start writing is nearly impossible
and,
 •  Not everything that’s started is meant to be finished.

Sometimes what I start is meant to take me somewhere else, to get me past a hump or lead me to deeper thoughts or inspiration.

Before I go any further, let me clarify that I am talking about personal projects here. Not jobs. That’s for another post.

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Occupy ADD

Is Your ADD-Doc GREAT?

We wanna’ know about competent ADD professionals.

How come?  Sadly (shamefully!), we see mounting evidence of a retreat to the ADD Dark Ages, and we need to jerk a knot in its tail and cut off its ugly head!

I have been disheartened, often appalled, by the accounts of patient/doctor and patient/therapist interactions that have been showing up recently on the ADD sites — in increasing numbers!

To say it plainly:

  • If the extent of ignorance we who are looking for help are finding among doctors and therapists who CLAIM to be ADD-specialists existed in any other field, we’d see malpractice suits and lost licenses!
  • There seem to be few AMA “watch dogs” with eyes on what the ADD doctors are doing.
  • Uninformed, non-medically trained government regulators seem to be more concerned with preventing drug abuse than safeguarding access to pharmaceutical interventions for those whose lives are derailed by legitimate, diagnostic disorders, made manageable through consistent access to medication.  Medication shortages are unconscionable.
THIS is not OK with me — and I hope it’s not OK with you, either.

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ADDerWorld – Folks Like US!

Lonelinesss . . .

is a longing for kind,

not company”

~source unknown

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Come meet your TRIBE

I would like to personally invite you to join one of the coolest ADD Playgrounds since the AOL ADD community  (way back in the online “olden days”) – ADDerWorld.

Membership is free. Bryan Hutchinson, the author of One Boy’s Story (and other ADD books and ebooks) uses book royalties to pay the freight.  In fact, when you join, he even lets you download a couple for absolutely nothing.

It’s like a FaceBook just for ADDers — and loved ones who want to understand the ADDers they work with, live with and love.
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Change Requests & SuperSensitives

Bradshaw’s Change Model and Hypersensitivity
Guest blogger: Glen Hogard

Hypersensitivity: Anything from not being able to tolerate tight clothing or labels in clothing that irritate our skin, to light, temperature, or sound sensitivity, to heightened emotional sensitivity, we often have to find ways to cut down on our reaction or “over reaction” to a stimulus.

While heightened sensitivity can be a valuable benefit in certain areas of life as in jobs such as EMS technician, doctor, fireman, and even a writer, when it is extra emotional sensitivity it can make interpersonal relationships, especially intimate relationships, difficult if not balanced with ways to sooth our hypersensitive emotions.

While it’s easy to see how it affects us, it’s not so easy to temper.

In the 1980’s, before I knew about ADD/ADHD, I was taught a tool by John Bradshaw, a famous family systems therapist, while working with his first satellite center outside of his California facility in Miami. I worked then, as I have done for ADDA, as the volunteer coordinator for his then yearly or semi-yearly seminars hosted by a great therapist Joan E. Childs.

I’m sure there are other variations of this method in practice, but this is how it was taught to me. So here it is: The Change Model

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RSA Animate – Changing Education Paradigms INDEED!

Clever but seriously flawed

“An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last.” ~ Winston Churchill

So what’s my beef with
Sir Ken Robinson???

Royal Society of Art’s figurehead, “world-renowned education and creativity expert and recipient of RSA’s Benjamin Franklin award,” as it says in the description under at least one of his cleverly animated lectures on education, posted on UTube.

His content is out of integrity
with what he says he stands for.

Black and white, perhaps, but misinformation in my area of expertise makes me question the sincerity of his quest as well as the validity of the rest of the items in his presentation.

To be truthful, it’s his derision that really gets me, even more than his ignorance.  I have always found it offensive when people attempt to sway others by poking fun rather than profering truth. It’s not funny, really.  It shuts down thinking.  And isn’t his point that we need to do the exact opposite?

Any “education expert” who doesn’t do his homework before formulating his opinion, quickly sliding his ill-researched conclusions into a presentation positioned as transformational knowledge as if they were established  ”fact”
needs SOMEBODY to call him on it.

Dag-nabit! The guy does so many things right. I applaud his vision and agree with so much of what he says — and his real-time drawings are just too darned adorably effective. I’m really sorry I can’t be unconflicted in my support of his work.

I wish I could, but I can’t.  

What I really wish is that I’d never been made aware of him, because I can’t unknow what I’ve recently observed, and I’d be out of integrity myself if I let it slide.

I just HATE being hoist on the petard of an ethical dilemma!

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Happy New Year’s Resolution to YOU

Have I lost my MIND?!

Drawing of a hand, arm, quill pen and paper, under the words New Year Resolutions - as if in handwriting.It isn’t even Thanksgiving yet.  Miles from Halloween, even, last time I looked.  New Years?  Resolutions?

YessireeBOB!

In my experience, in the United States at least, September is the time we think about changes in ways that empower us to actually make some: new school year, new binder, new clothes, new locker, new life. In a rare fit of temporal consciousness, I notice that we have just entered the month of August. September is one short month away, if I remember the calendar correctly.

Time to get busy with some change-management.

A therapist I know has this to say about change:

“Everybody wants things to be different, but nobody wants anything to change.”

He doesn’t add, “especially anything about THEM” – but I have always believed that’s what he was really talking about: the devil you know, and all that.

What IS it about change that makes us cringe?  

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Life in the Now Lane

Drawing of a man "stuck" in the top half of an hourglass, while the sands filter past him to below.Now and Not-now

  • Do it NOW
  • Be Here NOW
  • NOW is the winter of our discontent???

Quite the mixed bag of struggle, all this NOW stuff.

FIRST, there is my struggle to imprison NOW within the construct of time at all. Buddhists, Hindus, and ancient spiritual traditions suggest that time itself is man’s presumption – that minutes and seconds and years and eons are nothing more than a progression of accumulated nows, artificially massaged into parts and pieces to temper man’s terror of the infinite.

That works for me!

It certainly explains my life-long boggle over all of those questions to which the only accurate answer I could ever give would be a question-specific tailoring of, “Somewhere in the ether of the not-now, Grasshopper”
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If I Should Die

You know the prayer:Graphic of a girl in "onesies pajamas with feet," on her knees praying by the side of a cradle.

Now I lay me down to sleep.
I pray the Lord my soul to keep.
If I should die before I wake
I pray the Lord my soul to take.

Even I know the prayer, though I was not raised in a particularly religious household as I remember – which is always an iffy thing since I am the poster girl for a-historic.

I’m famous for the comment, “I didn’t see that movie,” to the very person who is in the position to say, “Yes you did. We saw it together!” (Now, wouldn’t you think they’d ALSO give you a clue about occasion, their presence or the plot? But then again, why ruin a funny story?)

But back to the prayer. You know, little kids are terrified by that prayer.

“But I don’t want to ask God to die!”
is a response many remember having,
chins quivering.

ADD kids aren’t the ones with that response, however.

What scares ADDers . . .

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Creating Community Together

What Goes Around Comes Around

Drawing of a globe encircled by various kinds of people holding handsWhen I began my own ADD journey, many things were very different: many were “worse” — but a few seemed much “better.”

One of the things I miss most is the closeness of the community “back in the day” when it was not so widespread.

Anyone who has read  The Goose Story** on my first website surely knows how VERY much I value community — and how “aggressively” I define that term.  Leading the charge toward its creation has been a spiritual calling — a mission, if you will.

It has been a real heartbreaker to watch the ADD Coaching field I gave up so much to build devolve into what often feels more like a competition than a community - battle of the coach trainings, battle of the websites, battle of the tips and tricks, battle of the treatment approaches, battle of the etiologies – even a battle between various approaches toward coaching in general and ADD Coaching in particular.

I’m hoping that what is beginning to emerge more and more lately portends more of a “coopetition” that means that others are a battle-weary as I.

Yes, we must each take care of paying our bills and supporting our families with what we do with some of the minutes of our lives.

But I have always believed that we would ALL have an easier time of that particular objective by joining forces, rather than “competing for market share.” How about you?

Co-creating the Kind of World We Want

I plan to add to this post with others on the same topic;
I invite those of you with similar views to lift your voices with 
mine.

Let’s work together for the mutual good of our communities and our planet – becoming resources for each other because it is simply the right thing to do – meaning the thing that will create the kind of world we wanta world that works for EVERYONE.

In addition to blogging about it, I plan to throw my own “shoulder to the wheel” of like-minded individuals in a practical fashion as well – by helping to publicize what they are doing in a number of ways, beginning with the following actions:
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**If you are NOT familiar with Noyes’ free-verse poem, it’s really worth a look – click on it’s title (above, with the stars), and a new window will open to give you a chance to read it.  VERY inspiring!

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