“Palm Pilots” and ADHD

Our family doctor is a Palm Pilot user. A Palm Pilot is a handheld electronic device that stores tons of information for you.

My youngest daughter had a habit of writing things to remember on her hand. When he saw it, our doctor said it was her own version of a Palm Pilot.

I used to work for a man who clipped small notes, phone messages, etc to his tie clip. He looked a little odd, but it worked for him.

When I had my first baby, the anesthesiologist wrote down my information on the leg of his scrubs.

All of these are unusual ways to keep track of what you need to remember, but if they work, who’s to argue?

Give it some thought - maybe you can come up with an easy creative idea to help your ADHD child remember.

Oh, and if you choose writing on your hand - use the top side. The palm gets sweaty and you’ll never be able to read it:-)

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Happy Thanksgiving

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving for most of us in the United States. I have spent most of today cooking and I am exhausted!

I wanted to take a minute, though, to tell you that you - my readers - will be on my list tomorrow of things I am thankful for.

I appreciate every one of you - without you I don’t know what I would do.

You enrich my life, challenge me, and teach me more each day. I am so grateful to be able to do what I do, and I thank you for allowing me to do it.

Whether or not you’re celebrating, have a wonderful day tomorrow.

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Same Stuff, Different Way

Attention Deficit Disorder can be so unpredictable. Our symptoms are affected by so many different things that it can be hard to know at times what might help.

One of the places this shows up is in learning. Your child may understand a concept pretty well on Monday and yet not be able to grasp the same thing on Tuesday. Much of what gets learned seems to come and go at will; there is no building a foundation of what has been learned and adding to it.

Think of it this way: let’s say you’re building a wall out of bricks - the bricks in this case representing learning. Someone without ADHD starts with the foundation wall and continues building upward.

For someone with ADHD, you start with a foundation of bricks, but you may come back to work tomorrow to find that some or all of the bricks have been removed. You work on your wall all day and make some progress, but you still don’t complete as much as you did the previous day. And yet, you may come back the following day to find the wall as you left it on the first day.

The best way to handle this is to keep repeating the information, over and over, in different ways. You could do some math problems, for instance, that teach addition. Maybe later you could play a game with your child and let them keep score. You could let them help you cook, adding ingredients. You could get some M&M’s, or cookies, or blocks and demonstrate addition with those.

You can do the same sorts of things with older kids - using websites, real life experiences that they can relate to, movies, whatever. Even switching up the order they study the chapter in might help.

Of course, all of this means more work and more time spent. Kids with ADHD often spend far more time on their homework than kids without it. There’s not a lot you can do about that. It’s just the way it is.

One suggestion - you might want to keep a log on methods you try and their success rate. You’ll know if you’ve already tried something, and how it worked. And once you find a method that does, learn to use as well as you can.

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