By Jeanne Jackson DeVoe, Tuesday, October 03, 2006
One mother at the CHADD meeting raised her hand anxiously and asked how she could keep her middle-school child organized when he has at least five different classes with five different teachers.
The rest of the crowd chuckled appreciatively. After all, most at the first meeting of the Children and Adults with Attention Deficit Disorder, Princeton-Mercer County, are parents of children with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder and they face similar challenges. They seemed eager for answers.
The answer, from guest speaker Carrie Greene, a professional organizer and ADHD coach, was that children with ADHD are poorly organized. In fact, their sense of time and organizational skills — all part of their “executive function” — are about three years behind that of their peers. So, expect to help your children with organization and life skills well into high school or even college, Greene advised.
The CHADD group devotes an hour to a guest speaker with another hour set aside for small group discussions. At the next meeting, psychiatrist Charles Martinson will discuss diagnosing and treating ADHD and co-existing conditions such as anxiety and depression.
Many of those at the initial meeting seemed to get a great deal out of the discussions and the question-and-answer session afterward, organizer Jane Milrod Jemas said.
“People are starved for data,” she says. “There is power in sharing data — that satisfaction of feeling we are helping each other.”
Another mother raised her hand to say she gets weekly progress reports from each of her child’s high school teachers. A woman who said her children are now grown told the group that she went along with the idea that you should let children fail and didn’t intervene when her son began doing poorly in high school.
“He fell, and he fell hard,” she told the group. She has since learned that young people with ADHD don’t always take heed of consequences. She says she would handle things much differently if she had it to do over.
Another woman posed a common question: “How can I help my children when I have ADHD my self?”
Since ADHD is genetic, many parents of children with ADHD also have the disorder, Greene told her, and parenting children with ADHD becomes that much more difficult. This is especially true be cause children learn organizational skills and time management from their parents.
“It was really helpful, and it was really helpful to see other moms I knew,” the woman said later.
It can be overwhelming
Parents of ADHD children can be overwhelmed with the demands of raising a child who is very active or highly distractible and disorganized. Children with ADHD may be very bright but they often struggle at school and may sometimes have trouble making friends, experts says.
Most of those in attendance were parents of fourth- to ninth- graders, but there were also those with children in high school and Milrod Jemas says she has gotten calls about the group from parents of young adults.
Schools don’t pay enough attention to the needs of ADHD children because they focus on children with more severe learning disabilities, Milrod Jemas says. With studies showing up to 9 percent of children may have ADHD, schools should be doing more to help them, she says.
“Given that I can’t change the way that schools or school districts teach children with ADHD, the next best thing is to educate our parents, educate our sons and daughters, so they don’t feel there’s something wrong with them,” she says.
Milrod Jemas is open about the fact that she and her children have ADHD. She points out that she was able to graduate Phi Beta Kappa from Rutgers University and run her own corporate headhunting business because her ADHD makes her excel at multitasking. But having ADHD is still considered a stigma, Milrod Jemas says, and many parents make her promise not to tell anyone that they or their child has ADHD.
“They’re ashamed of it,” she says. Those unfamiliar with ADHD may think it’s made up or that a child with ADHD is simply being stubborn or not trying hard enough, she says.
“If it were a cut, you would put a Band-Aid on it. But anything that goes on in the mind is in the realm of the unseen and if you can’t see it (you think) it doesn’t exist.”
The medication issue
Milrod Jemas trained as a parent-to-parent educator in ADHD. She plans to start a book club for members to discuss books about ADHD and related topics and she has donated more than a dozen books to the Princeton Library.
Future speakers will talk about medication, and Milrod Jemas says she will encourage the discussion groups to explore the medication issue as well. Medication is not al ways the right course, says Milrod Jemas.
“I think sometimes people are reticent to join anything to do with ADHD support because they think they’re going to get a medication line.”
CHADD is a national group with local chapters, but parents do not have to join the national group to attend local CHADD meetings. CHADD Princeton-Mercer County is open to all. The group will meet Oct. 10 at 7 p.m. at Riverside Elementary School, Riverside Drive, Princeton. More information is available by calling Milrod Jemas, (609) 683-8787 or e-mailing janemil rod@aol.com.
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