Struggling but not meeting any of the above criteria: These kids, like most of the population, have high abilities and low abilities. They are performing at or near grade level so are not LD; have average or above-average IQ so are not intellectually disabled; and are not gifted at risk. These, more than any other kids, slip through the cracks, not getting the help they so desperately need.
What’s Wrong With The Schools?
Public education is designed to teach as many children as possible. Therefore, it needs to target the majority of children. The majority of teachers were kids who enjoyed school and did well. They enjoyed it so much that they wanted to stay in school for the rest of their working lives. Teachers are not usually the kids who struggled. Because they do not receive training as part of their education into the reasons for learning challenges, they are not adequately prepared to deal with these problems in their classrooms.
I believe that most teachers, like most people, want to do a good job. It is not usually the teacher’s fault that a child is struggling.
What’s Wrong With the Parents?
If teachers and doctors don’t know what to do with these kids, how can a parent be expected to have the answers?
It was suggested that my son was ADD in Grade 4. Our family doctor gave me a book to read, which I did. It suggested that Ritalin was the only thing that could help. Years later, I learned that the book was written by a doctor who works for the pharmaceutical company that makes Ritalin. The book was given to every doctor in North America.
Years later, I started finding better books written by ADHD and LD adults, parents of kids with LD and ADHD, researchers, and program developers. These books were much better than the books that led parents, teachers, and doctors into believing in drugs vs. cognitive training and development.
What’s Changing?
With the extensive brain research that’s been done in the last 10 to 20 years, new information is starting to make its way into the medical community. Hopefully, it will make its way into the universities where soon-to-be teachers will learn how to better teach challenged children.
It is also becoming evident that IQ tests are not the best way of testing intelligence. The concept of multiple intelligences has been around for decades and is finally becoming more widely accepted.
It is also becoming more accepted that intelligence can be trained!
In his book, “Family First,” Dr. Phil states:
Let’s begin by focusing on your child’s intellectual functioning, which many experts have long believed to be genetically determined and therefore unchangeable. Are they right or are there things you can do or stop doing that will increase your child’s intelligence? I’m not talking about educating them more; I’m talking about actually increasing their mental ability. The answer may surprise you, although there are definitely differing opinions.
There’s an older school of thought supported by a large, if somewhat dated body of scientific research that says you cannot boost IQ because it’s fixed at birth and based on genetic programming. However, as the sophistication of measurement devices has improved, this long-held position has recently been widely disputed. Intellectual ability is no doubt primarily a function of genetics; however, there are many experts who now believe that intelligence is changeable and
that you can increase your child’s intelligence, as measured by standardized, valid and reliable tests, by as much as ten to twenty points! Many experts believe that it’s even possible to increase connections between brain cells, which in turn will lead to enhanced mental processing.
How Can PACE and Samonas Help?
These programs are the best we have found for training cognitive and processing abilities, though they come at it from completely different angles.
Samonas trains the auditory processing system through very specially recorded music listened to with very special headphones. In a nutshell, the brain must respond very quickly to what it hears. Different frequencies affect different parts of the brain. The message from the ear travels, in nanoseconds, to the brain and the brain sends information back to the ear (i.e. to adjust tension on the eardrum in response to loud or soft sounds) or the body (i.e. to jump out of the way in response to screeching tires). The auditory system is a major freeway into and around the brain. As it is exercised with the variety of frequencies involved in classical music, processing speed and discrimination improve. The brain no longer performs sluggishly but as it was intended.
PACE works by specifically targeting processing and cognitive abilities like memory, visual processing, auditory analysis (phonemic awareness), processing speed (thanks to the metronome), logic and reasoning, and several types of attention.
Both PACE and Samonas work very well but the child needs to be in the right program for his or her specific needs (as determined by the initial assessment).
The End Result—Improvements in School
By training the specific skills that cause the problems in school, the vast majority of our clients have gone from:
· Being intellectually disabled, to being average students (Intellectual Disabilities)
· Performing below intellectual ability, to performing above grade level (Learning Disabilities)
· Having both high and low abilities, to having consistently high abilities (Gifted at Risk)
· Struggling in school, to loving it!
ADD May Indicate Auditory Processing Deficits
In a very high number of cases of attention deficit, the cause is a lack of ability to process auditory information efficiently. This is especially important considering that most schooling involves learning by listening.
For a child with auditory deficits, the teacher begins to speak and by the time the child has processed the first sentence, the teacher is several paragraphs along in the lecture. The child attempts to grab a sentence to process, usually taken out of context by this point, and struggles to make sense of it, while getting further and further behind in the teacher’s discussion.
You tell your child to put his shoes in the closet, pick up his toys, and get ready for bed. He picks up his shoes, dumps them in the hall, and goes back to playing. All he was able to process was that he had to do something with his shoes. Everything else was lost to him.
In the classroom, this is the child who hears “open your math book” but misses “turn to page 33 and answer questions 1 to 12.” He sits there not knowing what to do but recognizing that everyone else does (negatively affects self-esteem). He might even get in trouble for asking another student what to do or for looking around at other desks for a clue. This is the child who is frequently accused of not paying attention or of being a behaviour problem. After all, everyone else got it. Well, everyone else might not have an auditory processing problem.
Medication
On www.remedyfind.com people post their experiences with different types of remedies. One ADHD adult wrote that for the first 15 minutes, Concerta was like a cocaine high; for the rest of the day it was like coming down off a cocaine high. Nine-year-olds can’t tell you that it’s similar to cocaine; only an adult who has done cocaine can make this comparison.
In a newsgroup, I read a discussion from an ADHD adult who had taken medications for many years. She suggested that instead of giving a child Ritalin, parents should have them smoke marijuana before school. Her opinion is that it does the same thing and causes less serious damage. She said she felt very similar whether on Ritalin or pot. In high school, she sold her Ritalin to other kids and smoked just a bit of pot to relax her so she didn’t get in trouble for her hyperactive behaviours.
Samonas and PACE both do a lot to develop the auditory processing abilities and attention. As these abilities improve, medication may no longer be necessary.
Strong-Willed or ADD?
Many children are misdiagnosed as ADD or ADHD when they are merely strong-willed.
Who are the most successful adults? It is the strong-willed adults who make their mark in this world. They are the creative inventors of new ideas and products; they are the entrepreneurs who find new and better ways of doing business; they are the leaders.
Every strong-willed adult was once a strong-willed child. Parents must nurture and help develop these children with special care. If you destroy the spirit you could see the energy, determination, and creativity released in negative ways by the teen years and adulthood.
I’ve heard of parents who use ADHD medication to control their strong-willed children. Watch out! They need to be parented, not medicated.
They need to know their boundaries and be taught how to operate within them by a parent who is direct and encouraging. We see the most dramatic conflicts when the strong-willed child has a strong-willed parent. It can be like watching elephants fight—they come out okay but the surrounding vegetation is completely destroyed. Is your family suffering the battle between a strong-willed child and parent?
There are many wonderful books on how to better parent these challenging children. A search for “strong-willed child” books on the Internet will result in dozens of options. Dr. James Dobson has several books on the topic!
Don’t break or medicate the strong-willed child—learn how to parent him or her better—so that years from now you’ll be proud of your adult child’s successes.
FDA Panel Approves Warnings for ADHD Drugs
The Associated Press – Feb. 9, 2006
WASHINGTON – Federal science advisers voted narrowly Thursday to recommend the most serious type of warning labels for Ritalin and other stimulants that are used to treat attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.
The 8-7 vote, with one abstention, by the Food and Drug Administration committee was to recommend adding “black box” safety warnings to ADHD drugs. Doctors prescribe the increasingly popular drugs to about 2 million children and 1 million adults a month.
The FDA isn’t required to follow the recommendations of its advisory committees but typically does.
The federal agency originally had asked the scientific panel to consider ways of studying the drugs, which include amphetamines, such as Adderall, and methylphenidates, sold as Ritalin, Concerta, Methylin and Metadate.
The agency’s own data suggested a link between the drugs and an increased risk of sudden death and serious cardiovascular problems, including heart attacks.
The panel quickly turned to a debate on whether it should consider new warnings for the drugs rather than simply discuss the need for more studies.
Panel member Dr. Curt Furberg said it would be “inappropriate, unethical behavior” for the FDA not to disclose to doctors and patients that there was uncertainty about the safety of ADHD drugs.
Dr. Steve Nissen told his colleagues they should push for the black box warning on the drugs’ packages.
The drugs already bear warnings related to the possible risk they could pose to patients with heart defects, the FDA’s Dr. Gerald DalPan said.
“We feel this warning is appropriate given our current knowledge of these drugs,” he said prior to the votes.
The balloting on warning labels followed an earlier 15-0 vote to recommend that the FDA require that the drugs include a medication guide for patients and parents.
25 deaths linked to drugs
A federal health official said Thursday that there was a strong possibility the drugs may be linked to the deaths of 25 people.
“There’s smoke. Does that represent a fire?” asked Dr. David Graham of the Food and Drug Administration.
The deaths occurred between 1999 and 2003, according to an FDA report. Nineteen of them involved children. The report also detailed 54 cases of serious cardiovascular problems, including heart attack, stroke, hypertension, palpitations and arrhythmia, in adults and children being treated with ADHD drugs.
Some of these patients had pre-existing heart conditions or hypertension.
The FDA said it has tallied an additional 26 deaths between 1969 and 2003 in ADHD patients involving death by suicide, intentional overdose, drowning, heat stroke and from underlying disease.
The FDA’s Drug Safety and Risk Management advisory committee was reviewing different ways to study whether the deaths were linked to use of the drugs. The few studies that have looked at longer-term use of ADHD drugs provide little information on those risks, the FDA said.
Analysis of the reports of death and injury suggests a possible link between the drugs and cardiovascular problems, the FDA’s Dr. Kate Gelperin told the panel. But the link is not conclusive, nor is it clear whether there is an increased incidence of death or serious injury, she said.
That, Gelperin said, “is really a question we’d like to have answered.”
An FDA review found fewer than one death or serious injury per 1 million ADHD drug prescriptions filled, with one exception: 1.79 cases per million of nonfatal cardiovascular or cerebrovascular problems in adults treated with amphetamines.
Sales of ADHD drugs increased to $3.1 billion in 2004, from $759 million in 2000, according to IMS Health, a pharmaceutical information and consulting firm.
That stepped up use could spell increased risk.
“Because adults have a higher risk of heart disease and stroke to begin with, any increase in risk caused by these drugs could affect a large number of people,” Graham said.
The FDA’s Canadian equivalent, Health Canada, briefly pulled the ADHD drug Adderall XR from the market last year. A Canadian panel eventually concluded there was inadequate evidence of increased harm from the drug. The FDA reached a similar conclusion at the time.
Adderall is made by Shire Pharmaceuticals and Ritalin is made by Novartis Pharmaceuticals Corp. Various other companies make generic versions of Ritalin as well.
Source: www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11242216
Training, Training, Training
In just the past six months, Lisa and Ross have undergone extensive training.
Text Box: The problem with working in such a new and changing field is that it requires constant upgrading and training in new methods. Lisa and Ross not only help others to learn better, they are constantly learning themselves.In October they went to New York City for Samonas Levels I and II.
In December, Lisa traveled to Vancouver every day for a week of Discover Math training.
In February they went to Seattle for Balametrics certification. (Lisa was already certified in Educational Sensory Integration, based on Frank Belgau’s Balametrics method.) It was nice to meet Mr. Belgau and hear success stories from his many years of developing and using balance to train cognitive and processing abilities.
Accomplished Learning Centre and the Fraser Valley Child Development Centre were able to lure Samonas developer Ingo Steinbach to Abbotsford in April in order to train Occupational Therapists and Speech Pathologists from around BC and Alberta. Ross and Lisa were able to retake Levels I and II, and add Levels III and IV to their repertoire.
Ross and Lisa are planning a trip to Colorado Springs for a few days in August to take the newly offered Advanced PACE training. |
