Does anyone know of anything natural for ADD? My daughter has ADD and she is almost 14. We've been the medical route. The psyciatrist had her on Trileptal and Wellbuffrin, then he added something else. I thought I was gonna loose her being on so many meds. Took her to a doc and got her off. She's been on nothing for about a year now and her grades are bad. I won't try to drug route again or another doc of any type!
unfortunetly I don't have any answers for you, I can only tell you what we have tried and dismissed.
My son has been on ritalin, then adderall, then adderall XR, and after a very bad repsonse to the XR we pulled the plug on the meds. Since then, we have put him on Gingko biloba (we try to get in 3-4 a day), and Omega-3 fish oil(1000 mg./day). Also we just had his vivion tested w/a behavioral optometrist. He was found to have an eye disorder (convergence excess) that may have been ALOT of the problem all along. He starts his treatments (therapy) tomorrow.
I, like you will not go the meds route any more. I am not against them if it works for a child. But we never had success. We never had good grades, we never seen his self esteem go up. It was always the opposite. He is back to the child I knew a long time ago. We have out moments, but we are trying to cope in different ways. I MAKE him write everything down!!
I don't know your answer...I have learned so much form this site, these wonderful people on here, and Have done a tremendous amount of research for anything that might help. I wish you good luck...what a terrible place to be in for your daughter, and it is so tough watching them go thru so much and feeling so lost as how best to help them. I feel alot has to do with hormones also. Sure changes a lot of things. My son's ADD is actually better than ever before since we are in the middle of puberty. Again, life is not bliss, we have our times, but I would rather have these times than the zombie, sickly, weak, crying, child he was.
Keep looking for an answer. Try an ND. I have heard some good things about them, but carefully check their license and ALWAYS check to make sure you know the side effects of any "natural" help.
ShaBaby59-
This is the first time i have responded on this board. Your post definitely caught my interest. I have a daughter that was formally diagnosed with ADD (the inattentive type) this year by her primary physician, the school psy, and a series of reviews from teachers and of course us, her mom and dad. It has been a difficult haul but I am glad we now have something to work with. By reading many many posts and doing my own research online/books I began omega3 fishoils that seem to be helping ever so slightly. Recently, because of her struggling to keep up academically in her regular classroom, we transferred her to an "innercore" class where she has the same teacher for all 4 core classes. The class also has only 20 students. What caught my eye on your post is the fact that you took your daughter off meds (something i have not tried yet) and her bad grades. My daughters grades are progressively getting worse. Actually, they are terrible at this point. The switch to innercore actually has not shown any form of improvement for her. I am scheduling a meeting with her teacher, but im beside myself on what to do. I literally have to disect her homework each and every night, and continue to dig-dig-dig for missing work, F grades on work not turned or F grades from tests/quizzes. I dont know what to do at this point. She is so unorganized but such a sweet sweet girl. When ever i ask her about what happened, its as if i am repromanding her (her head hangs low and she has that look on her face of failure). I have to defend myself to say that I am very very careful with my choice of words and tone. I try to remain positive, compassionate and do my best to be her #1 fan and support. Throughout this discovery of her diagnosis I (and my husband) are working in the mode of being supportive and trying to allow time to let her be a kid - not always grinding away at the books. Its not fair that she is in all the afterschool tutoring, no electives - she is in a study group. She has to have time to unload. Anyhow, to make a long story short, I am frustrated. I feel as if the school system is brushing her under the mat because she is so quiet,,,and I am not satisfied with the fact that they (the school psy & counselor) recommend her to innercore but forget about her progress thereafter. As a matter of fact, they did not even discuss her history with the new teacher at all. Any advice? I do wish you the best with your daughter. It is so difficult to see them fall behind and you almost feel exhausted as to what to do.
Thanks for listening.
Hi there all,
All of our children are different, but let me share about one of mine, who was totally different than the other two. We don't have scripts to follow, and everything changes daily, so life is very hard for parents, and imagine what it is like for kids! It is like we all need a PhD in psychology for Pete's sake!
Parents make many mistakes. I know looking back, that these will be just words to young parents as they were to me, but don't sweat the small stuff OR the big stuff. An elderly lady and her husband told me this, when they saw how anxious I was with my kids. I asked them how they could be so serene, and they told me that they felt just like me when they were younger. But, over time, they learned that what we sweat over the most is not important in the overall scheme of life. That we don't even know if we have a tomorrow or if our kids do, so we may as well relax right now!
The main thing I found as I began to practice their advice is that when I am relaxed inside, I handle everything much better, and can see solutions that were right before my face all along, but that had been blocked out by my own anxiety. We know inside ourselves what we really need to do. But it isn't fast or convenient or someoen else disagrees, so we tend to ignore our inner voice and listen too much to the clamour outside our heads. Or have too much of the outside clamour right inside of our own heads!
I have a grown child, 20 now, but he still has the same tendencies, who bows his head and goes into himself when confronted with what he has been doing incorrectly. He tends to depression, self-absorption, and self-pity. He is otherwise an intelligent, wonderful, sensitive and caring person.
As a parent, my personality is direct, open and somewhat impatient. Despite my son's compliant appearance, he is stubborn and passive-agressive, meaning that any rebellion he has is internalized and robs him of energy to get tasks completed. He will space out and be silent before he will fight for what he wants openly. This makes it impossible to get any
feedback out of him, or to deal with him. It can feel maddening!
I didn't see any of this about him until I home-schooled him during the 8-11th grades, and then I really learned a LOT. This child wanted complete structure and no surprises. If I got disorganized at all, or behind in my schedule, he shut down. When he shut down, I applied pressure, correcting him, urging him to do his work, etc. Not in a mean way, but to notify him that he had to get caught up. It became a vicious circle of his shutting down and me being overly involved in the school work that was his personal responsibility.
Eventually, I took cue from experience with my first child, who was more open, and had told me, many times, to allow him to make his own mistakes. It was very hard, but I backed off from this last son, and made up some consequences that he would not like, and put his responsibility back on him. It was not easy to find consequences, because he didn't have friends he wanted to be with, or activities he wanted to participate in.
All he wanted to do was play Nintendo, watch TV, or use his computer (which he was VERY good at). I had tried taking those things away from him, and he didn't care. He would just sleep.
Well, I had determined this was a battle of wills, though he did not admit it. I began making him sit on his bed (not allowed to lie down) to think when he was unresponsive, or down-cast. I didn't do it punitively, but told him that people have to communicate, and if they don't they damage relationships, and that he was damaging ours by not talking. I told him he has to sit there until he is willing to talk. It took a few hours for him to respond, at the first several times I did this. Then he would come out of his room, and we would have the necessary communications. If he hung his head, I told him not to try to make it appear I was abusing him, and if he didn't look up, he was sent back to his room to sit and think.
It took awhile for this to change, because he is a manipulator, not an open direct person. I have had long talks with him about how his traits, like all of us, can be used positively or negatively. He can be himself and not be negative, just as he can be himself and not be positive. If he wants to act like a weak person, he can choose to go into himself when he does things wrong and feel sorry for himself that someone noticed he did it wrong, or he can look others in the eye, and say yes, I did "this" wrong but I will work on it, or this is what I will do to fix it.
He lives at home and has, in spite of his great intelligence, failed and dropped out of college classes. This is a young man that tested at 11th grade to be at second year college level in learning. The public school didnt even want him back, as they had nothing to offer him, so he began college.
It has been very hard to do, but my husband, his father, and I made a rule that if he doesn't choose to do the work of college, he has to pay his full share of living costs, his car can't be on our insurance, etc. He can live here, but as a fully participating adult, like a room mate. And he won't get another chance to have support while he attends college. Then we left the choice to do the work up to him.
He chose to do the work of catching up in his classes, and my husband noted how he looked like a weight was off him, the next morning. I did tell him that if he needed to make himself accountable he could leave a list of due homework on the table where we could see it, if that would help him stay on task. He didn't say yet, if he wants that.
I suggest that you back off and give responsibility back to your child for his or her own grades. The child has to do nothing when you are the one poring over everything, and is not excelling or learning. The child has become inert mass, doing nothing, while you do all the worrying and fixing and all.
I don't have time to go into it right now, but this morning as I was looking at possible college psychology classes for myself, I noticed that the Conner's Parent Rating Scale is a criteria for ADD/ADHD testing. It rates parenting problems.
I suggest that these parenting problems are between
child and parent personalities, and if you can understand your child's personality and not feel guilty or be anxious, that you can figure out how to best manage your child productively. I believe the resources are inside of you and that you are the best parents your children can have! Gos bless you!
(gos??? that was some typo! I mean GOD bless!)
[This message has been edited by mickimac (edited 03-26-2003).]
You know, this is my 2nd daughter with academic problems and I know where you are coming from cause I'm there again! My first daughter, now almost 23, had the same sort of problems and ADD too. She had been on Ritlin when she was little, stomach pains, head aches, etc. and it seems those pains and aches never went away and I blame it on the Ritlin. Though she also had Hep B from when we were stationed in Turkey. And my 2nd daughter isn't a military brate, just the first. Anyway, my first daughter finally dropped out in 9th grade and lived with a boyfriend until they married a couple years ago. She just recently got her GED and got a job for the county and now her she got her husband a job there too. All that frustration all those years and she grew out of it all/the ADD. But I'll tell you, she had got involved in real bad stuff around 7th grade and older but now it's all behind her. So my 2nd daughter, it's frustrating to wonder what went wrong with her. I left her dad right before she was in Kindergarten. I homeschooled her in preschool and she knew everything, plus, what a Kindergartener knew, then I left her dad and her grades slowly fell until 5th grade and then she had straight F's. She also had her step-mother for her teacher and principal in 5th. Her step mother was the prinicpal from like 2nd grade through 5th and I got custody of her. Her dad would do horrible stuff to her and making her stay up till after midnight working on homework. I got custody of her that year. She was doing great in 5th grade but her teacher over here suggested that she was pretty immature and said maybe I ought to keep her back. Sam did alot of homeschooling over the Summer and even Summer School and then I let her go to 6th grade. Then 6th grade was very rocky, she wasn't ready for it still. She couldn't keep up with the work and wasn't motivated, couldn't keep her mind on it, etc. Then they passed her on to 7th and that Summer, she went to so many week long camps cause I felt she needed a brake so we didn't do Summer School or homeschool. 7th grade has been an entire disaster. She is back to straight F's almost. Band she gets a B and Science D's and C's. The others, pretty bad. The school won't test her again because last year they tested her and she fell within limits. They noticed she did show memory problems and what not but decided to do nothing but the 504 program which did nothing but monitor and check for homework which I could do myself! So I said screw that. That was in 6th grade but this year in 7th, they won't test her, they say I have to wait 2 more years because the law says they only have to test her every 3 years. When I threatened to have her tested on the outside at my own expense, they got scared and said they'd help her and they have been helping her but it seems as though they are giving her the answers! And it's too much homework still, they won't cut it down! I know if I could get an IEP, which I can't until 2 yrs go down but the IEP would offer less work than other students by law. The state I am in is worthless but you may try for an IEP. Some states require you to get a diag of ADD and a referral for an IEP which we did but that didn't make the school do anything. We are going to move very soon to where they will do something. I'm tired of fighting the system. I can't afford testing right now. And we are so far from the big city. The big city's have SO MUCH more to offer! The only problem is, we had lived in the big city with my first daughter and she wound up w/bad kids. So, when we move there, I will have to get my 2nd daughter involved in things to keep her buzy outside of school. I keep thinking, 4 1/2 yrs till she's 18 and hopefully she'll outgrow her ADD. Counseling didn't seem to help. Some of the stuff that bothers me too about Sam is she's so immature compared to my first daughter. Not even my 6 yr old son does things like Sam. She puts her snot all along the side of the sink when she uses the bathroom. She throws tantrums like a new born baby. I can't stand it so I open her window hoping she won't scream. I guess everyone handles things differently but I'm beside myself. Her dad wants her back there but whenever she had asked him to come to her event, he asks what's in it for him, what she would do for him. I told him if he's gonna act that way than Sam won't call him until he acts like a father should. She won't speak to him anymore actually. Anyway, I think she got behind years ago in her work and just hasn't caught up. She doesn't know her multiplication and she's doing a little pre-algebra at school. I whish the schools would realize all kids aren't at the same level. I wish you luck. Let me know what you look to do. My oldest son, now in 5th, at his dad's is having the same problems. His dad makes him stay up till after midnight most nights, doing work that he isn't ready for. He feels if he keeps pushing him that he'll do great in school and I'll have no basis to get custody of him but he wants to live with me. I've called child protective service alot in the past but it only makes me look bad for calling wolf. His wife is a friend of cps, and his wife has relatives in the sheriff's dept, my attorney use to work for cps and was the county attorney, finally i quite paying her after paying $30,000.00 and still I only have temp custody of my daughter for 2 yrs. I could go on for days so I'd better close.
Natural meds for ADD? 
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