Month: May 2019

Despite what some parents think, I’m not magic. It’s true that I’ve got a huge toolbox for connecting with each kid individually: that’s what you get from years of training and working with diverse kids, right? But there are limits to what I can do. Sometimes I need to use REAL magic, and that’s the magic of PEERS.

Peer feedback is 100 times more valuable than mine.

We’re all familiar with peer pressure as a bad thing, right? But peer influence can also be good, especially for kids learning through social challenges. As kids get older, they start to value peers more and more, so it’s really important to harness that power for good!

Let’s look at two kinds of peer influence:

Social proof is what researchers like Robert Cialdini call it: the power of seeing what the people around you are doing. When a child is around other kids who know how to behave, over time they can learn to model that behaviour. And it’s easier to convince a kid to try something different when you have the social proof of another kid doing it.

Peer feedback can take many forms, such as a child saying “I don’t like when you yell like that” or “your drawing looks really cool!” Even giving feedback can teach kids about their own behaviour.

That’s why I like to pair older kids up for therapy. With each thing we do, there’s often one kid who finds it easier to make changes, and often that helps the second kid make the transition faster.

Happy Pairings

Let’s look at some pair therapy success stories.

Learning friendly competition: Joe & Peter

Two of the boys I worked with were poor losers: they’d get angry whenever they played games and lost. I decided they could learn a lot from each other.

So I paired Joe and Peter up to play some games. When Joe lost, he threw his pieces and walked away. I brought him back to ask Peter how he felt, and Peter said he felt:
”Like I didn’t want to play with him any more and he scared me when he threw the pieces.”

Joe said sorry. But this was just the beginning.

Later that week Peter lost, and threw a fit. This was a great opportunity. I asked Joe to tell us how he felt, and then reminded Joe that he was lucky that the Peter would even play with him because last week he had done a similar thing.

This way both kids got to benefit from understanding what it was like to be on the other side, and had to adapt their behaviour to get along better.

The smell of success

One of my older kids never wanted to wear deodorant. We had several chats about how his body was changing and how smelly one would get after gym class or basketball. I even had him smell his stinky clothes after basketball. Despite the reminders and mom nagging him he rarely put it on in the morning, until one day that changed everything.

That day we were on the bus and he whispered to me, “Is that smell coming from that kid?” He gestured to the kid around his age that was sitting in front of us. Of course I took the teaching opportunity and said, “Most likely. He probably didn’t put deodorant on this morning, or maybe he didn’t shower”.

After that, he never forgot to put deodorant on, or complained about taking a shower!

This lesson simply wouldn’t have been possible without peer feedback.

Kids learn a lot from peers

As you can see from these stories, spending time with peers has the potential to greatly accelerate how kids learn social skills.

My role with peer groups, whether pairs or larger groups, is to make sure they learn the best things possible from each other, as quickly and happily as possible.

So I guess the real magic is all of us working together.

This blog post came out of all the research I did to support one really sweet girl who for the life of me I could not get to focus. I mean I was for lack of better words hitting my head against the wall trying to support her. The most insight came from books like Delivered from Distation and The ADHD Advantage, but also from my good friend Byron who has learned to use his ADHD to his advantage.

Controlling the Bingo Brain

What you may ask is the Bingo Brain? It is the ADHD brain running free. What I admire most about people with ADHD is their ability to see connections between people, situations, and things that I would never see because thier brains are “hyper connected” . People with an ADHD brain need time to let their brain run free. Honestly that is when some of the most of the wall but brillant ideas come from. One of the best analogies I have come across is that ADHD brain is like a race car that is turbo charged. One has to learn to put the right oil in the car so that it doesn’t burn up and one needs to learn how to put the breaks on and slow it down so it doesn’t crash.  – Dale Anchor author of the ADHD advantage.  Here are some types to slow things down and keep track of things:

1. Write things down. Making lists will help clear space in a person’s brain to allow for room and energy to put on the things that matter.
2. Remove distractions. Also when working on a computer things like closing all the apps, tabs and social media that may distract you from the task at hand can be useful.
3. Exciting goals. A good way to control the Bingo Brain is to have a meaningful, exciting, goal that stretches the person because then hyper focus is more likely to kick in.
4. Prioritize what needs to be done this month, this week, and today.

Time management and forgetfulness

Time management is something a lot of people with ADHD struggle with. They often don’t have a sense of time passing.

• Use a calendar One of the tools I use with the kids I work with is Google Calendar. Rather than giving them a gigantic list at the beginning of the day of all the stuff they need to do we put reminders in their phone. I often but heads up reminders in their phone to start putting it in their head before they need to do it. For example “heads up you need to meet so and so at 4pm” and then 10 minutes later “leave to walk to meet so and so”.
• To do lists and project management software Google calendar is great and an other website I use myself is Asana, which can help keep track of projects and all the little details that go with each of the projects. The best part is that multiple people can interact on the same project.
• Routine is important Building routines is also very helpful for children with or without ADHD. Things like preparing the night before for school in the morning can help, eg. making their lunch, setting out clothes, and packing a bag. Building morning and bedtime routines helps kids to remember: it almost becomes muscle memory. Have specific places for sports equipment like a swimming bag that the swim suit, towel, brush, and goggles live in so they can just grab and go.

ADHD has its challenges but it is also something that can be leveraged. If we spend some time early in a child’s life to figure out how to use their gift and work with it rather than against it one can only imagine what is possible in their future.

ADHD

Can be seen as:

• Difficulty focusing or staying on task
• Inattention to details
• Inability to sustain attention
• Trouble listening
• Disorganization
• Avoidance of tasks that they don’t find interesting
• Frequently losing things
• Being easily distracted by external stimuli
• Forgetfulness

Or as :

• An ability to multitask
• A propensity to thrive in situations of chaos
• Creative, non linear thinking
• An adventurous spirit
• A capacity for hyper focus on something that fascinates you
• Resilience
• High energy
• A willingness to take calculated risks
• Calmness under pressure

— Dale Archer, The ADHD Advantage

 

ADHD has its advantages! Many successful people both today and in history have had ADHD; many have gone undiagnosed.  They learned to leverage their strengths, such as the ability to compare different aspects of several options in their head, or their ability to stay calm in what the rest of us would call chaos.

So how can we help children or adults, for that matter, learn to harness their gifts and use them? First, we have to realize that people with ADHD won’t fit into our conventional inside-the-box way of doing things, so let’s stop trying to make them fit.

People with ADHD tend to:

• Need more stimulation than the rest of us to stay focused
• Need less sleep
• Work best in the wee hours of the morning or the late hours of the night.
• Have hyper-connected brains, so they make connections to things that we don’t always follow
• Get distracted easily—yet when, really interested can be hyper focused on something for hours and lose track of time
• Lose track of time, often being late, and forgetting things
• Thrive off multitasking
• Do really well under pressure
• Be big picture thinkers, and not so good at remembering all the details
• Need help from people in their lives who are strong at the things they struggle with—much like the rest of us!

In a lot of cases, parents, teachers, and doctors jump straight to medicating a child. I am not saying medication is wrong, but in my opinion there are many things we should try first, before dampening their brain and the child’s personality. Meds may end up being the answer for a short while or at certain times in a person’s life, but long term use can have some unwanted side effects. I believe that diet, exercise, coping mechanisms, and an open mind to things being done in unconventional ways are what needs to be considered first.

Supporting kids with ADHD in the classroom

Let’s make classrooms that fit the kids rather than kids to fit the classroom. My first suggestion is to ask the kids what works for them. If they know great, if they don’t here are some ideas to stimulate their brains, and help them focus.

• Fidgeting: Tapping a pencil or playing with a fidget toy
• Wiggle seat/ yoga ball
• Movement breaks every 30 min (I love brain gym breaks for the whole class)
• Changing places—Moving about to a new place in the classroom
• Multi-tasking: Working on a few different assignments at once. I tried this with one of my clients who was super frustrated, having a really hard time with sight words and got stuck in a routine of giving me the same wrong answer over and over again. She always seemed to get distracted even when sitting in a room with only a table, 2 chairs (one for her and one for me), and her work. So I tried alternating between a math equation and a sight word, and she got 50% more sight words correct. Before each question, I’d ask things like:
  • “We are thinking about numbers now.”
  • “Is your brain thinking about letter sounds now?”
• Build on interest—Work with what they are interested in and build lessons around that.
• Free time—Give them time that is unstructured so they can let their “Bingo brain” run free. It is important for a person with ADHD brain to have space to day dream, freely to make all those connections they make in their brain run freely. Amazing things can happen during those periods.
• Vigorous activity before seated activities
• Short bursts of instructions, so as not to get bored and tune out
• Kick start: When they have trouble focusing sometimes they need what I call a kick start, so start with something they like related to what needs to be done. For example when a friend of mine can’t get into working on his computer he starts by playing a game on it and after he plays for 10- 15 minutes his brain is in computer mode and then he gets down to work. It could be to start reading or listening to something they like before moving on to reading the textbook. It is kind of warming up their brain to get in the zone.

ADHD has an impact on the kid’s social lives, too. They don’t always catch when others can’t follow their train of thought, and often are a lot more self educated on subjects they are interested in than their peers. Sometimes the opposite is true they have trouble articulating what they are thinking. Teaching children with ADHD to be self aware, and read social cues, and control those impulses to interrupt others are essential to their success.

Sports are a great way to help children with ADHD with so many skills while meeting their need for movement and exercise. Teams sports teach them cooperation, communication, and resilience while things like dance, Karate, boxing and wrestling give them body movement to study, which is very complex and always changing so they don’t get bored.