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Is it Autism, ADHD, or Both?

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A parent recently brought her 10-year-old child to me to answer the question, “Is it Autism, ADHD, or Both?” Her son was having difficulty in school with friendships, concentrating, transitioning, and his teacher was labeling him as a problem child. This parent tried to find answers on Dr Google but was left feeling more confused than clear. She wanted answers to know how to help her child and stop the downward spiral.

Autism and ADHD Characteristics

Autism and ADHD share many overlapping characteristics such as difficulty concentrating, friendship struggles, rigidity, quirky behaviors, and emotional dysregulation. Two key features of identifying autism include looking for a child’s restricted interest and repetitive behaviors as these often interfere with social skills.

Ongoing Restricted Interests

A restricted interest is an interest that is unusually strong and hyper focused to the extent the child only wants to discuss, play, or research the topic. This boy had heightened interest, but they changed about every month. He obsessed about Legos, then Fortnite, and then Star Wars.  These short intense, and then move on, interests were unlike a child with autism who would rather have one extended hyper focused interest such as planets.

Self-Stimulating Behavior

Many children with autism also have repetitive behaviors or self-stimulating behaviors. These could be hand motions when they get excited or moving their body in a certain way. This boy’s movements were related to low impulse control rather than the same repetitive behavior.

Tests of Social Perception

In addition to looking at symptoms via interview and rating scales, we completed interactive tests of social perception. We assessed if he could recognize a child’s facial affect and understand another child’s frame of reference.

The overall conclusion was this boy had ADHD, which interfered with his ability to concentrate, maintain his impulses, and was the root cause of friendship difficulty. Other kids rejected him due to his unpredictable behavior and intense emotional reactions.v We created recommendations to help him learn to regulate his attention and emotions. The parents also shared the testing results with the school for an accommodation plan.

I’ve written books on autism and ADHD for parents like you and you can find them on Amazon .

Call (561) 625 4125 to discuss your child.

How to help my child focus without medication

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Most medications for improving a child’s focus have negative side effects. Sometimes the side effects are significant enough that these outweigh the benefit. When side effects are too severe, parents often ask, “How do I help my child focus without medication?”

How to help my child focus without medication

There are many ways to help your child focus without medication and the three ways are discussed below are use a focus item, provide a visual reminder, and change your child’s diet.  Usually a combination of these approaches helps maximize your child’s focusing without using medication.

Use a focus item

There are attentional controls in our fingertips so when a child’s fingertips are activated his attention improves. You may have noticed your child has busy hands and often drums fingers, touches things, or tears at napkins. This helps a child focus but many adults find these behaviors as annoying. Give your child a small item to hold that can be squeezed, rubbed, or squished. This is a focus item. The item becomes a learning tool rather than a toy.

Elementary teachers often read this book to their class to help their students learn how to increase their focus. Then the teacher places a basket of focus items in the classroom so any child can use it when they need to focus such as during seat work. Some parents buy two copies and give one to the teacher so the teacher and parent are on the same page.  The focus item is one way to help a child focus without medication.

Provide a visual reminder

Most people are visual. When we go into a room, office, or auditorium we look around to see what is hanging on the wall or displayed. We visually look at others: the shape of a person’s nose, size of their body, height, and other physical features. This visual inspection naturally occurs.

You can help your child increase her focus by providing a visual reminder that’s constantly in front of her. Use a plastic bracelet with the word ‘focus’ written on it rather than a saying like ‘Live Strong.’ These are available for purchase on the internet. Another visual is a personalized pencil and rather than your child’s name on the pencil, personalize it with “keep working, keep listening.” These subtle visual reminders will help your child remember to focus.

Change your child’s diet

Most children do not eat as well as they should. Parents are busy and kids are picky eaters so this is a recipe for a battle and who want’s to battle at 6pm? Nevertheless, your child’s focusing difficulty may be nutrition related because most kids eat too much processed food high in sugar and carbs without enough protein. A book I find valuable is The ADHD and ADD Diet! by Peiper and Bell. These two are the authorities so don’t buy any other diet book because with self-publishing on Amazon there are many useless knock offs. Follow Peiper and Bell’s diet with your child and I believe your see your child’s focus noticeably increase.

These three ideas may help your child. Want more? Call  (561) 625-4125

Spongebob Causes ADHD?

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I recently did some testing with a second grade boy because his dad was concerned about his impulsive behavior.  The boy’s father had a conference with the Palm Beach Schools teacher and the teacher said the boy talks excessively, rushes through his school work, finishes so quickly that he walks around and disturbs other children, and slides out of his chair.  If you have a son does this sound familiar?  The types of behaviors the teacher and dad described could be related to ADHD.  After all, they sound like ADHD types of behaviors since impulsivity and lack of attention to detail are characteristics of ADHD.

The dad continued to say the boy has a short attention span at home, bounces from activity to activity, and does not complete tasks.  The boy does enjoy TV and especially Spongebob.  What surprised me was that the boy’s father asked me, “Does Spongebob cause ADHD?”  I replied, “No.” There is no direct link to Spongebob causing ADHD.  There was a study in 2011 that suggested watching just nine minutes of that program can cause short-term attention and learning problems in 4-year-olds.   Sixty kids were assigned to groups that watched Spongebob, Caillou, or drew.  The kids that watched Spongebob performed lowest on measures administered immediately after the activity.  However the study was severely limited in that it did not test kids before watching TV.  Thus, we don’t really know if these kids were lower to begin with or if it was something about the TV program.

I offer comprehensive testing for ADHD/ADD.  It should include more than just a behavioral checklist or rating scale.  When I test a child for ADD/ADHD it includes neuropsychological tests of attention and executive functioning.  Most kids with ADHD have significant difficulties on these types of tests.  Thus, it removes the subjectivity of a person’s opinion on the rating scale.  Direct testing, observation, interviewing the teacher and parents, are all just as important as any one rating scale.  If you are concerned your boy or girl may have ADHD then contact me to get testing.  Most parents believe the insight gained in testing gives them peace of mind and specific direction for helping their child.  They don’t waste time and resourses doing things that don’t help the child.

7 Steps to Help Reach His Potential

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As a parent, it’s frustrating to know (and most parents assume they know) that your child is intelligent but yet, in school, does not work up to what you perceive to be his or her potential. Parents become discouraged and call their child lazy, unmotivated, slacking, and other similar words.  When describing her son’s lower than expected grades a parent recently told me the old adage, “You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink.”   I agreed but responded with, “You can salt the hay.”  This means we can entice our children to perform better academically but ultimately the best drive to perform must come from within.  So, how do you help your child reach his academic potential?  It’s an ongoing process since your child did not spontaneously arrive at their current state overnight.  Of course, you must believe in your child, encourage and affirm their efforts, provide homework help, and be her advocate.

But how do you really help your child reach his or her academic potential?  Here are 7 steps to help you help your child reach his or her potential. 

Step 1.  Determine his or her potential through a comprehensive evaluation.  You can’t really know how hard to push your child without knowing where your child is at cognitively.  It could be like your car not performing the way you want it to and instead of looking under the hood, you just yell at it.  Open the hood, check out what’s really going on.

Step 2. Based on the evaluation, set up a realistic plan.

Step 3. Specify short and long term rewards as well as consequences.

Step 4. Explain the plan to other key players and obtain their support.

Step 5. Implement the plan.

Step 6. Evaluate the plan weekly.

Step 7. Adjust the plan based on the weekly feedback.

Repeat as needed. Often it’s helpful to have a counselor, therapist, etc. available as a
mentor to help you work through these steps. If you need ongoing help then one of my associates can help you with the process.  I can help you with the assessment to determine your child’s true potential.  It’s not as expensive as you think so call me to discuss your child.

If you like to read books to help you gain new insight, read Rick Lavoie’s book called “The Motivation Breakthrough.”  I especially like his advice on competition in schools.  You might enjoy it too.  He explains that many teachers say it’s good for school to be competitive because that’s how things are in the real world.  Rick argues that is not always the case because in the real world we only compete when we want to.  In schools a child can’t tell his or her teacher, “I’m not doing the class spelling bee.”  They are forced to compete.  He suggests parents and teachers have students compete to do their personal best rather than being the best. He has some other good points too.

 

You Can’t Motivate Teenagers

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…Unless they want for them self.  Face it– adults have motivation problems just like teenagers. A few years back I used to regularly work out but now I don’t. Why? I’m not motivated. I know I should work out. I have incentive to work out. I get punished if I don’t work out (weight gain). It’s not that I physically can’t work out. It comes down to this: I don’t want to work out. It’s my choice.

To be effective, motivation must come from within. In order to motivate your teenager from within they must learn to want it (whatever that ‘it’ may be: good grades, entrance into the college of their choice, achieving a goal, money, etc.). They should have the above components and most of all they have to want it. It is difficult to motivate a person if they don’t want it for themselves. Parents can’t always do it for their teens and if your teen does not want, for example, good grades then sometimes they must hit bottom before they learn to want it. Hitting bottom may be contrary to what you were thinking.

Do you want your teen to hit bottom now within the support of your family or hit bottom when they are in college or out living on their own? I vote for having my teen hit bottom while living at home and I’m around to help prop him or her up. I don’t want to rescue my teen and make it all disappear but I do want her to experience the consequences of real life. Let’s assume my teenager failed a course and had to retake it during summer school. I’m not going to gripe that it was the teacher’s fault and demand a grade change. Nope, she can retake the course and work harder.

In order to motivate my teenage daughter I encourage her and speak positive words to her. I reward the effort and not the grade. I offer tangible rewards. I impose consequences for lack of effort. We keep up with her grades on Edline.

All these components take a lot of work from my wife and me. Our daughter is a high school junior and is an excellent student. We support her but she understands that if she fails, she faces the consequences and we’ll hold out a hand and help her up.

Dr. Forgan is a licensed school psychologist in the Jupiter, Florida and Palm Beach Gardens, Florida area. I can evaluate your child for ADD/ADHD, testing for Palm Beach gifted programs, or a learning difficulty such as dyslexia.