Gal.5:22: But the fruit of the Spirit is......patience.......

The disorder can take on many faces. The most usual symptoms are a lack of attention, more activity than is normal for the age, not able to finish tasks, sometimes moodiness, and a lack of social skills. Most parents of children with ADHD realize long before any teacher or health care professional intervenes that they have a child who is much more active that what is deemed normal. However, for those of you who have a child with ADD, no hyperactivity, then you might be quite shocked when you are approached by a teacher that there is something wrong with little John or Suzy. These children are not overly active yet they usually have a difficult time learning in a regular classroom setting. That doesn't mean that they are not intelligent, even gifted, just that they are not able to learn in an overstimulating environment

It can be quite challenging for me at times as I never had any problems in school. In fact, I was an honor student that never had to study much. You can imagine my dismay when our oldest began having problems learning to read in first grade. We knew he was smart enough, yet no one could figure out why he was having problems, including his teacher. We finally took matters into our own hands and had him checked for the disorder and sure enough ADD was the cause. Our second child was much easier to diagnose partly because we were all watching for it including her teacher. She was much more hyper than our son ever was. After several years of ritalin and fights with the schools we pulled our son out of ps and began homeschooling. We also pulled him off the ritalin mainly because of some very bad side effects that he was having and began a regimen of herbs to control his condition. The next school year we pulled our two middle daughters to homeschool them as well.

I am in the process of checking all the links on this page. I would love to hear from any of you out there that happen to visit this page and would consider adding more links if you send them my way.

Something very important that I have learned with our youngest is that some kids are on their own time table and unfortunately for them it doesn't fit the norm. This is the case with us. I'm sure she would have had problems in PS, yet at home she did great. Mostly because I allowed her to learn at her own pace. This means that I didn't teach her to read until she decided she was ready to want to learn to read which was late in her first grade year. Then when we did begin she learned very fast, reading at a full second grade level by the end of first. I have done the same thing with handwriting. I didn't push her to learn cursive, just presented the idea and then one day she came to me and asked me to help her learn all the letters. I'm really beginning to believe that a lot of the problems associated with ADHD and ADD are related to pushing these kids before they are capable of settling down enough to learn the traditional way. They are more active and cannot be expected to sit still for 7 hours. They need to be moving. That doesn't mean they aren't learning. They just aren't learning in the traditional environment and in the so called normal way. When our youngest was a beginning reader she would usually start out in my lap but before she was finished she had been down, on the side of the chair, in the floor, etc....but she was reading and doing so very well. Now, you tell me what PS teacher would allow that...none!!! So, I'm pretty much convinced that ADHD/ADD is really just a difference in learning styles at least for most rather than a true brain or chemical disorder. I also believe the reason that some adults continue to have difficulties with the symptoms of ADHD/ADD is because of the way they were taught things in the early years. It's always been interesting to me to watch our oldest do things that he likes to do without any problem with attention. He can sit for hours reading books or magazines about hot rods or working on his truck or even building a model car. However, you put an English textbook in front of him and he dawdles and fidgets and takes 2 hours to do what it should take 15 min to do. Why? because he isn't interested in it. He doesn't see the point in it. Can he do it? Yes, he knows the material. Everyone is like this to a certain extent but the ADHD/ADD child/person has a much more difficult time making themselves do the mundain tasks that we all hate. So, if in their early years you could make sure that they aren't pushed to do things before they are ready and if you could make all learning experiences interesting and fun then just maybe somewhere along the way the control they need would come also. Who knows? I guess we will wait and see if the differences we have done with our youngest over the oldest three will truly make a difference in the long haul.