How Do I Find Out If I Have ADD - Reflective Thinking

How Do I Find Out If I Have ADD

As the child gets older, his reflective thinking becomes stronger and stronger. He can identify his desires more confidently. He can recognize when he is calm and relaxed, or intense and active. If he needs a lot of adventure and excitement, he can deliberately choose to get involved in sports, dance, and outdoor exploration. If he likes more quiet time by himself, he can read or draw or write. These are his decisions. You can support your child in the kinds of activities that help him become calm and regulated and engage his full focus and interests. The reflective child becomes your partner in telling you what he needs, why he needs it, and how it makes him feel.
 

Regression In Thinking Level 

Of course, if the child's emotions are very intense, if he is really overwhelmed, like any adult he can regress and become a polarized thinker or go back to becoming impulsive, scattered, or withdrawn. It happens to the best of us. We all need to recognize high intensities of emotion or sudden shifts. Now, one hopes, a child will become reflective enough to notice his behavior and say, "Gee, I'm out of sorts today. What have I been eating? What have I been doing? What's going on that might be making me nervous?" He can notice that he has been staying up late and was exposed to a lot of loud noises for three days in a row and his system is getting overwhelmed.
 
Always expect regressions when there are intense changes in the child's sensory world as well as the emotional world, in his relationships. Each new level of emotional development and thinking gives the child greater and greater mastery of his behavior, including his level of attention and activity.
 
Encouraging Emotional Development and Thinking Skills 

When helping children to progress through these levels of emotional development and thinking that make possible self-regulation, attention, and focus, there are certain key steps for caregivers to keep in mind.
 
1. Help all the senses and the motor system to work together in harmony. 
In any game or activity, try to have the child looking, listening, moving, doing, and sometimes even smelling and tasting. How Do I Find Out If I Have ADD

2. Engage in long conversations, verbal and nonverbal 
Few children with attentional problems are able to carry on a long conversation or exchange of emotional signals.
Often, they just have fragmented conversations instead of ten- to fifteen-minute dialogues. Make sure that your conversations cover many different areas of the child's interests, raising real issues, like homework, sibling rivalry, TV habits, and special privileges.
 
3. Increase the range of emotions that the child can express and tolerate. 
Disappointment, frustration, and anger are some of the emotions that are difficult for children with attention problems and self-regulation. Some become day-dreamers, staring out the window when the teacher asks a hard question - "spaced out." Others become active or aggressive or have meltdowns or tantrums. Often this is because they can't handle negative emotions. For others, it may be the complexity that overwhelms them or a fear of failure. Bringing these feelings to the surface during relaxed chats will help a child recognize and control them.
 
When you are talking with a child, pay attention to her facial expressions. The child's verbal expression is not as important as being able to experience the feeling. If the child is verbal, have her describe the feeling. Let her express the full range of feelings from sadness to excitement, disappointment to happiness, anger to joy. Do this gradually by taking advantage of emotions that may arise as part of a natural conversation. For example, chatting about a schoolmate who "always has the answers" may bring up frustration. 

4. Follow the child's lead and interests. 
If a child wants to talk about baseball or dinosaurs and shows interest with interaction, engagement, emotional signaling, and so on, follow his lead. You can throw in other topics and help broaden the conversation once the child is engaged and motivated. The child's interest should be the starting point for the interaction, but it doesn't have to be the ending point. Gradually throw in different themes, building on the child's concerns and pleasures.

Even if the child's immediate interests are rather narrow and repetitive - for example, playing computer games - if you join her in them, you can encourage creativity. Throw in conflict and curveballs to expand the themes. Ask how the people who are being attacked in the game are feeling, or how the game might have turned out differently. What would she have the players do if a crisis arose during the game?
 
When a child is fantasizing, make sure the dialogue is logical and always makes sense. It can be imaginative, but it should be based on a logical sequence - the magical power works because of A, B, or C. How Do I Find Out If I Have ADD
 
5. Challenge the child's logic and self-reflection. 

Children with attention problems tend to think in fragmented pieces rather than connecting all the dots. We described this earlier with sequencing abilities, but logic will be needed in all spheres of learning and work. When talking about homework, for example, the child may suddenly switch to talking about a favorite computer game. Challenge the child to make sense: "I'm confused. I thought you were telling me about homework, and now we're talking about that computer game." "Well, Morn, talking about math homework reminded me of the game because you have to count in the game, too." Challenge the child to connect his thought patterns together and explain the connections. Debates about school rules, penalties, fairness, or even bedtime hours can bring out the child's best logical thinking.
 

Logic also helps with reflective thinking. A child with attention problems may not be able to reflect on an earlier instance in light of a current one and say, for example, "I got through the other test okay. Why am I nervous about this one?" This ability will be needed in planning a schedule or evaluating the child's own work to make sure all the pieces are in place. You can promote this by asking for the child's opinions: "Is there anything missing in your essay?" "I don't know." "Well, how did you reach that conclusion?" Or you might ask, "How does your first paragraph relate to the others?" "I'm not sure." "How can you stay on your main point?" "Maybe I can list all the points I want to make and put them in boxes and then put the boxes in order." As you can see, logical thinking, sequencing, and the ability to reflect on one's work are closely related skills that bear on a child's ability to keep focused and attentive in school and other pursuits. To learn more, you can check out How Do I Find Out If I Have ADD.

How Do You Know If Your ADD - Enhancing More Complex Thinking

How Do You Know If Your ADD

Language and Ideas 

As children learn to talk and use ideas, they become still more in control of their world and more secure. They feel more calm and collected, regardless of regulatory or sensory processing patterns. They can use words and ideas to express desires. They can use words to say "Swing, swing" to help them calm down, or to get Daddy to hold out his hands, or "Jump" to bring out the mattress or trampoline. The child can now ask for what he wants.
 
Pretend play is another way of expressing desires. A doll can be "scared" because there are loud noises like thunder. Children can show you by the way they stroke a teddy bear whether they like tickly touch or firm pressure. A child who is nonverbal can use pictures to show you what he or a doll likes. By communicating in this way he feels empowered.

Logical Thinking 

At the next stage, as the child gets closer to the ages of three to five years, he is combining ideas. When you ask, "Why do you want to go outside?" the child says, "Because I want to run." Or he can explain when you ask why he looks sad that his sister won't play with him. The child who is combining ideas and understands cause and effect, noticing that this action leads to that result, can express that with ideas: "Mommy, that's too loud!" or "Mommy, I don't like it when the children bang into me" (for the child who is oversensitive to touch or sound). The child who needs more movement or sensation may say, "Mommy, I can't sit still. I need to go outside and run." How Do You Know If Your ADD

Visual-Spatial Challenges. Logical thinking can also be developed in the visual-spatial realm. Help a child figure out how block designs work, how mirror images work. For example, show how two identical amounts of clay can be in the shape of a snake or a ball. See if the child thinks the long, thin piece is better than the round one. You can do the same thing with a tall, thin glass of water and a wide glass of water. In all of this the child is developing logical thought, strengthening processing abilities, and at the same time engaging in longer and more elaborate focused attention.
 
Underreactive Child. A child who is underreactive may invite you into her pretend play if you have been a good social partner before. She may prefer a quiet game, but if you feel she is talking to only herself, that's your signal to energize up and make the pretend more creative and interactive. Also, this child might avoid physical activity that requires a lot of motor output. You might need to entice her through playing dress-up as her favorite TV character. 

The favorite TV character can go on an adventure with Daddy that will require going on balance beams and standing on Koosh pads and doing all kinds of interesting things. The point is, now the child can actually say to you, "Daddy, I'm scared! I don't know if I can go over the water on the balance beam" (a make-believe bridge). Daddy says, "Oh, I'll be here to hold your hand. I'll be here to catch you, and I'll be your superhero friend." He then encourages the child to take a chance. The newly developed logical thinking can help children expand their abilities in other areas.
 
The verbal child can now tell you when she is frustrated or doesn't like something, and you can empathize with her. This helps as you slowly expose her to more and more sensory experiences that she may not enjoy initially. By making a fun game out of it with a lot of verbal interaction and reassurance, when she gets used to it she is going to find it more fun. Let the child express her concern or anxiety or fear or worries, and if you listen and bring it into the pretend play and are empathetic, the child will gradually master these worries and fears more and more, and become master of her own feelings. The key is not to push the child to inhibit the feeling but to express it in a comforting, secure environment with an empathetic caregiver. A child who can express her feelings and even learn to control them is less apt to try to escape them in wild, impulsive activity or by constantly changing the subject. How Do You Know If Your ADD
 
Multicausal and Gray-Area Thinking 

As we go up the ladder of logical thinking we get into multicausal thinking (between ages four and six years) in which the child can give you many reasons that he is feeling overloaded or craving more action. Then we get into gray-area thinking (between ages seven and nine) where the child can deal with degrees of feeling. He can tell you just how much touch he wants - "Just a little firmer" or "A little harder here, Mommy" as you give him a foot massage. Or as you are swinging, "A little more, Daddy" or "A little less, Mommy." So he can really now regulate his sensory and motor worlds and fine-tune them, not just go for all-or-nothing: "Slow." "Fast." "Stop." 

The sensory-craving child, the child who is on the move, can modulate more finely - a little bit faster, much faster. Now you can have a dialogue and discussion while you are doing it, and the child can tell you just how he feels: "This feels really exciting" or "This feels a little scary" or "This is boring."
 
You want to help the child strengthen his ability to do multicausal thinking, to give you many reasons for why he wants to do or have something. Ask him why he wants to go next door. He may answer, "Because I need fresh air." "Why do you need fresh air?" "Because I've been sitting in school all day. Anyway, they are playing baseball, and that's my favorite game." At the same time while you are asking him "Why?" you are looking at your child and listening to him intently. The child is focusing because he is interested in the topic, and you're picking up on his natural interests and encouraging him to think in more complex ways about them. To learn more, you can check out How Do You Know If Your ADD.

Teachers With ADD - Engagement And Relating

Teachers With ADD

At this second stage, the two to four month old is becoming pleasurably engaged with the human world, showing a preference for Mommy or Daddy or other caregivers over the inanimate world or to all other sensations. A big, beautiful smile tells parents that the baby is fully engaged with them. Caregivers encourage the child to attend to sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and movement patterns by helping her become calm and comforted by rocking patterns, by types of touch - gentle, firm, tickly, or more of a squeeze - and by the quality and tone of their voices. 

Sooner or later, they find the right formula for comforting and soothing their little guy or gal. If the baby is very fussy, maybe due to gas or other distress, it can be a little more challenging, and parents may seek help to find the right approach. Perhaps it involves walking with the baby or holding her with firm, gentle pressure. Various strategies can be worked out, but the baby comes to recognize the caregivers as the source of comfort and anticipates being soothed more and more, often searching them out in a room or getting "bright-eyed and bushy-tailed," so to speak, as the caregiver enters the room. Here is not only a source of nutrition and fun and play but a source of comfort as well.
 

Purposeful Emotional Interactions 

Around eight months, there is a real back-and-forth communication, with the baby reaching, vocalizing, and smiling, and the parents responding back - we call this opening and closing circles of communication. Now, through his facial expressions, arm movements, leg movements, body posture, and different sounds that convey emotion, the baby is letting you know what he likes and doesn't like. He is learning to regulate his own environment - basically telling you to "shush" or to liven up a little bit. By attending to the parent's responses, the baby is beginning to get a sense that "I can make an impact on the world." A baby can now create a more pleasurable environment for himself through his influence on others. Teachers With ADD
 
Emotional Signaling and Shared Social Problem Solving 

Between ten to twelve months and eighteen months, a toddler can engage in a continuous exchange of emotional signals with different expressions and more complex gestures and what we call shared social problem solving. She can direct a parent's attention to what she wants, whether it is to be picked up, hugged, or helped to retrieve a toy. To do this she uses a tone of voice and gestures arid expressions, and the parent responds with her voice, gestures, and expressions.
 
These developing skills increase a toddler's ability to create a more comfortable environment for herself. If she is feeling overloaded, she can now let a parent know this. She might hold her hands over her ears, or put them on Mommy's ears, or, even better, hold her hand over Mommy's mouth as though to say "Quiet." Not all toddlers can do this. Some will just get overloaded and cry, but even a simple anguished look is a signal to Morn or Dad or other caregivers to tone it down. The child who craves a lot of sensation may grab Dad by the hand for roughhousing or racing around the room together or take out a ball and start rolling it to Dad. She can clearly signal that she wants action, Without these skills, a child might just start running around the room knocking into things and be given an early label of hyperactivity.
 
Enhancing Engagement, Communication, and Attention

The Active Child
 
Many of the games we spoke about previously, such as "Modulation Games," give children a chance to give voice to their need for activity and action, while also learning to regulate, that is, to modulate down. Rather than random activity, active children can learn to engage with others and give structure to all their energy. Children who are sensory craving can enjoy a lot of activities, but these games help them channel their cravings into an interactive framework - in other words, playing with another child or parent.
 
The Underreactive Child
 
When a child seems self-absorbed the parent can take that as a signal to energize up. Sometimes such a child might offer a clue to initiate play. For instance, a child who is quietly pressing the buttons on the pop-up toy might look at a parent very gently and sheepishly as though to say, "Do you want to do it too?" A parent can pick up on the signal and get into a little game. Teachers With ADD
 
Not only are parents responding to the child's emotional signaling, helping to counterbalance the child's tendencies, but they are also strengthening the emotional bond that helps the child coordinate all his senses into focused activity. Warm emotions fuel the motor system to work harmoniously with the senses and create connections between all of the different areas of the mind and, we speculate, the different areas of the brain as well.
 

Emotions and Processing Difficulties 

For the child who is very vocal and may be repeating some words already, it is easy to ignore any lack of visual-spatial skills they may have. For such children, you might take some toy or treat or something the toddler really loves and put it in a special place in the room with a little barrier in front of it. Then you can say, "Where is the truck?" and make a game out of it with an animated expression. Offer a hand to help the child so that he can proudly march over to the barrier and knock it down to get the toy. Then you can make the game a little more complex, putting three barriers around the room so that the child has to search behind all three to find out where their special toy or treat is hidden. 

In all of this, the child's desire for that special toy or treat strengthens his visual-spatial processing skills. The child who before would look in only one spot can now look in three or four spots around the room and develop a sense of the whole room. He's beginning to become a "big-picture" thinker with a visual map of his world. Many verbal children with excellent memories tend to have a limited focus and need help in visualizing a whole scene. Games that create strong motivation, with favorite objects or competition, can broaden their range of attention at this early stage. To learn more, you can check out Teachers With ADD.

How Do You Know When You Have ADD - Overactive Child

How Do You Know When You Have ADD

For children who like to be active, begin by getting active with them and match their rhythm - running, jumping fast, yelling loud, even muttering under your breath or fidgeting when they do. Then get into a kind of dance, making a game out of it, going from the fast movements to the medium-fast ones and then slightly slower, and slightly slower, and slower until you are really in slow motion. All kinds of senses can be involved. Drums can be played from fast to slow to superslow to slow motion, or songs can be sung loud, soft, supersoft, super-supersoft, and bright lights can be dimmed, softer and softer. In all the ways you can imagine, in playing this game, the idea is to go from the 100-mph down to the 1-mph or the 1-foot-per-hour level. You play both the tortoise and the hare together.
 

By making a game like this, we in essence help children learn to enjoy regulating their own activity level. By recognizing their own patterns and turning their energy into regulating and modulating that activity - not giving up the high activity - they now can get it under conscious control.
 
A second strategy is to find a structured activity, such as sports, dance, and music, in which a high-level activity is needed at some moments and not others. How Do You Know When You Have ADD
 
Drumming works better than other musical instruments for very active children because they can move their hands and legs while drumming and hearing the loud noise. They can also accommodate to the rules of drumming as they are doing this. Start off with a gentle touch with freelance drumming and gradually introduce some of the rules that create rhythms. Rhythms can be vigorous at first and then slower and then slower and slower.
 
Same thing with sports - you can begin by just running around haywire and then around a set of bases and then through different agility drills. A game of catch can just be informal and then follow rules, or be done while balancing on one leg or catching one-handed. You can make these games demanding and challenging while still keeping them fun. Over time (and this may take months or sometimes even years), the highly active, sensory-craving child can become a child who enjoys vigorous sports or dance or active games but can also operate very attentively and with full focus within the rules of those activities.

The Underreactive Child 

For the underreactive child, you can begin by energizing up your voice as you gradually woo the child into more and more interaction. You'll need to have an extra-animated and extra-energetic voice to catch their attention. A useful strategy to encourage self-awareness is to pretend to be the one who is self-absorbed and lost in your own world. Let the child draw you out. Children who lapse into creative fantasy can learn to recognize this and become more responsive, paying attention to more signals from others. Such a child will do better with a teacher or instructor or caregiver who can generate a lot of energy of his or her own.
 
Orchestrating the Senses 

In helping children overcome their sensory processing problems, an important goal is to help them use all their senses together - vision, hearing, and touch. We want children to get all the parts of the brain functioning together as a ballet troupe or a basketball team would. Just a game of throwing and catching balls and talking at the same time keeps many parts of the brain and mind working together. When you help an underreactive child learn a new dance step and demonstrate the movements in different areas of the room all while talking about the new step, you are helping him process bodily, visual, and verbal stimuli at the same time. 

In summary, to help with processing and the sensory modulation, gradually focus initially on what is comforting and soothing for the child, or what is energizing, or what gives structure to the child's activity. In other words, focus on whatever the child seems to require and then go on to increasing his flexibility to tolerate and enjoy a wider range of stimuli. At the same time help him become aware of this ability so he can take charge of the way he processes sight, sound, movement, and so forth. With these principles in mind, you can help children become the masters of their unique biologies rather than being governed by them. How Do You Know When You Have ADD

Shared Attention and Regulation 

A baby's first task in becoming able to focus and attend is to remain calm and regulated and to coordinate sensation with actions. In the early days of life, emotions help infants to bring all of their senses together and integrate them with their motor system. When a one-month-old baby turns to look at her mother to find that wonderful voice saying, "You're my sweetheart," she is coordinating vision, hearing, and action - listening, looking, and searching - guided by her pleasure in hearing this loving voice. This pleasure fuels the baby's first attention to the external world and coordinates her senses with motor actions.
 
Parents quickly learn how to grab the attention of their baby. For example, if the baby is sensitive to loud sounds, they learn to use a more soothing voice. For an underreactive baby who doesn't register sounds or sights easily, the caregiver will need to use more animation and energy. Some babies respond more to visual cues and others are more sound oriented. To learn more, you can check out How Do You Know When You Have ADD.

How Do You Get Diagnosed With ADHD - Sensory Processing

How Do You Get Diagnosed With ADHD

Children with attention problems often have difficulty with processing sensations, like sights, touch, sounds, smells, and so on. They can miss or overreact to what they see or hear, such as different gestures, vocal intonations, and the like. These difficulties make it hard for them to differentiate between their own and other people's emotions and between someone's true intent and imagined intent.
 
We will look in more depth at how children make sense of what they see and hear and develop complex visual-spatial skills. Here, we are concerned with how children modulate their reactions to sensory stimuli and become flexible in what stimuli they can handle.

Some children with attention problems are overreactive to sensations and get distracted by every sound or sight or touch. Others are underreactive, so sounds or touch or visual input hardly register. These children tend to get lost in their own world. They may get absorbed in imagination, sometimes in brilliant and creative fantasy, but they have problems interacting with others. Some children can enjoy fantasy and also be interactive and have good relationships, but are not flexible enough to do so at the same time. How Do You Get Diagnosed With ADHD
 
Other children who receive the ADHD label are sensory craving. They seek sounds, sight, and touch and seem to want more and more. These children are extremely active and want to move and jump and crash into people and things. They are fidgety at school and can't sit still. This pattern is often the most challenging for parents and educators and all those around the child. As we pointed out earlier, people have argued from an evolutionary perspective that this kind of action orientation was once adaptive. 

In modern society, this view holds, we are constraining the natural and appropriate activity level of children. However, in today's world, at work, in school, in sports, or the arts, it is necessary to be flexible, to be able to adapt to the situation at hand. Enterprising and creative people can structure their own activity level, but you have to be organized and in control to do that. There will always be an occasional need to sit and listen an classroom or take in what someone else has to say, or learn from others, as well as times when initiative and intense effort and activity are essential. Even the most physically active or quietly reflective of us needs to be flexible in how we modulate our activity.

Self Awareness 

There are two basic abilities that help children modulate their response to sensations: self-awareness and flexibility. As children become more logical and their thinking grows more complex, they begin to be able to describe their own internal world. "I can't seem to slow down." "I tend to get scared by these loud sounds but not quiet ones." When children can think in this way, they can control themselves and their environment better and thus stay calm and attentive. A child can say, "I'm getting fidgety. I need to go outside and run" or even ask a teacher, "Can I walk around a little bit while I listen?" An understanding, flexible teacher might let such a child walk around in the back of the room while listening to the lecture.
 
Using these higher levels of thinking, an overreactive child or adult can sense that he is not going to learn as well in a busy, loud auditorium, or he may avoid rock-and-roll concerts or go out on the balcony during a noisy party for some alone time. A child who is self-aware may also be able to help his caregivers, parents, and occupational therapists identify the experiences that are calming for him. Often rhythmic activities, such as music, or firm hugs or squeezing one's own forearms or hands will help soften the overload. 

Sometimes jumping on a trampoline, swinging, and getting what we call "vestibular input," that is, sensations in the inner ear, may be calming. The child may have noticed this about himself, and now he can act on it to help maintain his focus and attention. From more simple requests, such as "Shhh, Mom" or "Tone it down," to more diplomatic and elaborate explanations, a child can, in a sense, create environments that are more regulating and calming, in which he can pay attention and focus more easily. How Do You Get Diagnosed With ADHD
 
For underreactive children, becoming aware of their inattention may take time. When adults ask them, "Where have you been?" or "Didn't you hear the homework assignment?" these children need to recognize that they were lost in their own thoughts. A child who can know his own tendencies and say to himself "I've been daydreaming again" is on his way to becoming attentive at appropriate times.

Flexibility 

Children with attention problems also need to become more flexible in the level of sensation they can tolerate. A sensory overreactive child needs to be able to deal with an ever-wider range of stimuli. Parents and caregivers can help the child do this by combining soothing activities like rhythmic movement with very, very gradual increases in sound or touch (different light touches on different parts of the body) or bright lights or colon, and so forth. Find an activity that the child experiences as very soothing and gradually add exposure to a wider range of stimuli. The more verbal the child is and the higher level of thinking he uses, the more he can cooperate in these ventures.
 
A sensory-craving child may need to be exposed to gradually decreasing levels of sensation, and helped to notice more subtle stimuli - soft colors, whispers, light massage, and so on. To learn more, you can check out How Do You Get Diagnosed With ADHD.