Hi Stoid, good to see you again!
Indeed! I hope you find some value in it and feel free to ask anything else. Please read the Barkley material, of all the experts I’ve read, I felt most clearly understood by him. It was kind of freaky, it was like he’d been following me around and taking notes while probing my brain. So that material will really help.
I guarantee you will have days where your patience is just gone and you want to throttle him,unless you are not an actual human being. I’ve heard it said that ADD kids tend to be bright, so if your son is there will be times when you just find yourself unable to believe that he can be so smart and struggle so hard with things that, to you, seem so simple.
The more you can help him develop and establish good habits and practices and tricks and tools while he’s still very young, the easier it will be for him when he has to navigate middle and high school, which are extremely tough on kids with ADD, because that’s when you find the expectations on you to self-motivate, self0direct and self-regulate start to kick in.
It will take creativity on your part, and your best bet is to use and teach him to use things that will, to whatever extent possible, create conditions that in some way force him to do X vs. Y. The reasons I gave up my car and got a bike instead were many, but some of the most compelling had to do with my issues with time management, planning and impulse control. Being confined to my bike, my legs, and public transportation helped me with several things aside from exercise: knowing I can’t jump in my car at the last minute and go racing to get somewhere has forced me to be more aware of time and planning ahead for anything I need to do because it will take so much longer. Even when I get there, I have to remember to allow an extra 10-15 minutes to find a good spot to lock up because I have several very heavy chains that take time to set up. On top of that, I can’t jsut dash out the door when I get the urge to go buy something or eat something…it’s kind of a hassle for me to go anywhere, so it slows down my impulsive shopping.
It’s that kind of thing that he needs to learn to do as soon as possible: create your environment so it makes things you want or need to do extremely appealing or extremely easy, or impossible to do any other way than the way you want to be doing them. Relying on himself to just be better at time management or planning or what the hell ever is just not going to work. But if he learns how to rely on himself to know and apply real-world tricks to getting himself to do these things, that will serve him all his life.
Thanks.
The self control research I referred to earlier…some links to follow. But what it boils down to is this: the “stuff” that we all use to self-regulate/control ourselves is a limited resource of differing amounts in each of us. To the extend that we tap into it, we reduce the availability of more to tap into later (an a daily basis, not lifelong). Apparently this “stuff” is exactly the same pool of “stuff” that we use to make choices. In other words, if we have to make a choice at 10am about something, if we need to control ourselves at noon when lunch comes and we want to eat a salad rather than a plate of fries, our ability to choose the salad over the fries will be impaired by the fact that we had to make a choice at 10am.
Completely apart from how this relates to people with ADD, I find it absolutely fascinating and I’m trying to learn more about how this operates and how knowing this can help me be more effective. Since I know my pool of self-control/choosing “stuff” is pitifully shallow to begin with, I want to start being more conscious of things which might inadvertently deplete my resources when I need them for more important things.
Most of us do. There’s something about managing to fill out a check, put in a stamped envelope and put in in a mailbox that really highlights the executive functioning deficits related to planning that Stoid mentioned. I’ve learned within the last year that having money to easily pay those bills does not improve my competence with bill-paying. So far this year I haven’t incurred any late fees yet, but the year is young.
But Stoid, how are you with non-bill mail? I just blew $11 because I couldn’t get my shit together enough to go to a post office to return something defective to Amazon within 30 days.
lorene, when they updated the DSM a lot of the doctors giving input wanted to officially include mild-moderate-severe in the ADHD description (because they’re widely used unofficially). Didn’t happen for DSM-V, but who can say for next time.
You are KILLIN’ me here… my Amazon return deadline is day after tomorrow. Have I packed it up and labeled it yet? Of course not. But I’ve printed out the return papers at least three times…
Which would also be why selling shit on Ebay is not the cakewalk you might think for folk like us… Match the sale paperwork to the item? Pack it? Label it? Get it out the door? What, are you MAD???
You have seemed to find the root cause of your issues multiple times over the last few years, complete with full documentation and citations. What do you think will be the next new revelation?
You are mistaken.
How is the low-carb diet going? Were you able to stick with it?
What advice can you give to someone who is starting out what looks to be a long-term relationship with someone diagnosed with ADD? What are the best ways to be supportive, understanding, and tolerant?
I wanted to throw my two-bits in on this.
I’ve found by trial-and-error that the best jobs for me are those which constantly hand me short-term tasks to do. If it’s a job where I have to govern large blocks of time and choose my priorities, I struggle. I still do good work, but it’s more stressful than it needs to be. My work as an adult has been split half-and-half between IT and teaching.
In IT, I’ve worked almost entirely on the phone as tech support. As far as ADHD goes, it’s a dream job. I’m either on the phone fixing something, or I can surf the Web or do whatever I like - so long as I’m ready to take a call. In fact, on one job, I worked the evening shift, and calls tended to come in one-hour waves as the stores we supported closed for the evenings and ran their financial close procedures. Between those times, I wrote. In the space of six weeks, between calls, I wrote a 270,000 word novel. In the next three months, between calls, I wrote another novel the same length.
Now I’m at a job that’s anywhere from 25% - 50% phone work. The remaining work is tickets, building out new computers, going out to people’s desks and fixing their problems there, research, follow up, and organization. I struggle. Some days are great, and I get a huge amount accomplished. Other days, I stare out the window for hours at a time.
As a teacher, there were things I was fantastic at. I could take the published standards for 8th grade English and the district calender, and break them down into units, lessons, assessments, and assignments taking care to provide an even mix of solo, paired, and group work, with a balance of visual, auditory, and kinesthetic learning approaches. I was great in front of the kids. But . . . come time to follow up on discipline or Og forbid, grade, I sucked. I knew I sucked. The kids knew I sucked. Most times, I would allow the stack of papers to reach a certain height, and then I would come in on a Saturday and spend the entire day doing nothing but grading, because that full day allowed me to go into hyperfocus - no kids, no other teachers, no administrators, no interruptions, no distractions. Just me with the impending threat of professional death if I didn’t get it done.
Let me put it this way: I’ve been panicking the last couple of weeks, because I realized I hadn’t sent in my cable TV/Internet/phone payment for going on three months. The problem is, I can’t log in online because the webpage says I don’t have an account, but when I try to create an account, it says I have one. If I try to pull my user name and password with my info, it says I don’t have an account. The customer service line is only open 9-5, and I’m never together enough to call in during business hours (same thing happens with appointments and business calls).
Yesterday, I was going through my checking account, looking for when I purchased something so I could get a replacement. While looking, I noticed a recurring charge with the same name as my cable company.
Three months ago, I set up automatic payment, and then completely forgot about it. I mean, yay me, but . . . for the love of Og, seriously?
Or a boss? Good Lord, I’m going bonkers - I mean on an intellectual level I understand that he has a hard time focusing on things, but I simply cannot get anything done if I’m interrupted every 90 seconds.
Got me. Not meaning to be flip, but everyone with and without ADD is an individual, so the way it manifests in your partner vs. the things that drive you bonkers are yet to be determined. You have to know what you can live with and what you can’t, because (and of course this is true in all relationships) you can’t enter into it with the expectation of change. Figure out where your partner’s obvious weaknesses are specifically, and consider whether that is likely to have a serious impact on the quality of your life, or if you are willing to fill in those gaps on your partner’s behalf.
If I could pick a partner for myself, I would want someone who is strong in all the areas where I am weak, low-maintenance and low-stress, yet willing to act as my accountability in ways we agree upon together.
The last partner I had wasm, unfortunately, weak in almost all the areas where I am weak. The fact that we lasted as long as we did is a bit of a miracle.
YES! I was just commenting to my husband last night that my current job is perfect because this is exactly what it entails…doing lots of short-term tasks all day long, and the majority of them are the kind that you have to address immediately. I love it and I can get an amazing amount of work done in a day compared to jobs where I have longer-range planning and goals.
I understand a lot of emergency room personnel - doctors, nurses, EMTs, and so on - have ADHD. The high pressure, always on nature of the job attracts them. It’s certainly an area that would play to the strengths of ADHD and allow someone with it to excel and command respect, instead of that look of confused disappointment we so often get.
phouka’s experience sounds a lot like mine. Highly diverse short-term tasks at work, and very independent. Inability to do anything concrete. And like Stoid said, get out the door. I spent school reading books, and was a solid B student, because I couldn’t be bothered to do much but I compensated with my intelligence. Impulse control? Fohgeddabout it. And like Stoid, I couldn’t read books anymore, and barely could watch TV.
I went to the shrink for emotional problems, and when those were cleared up, asked to get tested for ADD. I KNEW I had ADD. Instead I got diagnosed with major depression. I’m now on a drug that makes me capable of doing small tasks I don’t want to do. And read books! Life-changing.
I encourage people to seek testing and a professional evaluation, because there is help, whatever the actual diagnosis.
(Except for fatigue. Goddamnit. I’m supposed to try acupuncture because everything else has failed me.)
I lived with my ex a couple years, during which time his ADD was untreated.
My main advice is to not take things personally. Things will happen that will inconvenience you, make you angry, hurt your standing, cause you pain. Keep in mind they didn’t intend any of that, and probably feel terrible about having done so. Your SO had good intentions that just didn’t manifest in their actions.
My other piece of advice is almost contradictory: while good intentions are dandy, at some point, there needs to be action. You don’t have to be captive to a partner who has ADD but is unwilling to do anything about it or allows it to have serious impact on their life or yours.
What led to my breakup was the realization that my ex’s complacency about his ADD and its effects directly caused me to contract a sometimes-fatal illness from him. Rather than saving up money and seeking medical treatment, it became a foregone conclusion I would catch it, as though nothing else could be done. Your limit doesn’t have to be a life-or-death one, but you may need to draw a line if your SO can’t.
For people whose kids have it with the hyperactive component, another page from the Jesuits’ Big Book Of Teaching Children: some of the kids in my HS would be sent to run a couple of times around the yard “and come back immediately, you’re sent off to let steam out, not kicked out of class and most definitely not being let out.” This would let them burn off the top of their excess energy and rejoin us with the bounciness toned down.
While it won’t be an easy thing to do in most schools, it can be a good strategy in less time-regulated situations, such as doing homework. It needs to be kept short, though: burn some energy, not play a basket match.
My classmate who’d get sent to run once or twice a month is now that same HS’s PhysEd teacher: short-term tasks, paying attention to a lot of things at the same time, and under a pre-set curriculum so he doesn’t need to prepare exams in the same way other teachers do. He needs to prepare the students for the stuff on which they’ll be tested and he has to run the tests, but he doesn’t need to come up with questions. One of the reasons he’s a good PhysEd teacher is that he doesn’t expect students to have his energy levels or to be in perfect shape (he expects them to get better through the year, tho).
Thanks Stoid and Geek Mecha. Much appreciated. Any online resources you can recommend for getting a more in depth understanding? The sheer volume of info out there is slightly overwhelming but a lot of it also seems really vague.
This is great advice.
I can tell you from the ADD side of things that it’s just crushing to have others assume I didn’t complete a task, or didn’t do something, or didn’t even notice something because I don’t care, or I’m lazy. I have trained myself that whenever someone points out one of these lapses (usually at home, only rarely at work), I immediately go do it. No complaining, no explaining, just “you’re right. I’ll do that right now.”
Being unwilling to try is inexcusable.
Things I’ve learned about dealing with ADD/ADHD kids as a teacher:
- do not overload with instructions. Keep lists short, and deliver in at least two ways (usually written and verbal, but it could be something else)
- make it as kinesthetic as possible. The more kids get up and move to do their job, the more focused they are.
- for Og’s sake, when they are on task, don’t bug them!
- give them alternative strategies for behavior you find irritating. For instance, a lot of ADD kids (myself included) often do some sort of fast, repetitive movement - like drumming fingers or buzzing lips or playing drums with their pencils. There’s a method behind this madness. Repetitive motion revs up the neo-cortex, making it active enough to allow the person to focus. It’s just that it drives other people crazy. I learned to jiggle my knee when I was in high school - satisfying, silent, and helpful. I taught a lot of my students to do that and never had one go back to the irritating version.
DING DING DING!!!
I would go so far as to say that being in a relationship with someone who places a very high priority on “thoughtfulness” is bound to fail between an ADD’r and that person. Not because we are not thinking of other people and how to make them happy, Not because we are selfish narcissists. It is because we have very poor working memory And planning skills. This can show up in lots of ways that look like your partner doesn’t care. They do.
Of course, on the other hand, selfish narcissists can also have ADD… It becomes sometimes a matter of learning how to tease apart the difference. And this:
.
I realize now that so much of my problem in school had to do with not understanding how to study. With the exception of how to make a basic outline, I never learned any skills or tips or strategies or methods for taking in and organizing information. As an adult in the computer age I have noticed in myself a somewhat obsessive pleasure in manipulating data. I think it gives me a sense of control.
I also have a weird “thing” about real world things to organize: boxes bags folders stationery products of every kind, labels… Unfortunately while I am drawn to these things as a way to organize my chaos, they actually become part of the chaos instead.
Before I even knew I had ADD, I would describe myself as Felix Unger trapped inside Oscar Madison’s body. Many people with ADD have told me they relate completely.