Superparenting for ADD: An Innovative Approach to Raising Your Distracted Child - Hardcover

Hallowell, Edward M.; Jensen, Peter S.

 
9780345497765: Superparenting for ADD: An Innovative Approach to Raising Your Distracted Child
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0345497767 ISBN 13: 9780345497765
Verlag: BALLANTINE TRADE, 2008

Inhaltsangabe

With decades of experience working with ADD children, Dr. Edward Hallowell–a pediatric psychiatric clinician, father of two ADD children, and himself an adult with ADD–understands how easily the gifts of this condition are lost on a child amid negative comments from doctors, teachers, and even loving but frustrated parents. Hallowell has long argued that ADD is too often misunderstood, mistreated, and mislabeled as a “disability.” Now he teams up with top academic ADD researcher Peter S. Jensen, M.D., who is himself a father of an ADD child, to bring you an upbeat and encouraging new approach to living with and helping your ADD child. The practical strength-based techniques Drs. Hallowell and Jensen present put the talents, charms, and positive essence of your child ahead of any presumed shortcomings. Clearly outlined and organized, Superparenting for ADD offers a specific game plan that includes

• UNCONDITIONAL LOVE Tune out the diagnosticians and labelers and simply notice and nourish the spirit of your child for who he is. Providing this unshakable base of support will set the tone for all interactions to come.
• VIEWING THE MIRROR TRAITS There are positive sides of the negative symptoms associated with ADD: stubbornness = persistence; impulsiveness = creativity; intrusiveness = eagerness. By recognizing the mirror traits, you avoid the ravages of shame and fear.
• THE CYCLE OF EXCELLENCE Use this critical 5-step process to help a child develop self- and social awareness. Nurture an environment in which a child can safely take risks, reserve time to let a child dabble as a way to learn, encourage playful practice, support mastery of a skill (whatever the skill may be), and then recognize a child’s accomplishments.
• IDENTIFYING AND TAPPING THE SOURCE Pinpoint your child’s inner, conative strengths, which drive what he naturally and spontaneously does, as opposed to what he is told to do or feels he must do. Your child will do his best when allowed to use these conative strengths.

Drs. Hallowell and Jensen fully understand the real and everyday challenges–both at home and at school–facing parents of an ADD child. Now this important book shows you how to unwrap the wonderful, surprising gifts of ADD and turn what is too often labeled a lifelong disability into a lifelong blessing.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Edward M. Hallowell, M.D., was an instructor at Harvard Medical School for twenty years and is now the director of the Hallowell Centers in Seattle, San Francisco, New York City, and the Boston area. He is the co-author of Driven to Distraction, Delivered from Distraction, and Answers to Distraction, as well as the author of CrazyBusy, The Childhood Roots of Adult Happiness, and Worry, among other titles. He also hosts a weekly podcast called Distraction that offers practical solutions on how to focus and regain control in today’s digital world.

Peter S. Jensen, M.D., is a world-renowned child psychiatrist, the author of more than 200 scientific articles, and the CEO of the REACH (REsource for Advancing Children’ s Health) Institute. Dr. Jensen was the founding director of the Center for the Advancement of Children’s Mental Health at Columbia University and the associate director of Child and Adolescent Research at NIMH, where he served from 1989 to 2000. In 1999 he received the Exemplary Psychiatrist Award from NAMI (the National Alliance for the Mental Ill) and was inducted into the Hall of Fame for Children and Adults with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder. He lives in New York.

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Chapter 1

Love

THE ESSENTIAL STRENGTH

Nowhere in life do we see love burn more brightly, work harder, and achieve more than in the relationship between a parent and a child. This is real love. Messy love. Nonstop, -never—off—duty love. This love forever changes you. When you have a child, you enter into a permanent state of psychosis. You go crazy. You fall insanely in love with the little baby, whether the baby is adopted or born to you. For first—time parents this love is new and quite unexpected. It’s a feeling we’ve never experienced before. We never knew we could become so selfless, so willing to give up everything for our baby. Buoyed by this lifelong, blessed madness, we plunge into the adventure called parenthood. To assist us in doing the most important and most difficult job in the world-raising a child-our single greatest ally is the protean force nature provides parents called love. And what a love it is! We doctors do not celebrate, honor, and emphasize it nearly enough. In this book, however, we do. Here, in our framework, love initiates and supports everything else. Love is the cornerstone of the model we build.

That’s because love is the single most powerful tool you can use to draw out your child’s strengths. How wonderful that it’s free, instantly available, and all but inexhaustible. It -doesn’t do the whole job, but without it the job never gets done right. Love works unpredictably, in that you have no idea what strengths you are drawing out while you love your child. But if you keep loving and trusting that love, over the years the strengths will emerge. Without love, however, they often do not, or they emerge deformed. So keep your faith in love. Don’t ever give up on your child or on the power of love. Sometimes it is all you’ve got. But no matter how hopeless or desperate you may feel, if you keep on loving, your child’s gifts will appear one day, perhaps to your total surprise and the surprise of the world, like wildflowers growing through crevices in a granite rock.

Trust the process love initiates. Always listen for the song your child is trying to sing. Search for the instrument your child is destined to play. Look for the person your child is trying to become.

Those are not just pretty words. They define what matters most in raising children, especially those who have the fascinating, widely misunderstood trait called ADD. These kids particularly need someone who can perceive and draw out what is wonderful within them. It can be a selfless and frustrating process, one that only the best parents and teachers can stick with. But it is also true that any parent or teacher can be one of those best parents or teachers.

Some kids slide into life easily. They don’t need anyone to listen for the song they are trying to sing because they are born with a song the world already sings, so they naturally join right in. They are born with the instrument they are meant to play. They grow into the wonderful person they are meant to become without a glitch or a crisis. Life is free and easy. They fit in from the start. Good for them!

But then there are those who don’t fit in easily, if at all. They bounce back rather than join in. They cause problems for themselves and others. They become the subject of long conversations between various adults, the central theme of which is “What can we do about ______?”

The answer to that question is clear, albeit rarely stated plainly and emphatically: love them. But there’s a catch: they’re not every minute of every day all that easy to love. Nonetheless, it is love, wise love, smart love, persistent and unremitting love that they need, first and foremost. More than anything else, these kids need someone to detect the beginnings of what’s positive in their oddball, offbeat, exasperating, or disruptive ways.

For love to do its transformative work-and nothing is more transformative of humankind than love-it must not be blind. It must see clearly and be brave. Through the eyes of this love, you see without illusion the child who stands before you, the child you actually have, as opposed to the child you always wanted or wished you had, and you love that child, the messy child, the child who - doesn’t win the prizes or get the lead role, the child who -doesn’t get top grades and who isn’t necessarily headed for an Ivy League school, the child who can’t play the instrument you wanted her to play, who can’t throw the fastball you wanted him to throw, nor was ever meant to.

As you come home at the end of the day and your child runs to meet you, it is important before all else that you see not the perfected version of that child or the version you might like to behold, but the actual child, the ragtag child who’s reaching out to you, the child who needs more than anything to be known and loved for who she or he truly is.

If you give that child your love, do you know what a difference you will make? Only all the difference in the world! You will become a miracle maker.

More than anything else, it is love that separates those who thrive in life from those who do not. Love is the main ingredient of the recipe that makes for happy adults. So revel in your love for your child. Enjoy your child. Spend as much time together as you can. Have fun with each other. Work problems out, whatever they might be, knowing that in the long run love will carry the day. This can be difficult, but if you commit yourself to doing it, you will be carrying out the most important and rewarding work in the world. It is work few people will notice, no one will grade you on, and no one will pay you to do. Indeed, your career may suffer if you give loving your child the time it deserves. You may not make CEO or first violin or top billing. But you will be doing the greatest thing a parent can do, which is to give your child the best start in life he or she can get. And on your deathbed, the place where perspective sharpens, you’ll rejoice inside that you gave all the love you could to the ones who needed it from you the most-your children.

This is in no way to say that if your child is struggling or if your child gets into major trouble, it’s your fault because you haven’t loved him enough or loved him right. Not at all. Some children will struggle no matter what. They are born with such problems that no one is able to make them all better. But to give them their best shot, rely on love above all else-love adeptly and creatively applied, love consistently and abidingly offered, love wisely and enthusiastically held out and always felt, even when you’re sad, angry, disappointed, or hopeless. Such love is muscular and magical. It stares adversity straight in the eye and never once blinks. It prevails.

As we said above, it is easy to love many kids, but it is not easy to love all of them. Those who have what we call ADD can be dishearteningly difficult to love at times, but these are the kids who need your love the most, because they get it elsewhere the least.

Even though love is the best “treatment” we’ve got for just about anything, there are several reasons that love -doesn’t get more mention from doctors and other experts as a treatment for ADD (or any other condition, for that matter). First, it’s hard to define what love is, and it is therefore difficult to prescribe. Second, it is difficult to measure the results of applying it. And third, perhaps most important, love is not a quick fix. Most treatments that get studied scientifically in a prospective, -double—blind, randomized trial produce results fairly rapidly, even within hours in the case of some medications, or within months or at most a year or two. Love...

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Verlag
BALLANTINE TRADE
Erscheinungsdatum
2008
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0345497767
ISBN 13 
9780345497765
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
212
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar

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