This group unites families dealing with
ADHD
By Jeanne Jackson DeVoe, Tuesday, October 03,
2006
One mother at the CHADD meeting
raised her hand anxiously and asked how she could keep
her middle-school child organized when he has at least
five different classes with five different teachers.
The rest of the crowd chuckled appreciatively. After
all, most at the first meeting of the Children and Adults
with Attention Deficit Disorder, Princeton-Mercer County,
are parents of children with Attention Deficit Hyperactiv
ity Disorder and they face similar challenges. They
seemed eager for answers.
The answer, from guest speaker
Carrie Greene, a professional organizer
and ADHD coach, was that children with ADHD are poorly
organized. In fact, their sense of time and organizational
skills — all part of their "executive function"
— are about three years behind that of their peers.
So, expect to help your children with organization and
life skills well into high school or even college, Greene
advised.
The CHADD group devotes an hour
to a guest speaker with another hour set aside for small
group discussions. At the next meeting, psychiatrist
Charles Martinson will discuss diagnosing and treating
ADHD and co-existing conditions such as anxiety and
depression.
Many of those at the initial
meeting seemed to get a great deal out of the discussions
and the question-and-answer session afterward, organizer
Jane Milrod Jemas said.
"People are starved for
data," she says. "There is power in sharing
data — that satisfaction of feeling we are helping
each other."
Another mother raised her hand
to say she gets weekly progress reports from each of
her child's high school teachers. A woman who said her
children are now grown told the group that she went
along with the idea that you should let children fail
and didn't intervene when her son began doing poorly
in high school.
"He fell, and he fell hard,"
she told the group. She has since learned that young
people with ADHD don't always take heed of consequences.
She says she would handle things much differently if
she had it to do over.
Another woman posed a common
question: "How can I help my children when I have
ADHD my self?"
Since ADHD is genetic, many parents
of children with ADHD also have the disorder, Greene
told her, and parenting children with ADHD becomes that
much more difficult. This is especially true be cause
children learn organizational skills and time management
from their parents.
"It was really helpful,
and it was really helpful to see other moms I knew,"
the woman said later.
It can be overwhelming
Parents of ADHD children can be overwhelmed with the
demands of raising a child who is very active or highly
distractible and disorganized. Children with ADHD may
be very bright but they often struggle at school and
may sometimes have trouble making friends, experts says.
Most of those in attendance were parents of fourth-
to ninth- graders, but there were also those with children
in high school and Milrod Jemas says she has gotten
calls about the group from parents of young adults.
Schools don't pay enough attention to the needs of
ADHD children because they focus on children with more
severe learning disabilities, Milrod Jemas says. With
studies showing up to 9 percent of children may have
ADHD, schools should be doing more to help them, she
says.
"Given that I can't change the way that schools
or school districts teach children with ADHD, the next
best thing is to educate our parents, educate our sons
and daughters, so they don't feel there's something
wrong with them," she says.
Milrod Jemas is open about the fact that she and her
children have ADHD. She points out that she was able
to graduate Phi Beta Kappa from Rutgers University and
run her own corporate headhunting business because her
ADHD makes her excel at multitasking. But having ADHD
is still considered a stigma, Milrod Jemas says, and
many parents make her promise not to tell anyone that
they or their child has ADHD.
"They're ashamed of it," she says. Those
unfamiliar with ADHD may think it's made up or that
a child with ADHD is simply being stubborn or not trying
hard enough, she says.
"If it were a cut, you would put a Band-Aid on
it. But anything that goes on in the mind is in the
realm of the unseen and if you can't see it (you think)
it doesn't exist."
The medication issue
Milrod Jemas trained as a parent-to-parent educator
in ADHD. She plans to start a book club for members
to discuss books about ADHD and related topics and she
has donated more than a dozen books to the Princeton
Library.
Future speakers will talk about medication, and Milrod
Jemas says she will encourage the discussion groups
to explore the medication issue as well. Medication
is not al ways the right course, says Milrod Jemas.
"I think sometimes people are reticent to join
anything to do with ADHD support because they think
they're going to get a medication line."
CHADD is a national group with local chapters, but
parents do not have to join the national group to attend
local CHADD meetings. CHADD Princeton-Mercer County
is open to all. The group will meet Oct. 10 at 7 p.m.
at Riverside Elementary School, Riverside Drive, Princeton.
More information is available by calling Milrod Jemas,
(609) 683-8787 or e-mailing janemil rod@aol.com.
|
