Susan Ashley - 1000 best tips for ADHD: expert answers and bright advice to help you and your child

Copyright 2012 by Susan Ashley, PhD

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Dedication

For Lanterne Rouge. You may come in last, but you always cross the finish line.

Contents

Acknowledgments

Creating 1,000 Best Tips for ADHD did not happen quickly. It is an accumulation of experience gained in twenty-five years of working with hundreds of families living with ADHD. While my education and training provided the foundation for my knowledge about ADHD, it is my work in the psychological trenches with children and their families that allowed me to create, test, and verify the tips in this book. Getting to know each child and family individually, learning how they operate in their lives, discovering their likes and dislikes, their capabilities and limitations, they allowed me to design techniques and solutions customized for them. Through trial and error, together we would find which tips were effective for their situation. I wish to thank the many families with whom I have had the joy of sharing success in managing the symptoms of ADHD.

I owe many thanks to my editor, Kelly Bale, for her vision in the development of this book. Sabrina Baskey-East, Heather Hall, and Regan Fisher were invaluable with their keen eye for detail.

As always, gratitude to my parents, who provided me with a solid foundation in childhood, unknowingly using many parenting techniques I would later bring to my practice in psychology.

Forever, my deepest appreciation to Stan for every little thing.

Introduction

How do I get my child to do his homework? How can I make her brush her teeth without arguing with me every night? What do I do when he lies about the same thing over and over? Why doesnt punishment seem to make any difference? 1000 Best Tips for ADHD is your go-to guide for the challenges your child presents. In this book, you will find the answers to these problems and most other situations you face raising a child with ADHD.

Raising a child with ADHD is tough, really tough. When faced with a problem or impossibly frustrating situation, you want answers, and you want them fast. Here they are! Quick, easy to read, and easy to put into action, 1000 Best Tips for ADHD lets you look up specific answers to the exact problems you are facing and find ways to implement immediate solutions. Because no two children with ADHD are alike, you will not find the usual one-solution-fits-all approach in this book. Instead, you will find a multitude of options so that you can find the one that works best for your child.

And because, as a parent of a child with ADHD, you know that what worked today may not work tomorrow, 1000 Best Tips for ADHD gives you many different ways to solve each problem so that when one solution stops working, you will turn back to this book and find dozens of other options.

As a child psychologist specializing in ADHD for more than twenty years, I know exactly what parents are facing every day. Your child has numerous behaviors that are challenging for both you and for her. No two days are alike. Life with an ADHD child is consistently inconsistent, predictably unpredictable. Simply getting through the ordinary tasks of the day can be a relentless challenge that never seems to get easier. 1000 Best Tips for ADHD will give you the tools you need to make the days go smoother so you and your child stop the battles over behavior and can have the happier, emotionally rewarding relationship you both deserve.

1000 Best Tips for ADHD is a how-to manual that is easy to use. It does not require you to read it cover to cover. You can look in the table of contents to find the problem you are trying to manage, turn to the chapter, and find many different solutions. No one tip is better than another. Read each solution, select one you think might work, and give it a try.

Keep a daily log of how it went so you can keep track of the ones that worked and those that did not. If the solution works, keep doing it until it is no longer effective. ADHD children change rapidly, and a solution that works for several weeks or months may lose its effectiveness and require you to come up with a new one. This is not a problem! I know that at some point, whatever solution you initially pick might wear off, so I have given you many other possible solutions. Go back to the chapter, find another solution, and give it a try. Its that simple.

1000 Best Tips for ADHD gives you the many hundreds of solutions I have used in my twenty-plus years in private practice working with families living with ADHD. Each of the thousand tips has been tested and verified to work by the hundreds of families I have helped in my practice. These are the strategies I would suggest to you if you brought your child to my office. We would identify the problem your child is having, and I would suggest the one solution I thought would be most successful. I would ask you and your family to try it for one week while keeping a daily journal of who, where, what, when, why, and how you used the tip.

I would go over the journal with you, and together we would determine if the solution was a success. We would need to make sure, however, that you used it in the proper way and that you did so consistently, every day, and did not change it in any way. Too often parents will tell me It didnt work! Despite their promises that they did it perfectly, when we really dissect what they did, the failure is not due to the tip itself, but rather that the parents did not use the strategy properly.

Before you conclude that the solution you tried was ineffective, imagine you are sitting with me in my office and we are analyzing how skillful you were in using it. We do this because I know without a doubt that every solution I have given you in this book works. I also know it is all too easy for parents to blame the solution and hope for a different one that will be easier and take less time and effort to implement. I know you will think this applies to other parents and not to you, but trust me, it applies to all parents. No one wants to admit that a childs behavior problems have anything to do with the parenting. I do not want parents to think about blame, but for children to behave better, parents need to understand that how they parent does affect their childs behavior. Parents do not cause ADHD, but they can make it better or worse.