ADD/ADHD Lookalikes: Problems that look like – but are not! – ADD/ADHD

It is startlingly easy to misdiagnose a child with ADD/ADHD – because many, many different problems can look exactly like it. I see this all the time at my learning center in California, where I have worked with hundreds of mis-diagnosed children. I most commonly see a problem – which looks like ADD/ADHD – called a “tactile disorder.” This is a very simple problem with a child’s sense of touch, and it can cause the exact same distracted look that can be so easily mistaken for ADD/ADHD. (You can read more about the tactile sensitivity here).

Vision problems, hearing problems, and other learning deficiencies can also look like ADD/ADHD - but are not. You can find checklists for these problems here). 

Children who perform poorly in the classroom may develop ADD/ADHD-like symptoms out of frustration.  People with petite mal seizures often suffer attention lapses mistaken for ADD/ADHD.  A middle-ear infection may cause minor hearing loss, making a person seem inattentive.  Also, children under extreme anxiety, fear, or depression are often so disruptive that they are mistakenly diagnosed with ADD/ADHD.

Remember: identifying and treating ADD/ADHD can be difficult since it often appears in combination with another condition.  At the Hardy Learning Center’s Online Resource Center, there are checklists designed to help you identify symptoms.  If you suspect your child has a problem, consult your doctor, psychologist, or psychiatrist.

For more information, and for checklists for ADD/ADHD symptoms, check out Hardy Learning Center’s Online Resources.

To your success!

~Sherrie Hardy, Hardy Learning Center:  www.hardybraintraining.com

HELP, I’m launching an on-line summer program…

Next month I’m going to be launching a brand-new training program that is designed to teach you how to discover and correct your child’s learning and attention weaknesses.

This will be a complete program for parents who have tried special classes, tutoring, and therapy but have had disappointing results.

I’m bringing all of my years of experience searching for solutions for struggling kids to my new program… solutions that are proven to work and that I use daily in my center in California! My goal is to teach you all of the top tools to help your child and how to start and build key skills quickly and easily.

I’m also going to be including an entire training about the real reason kids struggle to learn and pay attention – to make sure that you have the tools to handle your child’s success after the program.

I want my program to include the exact tools that will help your child succeed in the long term… so I’ve set up an on-line survey so that we can take the first few steps together.

Take a minute, fill out my short survey, and I’ll make sure I get you more details very soon!

Click here, then type in survey number 67951 in the “Take A Survey” box.

To your success,

~Sherrie

ADHD kids will fidget & it’s a good thing

I ran across this article in Time magazine about how kids with ADHD can learn better when they fidget and move around. And it’s true!  ADHD children like to move when they learn and so do many “regular” people.

In fact, all of us moved a lot when we were starting to learn. In the early years of life – birth through age 7 – we developed the cerebellum of our brain through movement. We rocked, twirled, crawled, ran, jumped, spun and found ourselves in almost constant movement during the early years of our lives. All this movement served an important purpose – it developed the connections in the cerebellum that would become the foundation for our learning, attention and behavior for the rest or our lives.

With enough of the right movement, the cerebellum is set to go on “autopilot” around age seven and the left and right hemispheres can take their growth spurt. When we have not developed enough connections in the cerebellum, it is more difficult for the brain to process the information we receive in the classroom. Movement helps us by giving the cerebellum more input when we are trying to learn.

If you were a fidgety kid, most likely you will be a fidgety adult. Chances are you have a nice slow brain wave. Chances are that parts of your brain are firing 4 to 8 times per second, while “regular” people have a firing of 15 to 18 times per second in those parts. People with brain waves of 15 to 18 times per second can get lots of routine tasks done easily every day.

People with slow brain waves are extremely creative. They are thinking of the possibilities and what they could do. Often, they have difficulty doing all of the routine and boring tasks necessary to get their big ideas to happen.

When they take stimulants their brain speeds up into the 15 to 18 range and they are able to do the routine tasks more easily – at least while the stimulant is in their system.

Movement and stimulants help lots of people with nice slow brain waves accomplish the routine tasks that most people find easy to do.

But, it is the nice slow brain wave that facilitates the creative insights and great ideas that lead to new discoveries. People with slow brain waves dream up the next new ideas.

John Lennon sang, “You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one”…indeed, approximately 10% of the population are “dreamers”.

This ten percent of people make the nice slow brain waves. They dream up the new advances that carry invention and creativity forward, as they wiggle and squirm to get their brain focused on the tasks they need to accomplish to carry out the dream.

Imagine if Thomas Edison were made to sit still. We would not have the electric light and many other amazing advances that have carried forward generations of discoveries. Leonardo da Vinci lamented that his life was a failure because he failed to carry out most of what he started.

How many highly creative people feel this same way. It is easy for the “dreamers” to feel they can’t keep up with the 90% of the population that can easily accomplish all of the routine tasks that need to be done.

During the early years of school, almost all of the tasks are routine. Learning the math facts and the sounds of letters are all very specific, routine kinds of tasks.

Creative people have more difficulty doing boring, routine kinds of tasks. When they move their bodies, they engage their cerebellum so the higher centers of their brain – where the creativity emerges – can do their job.

Wiggly, fidgety children are doing their best to pay attention to and learn the routine information that will give them the important basic learning skills so they can put their creativity to its best use.

Learning Success

Common Mistakes Pro-Active Parents Make

(that actually hold their children back!)

· “Maybe she just needs more tutoring.”

o Haven’t you tried tutoring already?  If it didn’t fix the problem, maybe no one’s identified the full problem yet.

 

· “I was never good at math either.  He must have gotten it from me.”

o Every child can succeed in school.  If you once struggled with the same problems your child is now struggling with, it was because no one ever learned how to teach to you.  Don’t let that happen to your child!

 

· “Our pediatrician thinks it’s ADHD.”

o Maybe it is.  But even children with extreme cases of ADHD can – and do – excel in school.  If your child is struggling, something else is the matter.

 

· “She just needs to knuckle down and focus.”

o If children can’t focus at school, it’s because something’s wrong with their ability to focus – not because they’re not trying.

 

· “My kid’s just not good at school ….”

o I’ve seen children with even the most severe learning disabilities turn their lives around and become successful students.  There really is hope for your child.

 

I see hundreds of students every year at my learning center in Southern California.  They are all struggling for the same reason: an underlying learning weakness.

New Audio on Learning Problems

Listen to Sherrie Hardy discuss learning problems with Howie Jacobson

the First Step -Understand Why Your Child Struggles in School

How to Take the First Step

Understand Why Your Child Struggles in School

You have three options right now:

1. Continue what you’ve been doing.  Next year’s Report Card will look the same.

 

2.  Try tutoring.  You’ve tried that before – it will only help in places.

 

3.  Read Beyond Labels to determine what the problem actually is so that all of learning for the rest of your child’s life will be easy and efficient, and your child can feel happy and successful in the years ahead.

The Hardy Method is not for everyone.  It’s not for parents with children with severe retardation.  It’s not for parents who have already given up on their child and are just looking for excuses as to why their child can’t learn and behave.  It’s not for parents who want to stay uninvolved in helping their child.

I have found that 99% of children who have come to our center who are struggling in school have never had a brain training assessment that checks how their brain processes information!  They may have had an eye exam but never checked to see if their eyes can move efficiently from left to right while reading!  They often have had a hearing test but never an auditory processeing screening to see how well they make sense of what they hear!  They may have had an achievement test to see how well they do in reading and math but never a processing speed test to see how quickly they can learn!

I hope that you find my program as life-changing as it was for me and my daugther, in the hopes that your student’s next Report Card can be that shiny, perfect gift for which you’ve been hoping and working so long.

 

 

“Why is my child struggling in School?”

The brain grows in stages. Each stage lays the foundation for the next stage. In stage #1the cerebellum grows from birth to 7. In stage #2 the left and right hemispheres take their growth spurt from 7 to 13. The cortex starts its rapid growth spurt at 13. At 17 the frontal lobe begins its growth.

The earlier your child gets help with the learning skills that develop in each stage of brain development, the easier learning, attention and behavior will be.

If you’re trying to help your child succeed in school, you may have tried lots of programs and looked at lots of resources, but you are still looking for answers to the question:

“Why is my child struggling in school?”

Often bright children are able to use their intelligence to strategize their way through the early years of school. When these children suddenly start to struggle their parents are confused by the change. It may take a year or two to realize the extent of the difficulties.

Some children have a sympathetic teacher who doesn’t let on the extent of the struggle and the child gets to the next grade before the difficulties are noticed.

Many children have problems sitting in their chair and staying focused on the lesson they need to accomplish. Their learning struggles can be overlooked because of the difficulties with movement and attention that are easily noticed.

Children who are very verbal often don’t receive help early enough with their difficulties because they are good at talking and studying their homework out loud and the difficulty getting their ideas out on paper isn’t addressed until they have gotten way behind.

Sometimes children have strategies that are very effective that compensate for their weaknesses until the amount of school work increases and they are no longer able to cope with the larger workload.

Children who start to struggle when they get to middle school have been able to get by when they just had to learn at school but when they also have to move from class to class and remember books, belongings and turning in homework the difficulties can become overwhelming.

Many students are in high school before their parents realize they are not working to potential. The difficulty of the classes and the need to organize projects, tests and daily homework can cause some students to fall far behind before the problem is spotted.

Wherever you child is, the sooner you are able to correct their learning skill weaknesses the more effective your efforts will be. Ideally, starting to strengthen the learning skills earlier will build the strongest learning foundation in the brain. However, whenever you start, once the weaknesses are identified and corrected your child will begin to learn more easily. Your child will start to feel happier and more successful at school.

If your child is struggling with learning, attention or behavior and you’d like more information to clearly identify the struggles, go to www.hardybraintraining.com and download my report.

Your Questions Answered

Q:  Thank you for responding to my inquiry so quickly.  My daughter is 11 years old.  She has  been diagnosed with dyslexia, dysgraphia, dyscalcula, other language and auditory processing deficiencies, ADD  – I think you can get the picture.  We have tried different therapies including neurofeedback.  Are you familiar with that?  It actually helped
her a lot, but as soon as we stopped the treatments, she digressed back and now its like she never had the treatment at all. Its so expensive there is no way we could continue with that on a regular basis.   She is currently in  visual therapy and we do lots of different exercises at home everyday which help a tiny bit, but the process is VERY SLOW.  She has learned to read and thankfully is reading chapter books now which are at her grade level (5).  Math is a real problem.  She can’t memorize or understand.  She gets words all mixed up in her mind.  She can’t retell a story the way she hears it.  She is very “spacy” – looks like she’s in a daze a lot of the time.  She is very willing to work hard and try to help herself, but needless to say it has been a real struggle for all of us.

What kind treatments/therapies do you offer?  Are they home-based?  What is the cost?

A: It sounds like your daughter has a lot of different processing difficulties.  The vision therapy will help the two eyes work together as a team. The work is slow but worth the effort. Neurofeedback works with the speed of the brain and can be quite effective but it can sometimes wear off after awhile (the brain really likes it natural speed).  There is another very helpful method that improves learning and attention by improving the timing of the brain. This is much more permanent and can help with the attention, focus and coordination resulting in better ability to pay attention, read, work math problems, handwrite.  We usually get a year and a half growth in reading and math without tutoring!  This is a home training program where we ship you the equipment and step-by-step training guide then help you work with your child on-line using our virtual classroom and by telephone.  We have had great results with this program and it sounds like one that would benefit your daughter.  You can check it out at www.hardybraintraining.com.  It is called the Rising Star Program.

For the last 6 years I have been bombarded with requests from families who have brought their children to my center to help their neices, nephews and friends who live far away.  And – finally – I am getting the home training programs ready so I can help kids who don’t live near me in southern California.

Soon we will have our programs that help children memorize math and help children remember words so they don’t get all mixed up in their mind ready for home use.  I expect to have these up in the next few months.  After that the dyslexia help and handwriting programs will be up and ready for home use.

In April we will start offering auditory processing help in a home training system.  I am wondering if, in addition to auditory processing problems, your daughter may have difficulty making mental pictures of information she hears and reads. Children who don’t make mental pictures process with words and can appear “spacy” looking like
they are in a daze because they don’t look at you when they are listening because it overwhelms the auditory cortex when there is a lot of visual information coming in.  Does she look at you when you talk to her?  Does she look at the teacher when the teacher is talking?

I think the best place to consider starting is with the Rising Star program to get the attention, focus and timing organized to make learning faster and easier.

Once the timing is better it will be easier to get started on some of the other programs that will help her become more successful in the classroom.

Please let me know about her eye contact when she is listening and any other questions that have come up.

What Really Causes Failure – Underlying Learning Weaknesses

What Really Causes Failure

Underlying Learning Weaknesses

 An “underlying learning weakness” means that a child never learned how to learn.  To succeed in school, a child must develop dozens of mental skills.  If any of these skills are under-developed, the child will struggle in school.

 

Here are some of the clues I use to look for an underlying learning weakness in a child:

• The student doesn’t follow directions, takes a long time to finish classwork, and doesn’t look at me when I’m talking.
  • Underlying Learning Weakness: auditory processing preference.
  • Impact on Schoolwork: Children with an auditory processing preference quickly forget what they were taught, especially if they were reading it.  They can’t remember all the instructions a teacher gave, and so frequently forget to do homework or crucial parts of an assignment – thus, they get bad grades, even though they might be perfectly intelligent and capable.

 

• The student can’t seem to get the “big idea” out of a reading passage, talks on and on about unimportant facts and details, and has trouble taking turns in a conversation.
  • Underlying Learning Weakness: right hemisphere weakness.
  • Impact on Schoolwork: The right hemisphere of the brain is in charge of unifying all the facts that we learn into a concept.  If the right hemisphere did not fully develop this skill, a child might learn all the facts by heart, but never be able to use them on (for example) a test or essay.

 

• The student is easily frustrated by schoolwork, struggles to finish homework, and has trouble controlling his or her behavior.
  • Underlying Learning Weakness: executive functioning.
  • Impact on Schoolwork: This one is a serious weakness, because “executive functioning” is the conductor that makes all of a child’s learning skills work together.  If a child has not fully developed their executive functioning skills, they can’t actually use any of their skills, and so they struggle to get anything done.  (Fortunately, this is a fairly easy weakness to improve!)

 There are many more, all outlined in Beyond Labels.  If a child hasn’t fully developed every one of these skills, they will struggle in school.  And no amount of tutoring or extra help will truly fix the problem.