Health Learning to live with ADHD SEPAC brings in expert to offer parents tips on how to help kids with disorder

Parents of children with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) were able to learn more about the condition and what they can do to help their kids during a meeting of the Saugus Special Education Parent Advisory Council.

Dr. Ronna Fried, director of paradigm development at Massachusetts General Hospital, gave a presentation on ADHD at the group’s April 6 meeting at Veterans Memorial School.

Fried said 8 to 10 percent of children have been diagnosed with ADHD, making it almost as prevalent as asthma.

“ADHD sometimes doesn’t get the attention of the community, the school, the family that it really deserves in terms of how prevalent it is and how much treating it can program the future of the child,” she said.

Fried discussed tasks children with ADHD often have difficulty completing and shared tips parents can use to help them. Throughout the presentation, she stressed that solutions that help one child are not necessarily going to work for another.

“It’s all about finding what works for your kid,” she said to the nearly two dozen parents in attendance.

Fried said that for children with ADHD, working memory is often one of the biggest problems. To explain this, she gave the example of remembering a telephone number. She asked the parents in attendance to recite their phone numbers as quickly as they could, which most did with ease.

Then she asked them to recite that same phone number backwards, which took a little longer and a few parents remarked on the comparative difficulty. She said it is this idea of holding something in mind while performing other complex tasks in order to be able to think through the rest that people with ADHD often struggle with.

She offered tips to parents to help their kids with this, such as enforcing the use of assignment books and using cue devices such as alarm clocks and Post-it Notes.

“You can’t change somebody’s capacity miraculously, but you can do things that help them to build,” Fried said.

Fried gave an example of another function people with ADHD often struggle with: cognitive inhibition. She explained this as the ability to control impulses at the appropriate time. Children with ADHD might exhibit difficulty with inhibition if, for example, they disrupt a group activity, but she said this is also a cognitive issue.

To demonstrate, Fried first displayed colored squares on the board and asked parents to name the colors aloud. Then she put up a list of the names of colors in black text and asked parents to read the words aloud.

Finally, Fried displayed that same list of colors, but in text colors that didn’t correspond with the words. For example, the word “red” was displayed in green ink. She asked parents to go through the list once more, reading the color of the ink – in this case green – rather than the word itself, which was “red.” She said people with ADHD will often take longer to do this and make more errors because they are more likely to go with their first impulse.

“This is the inability to inhibit automatic processing, and this is what gets in the way of for kids with ADHD: they go with what is automatic for them, what’s first,” she said.

Other functions students with ADHD may struggle with include sustained attention, task initiation, planning, organization and flexibility, Fried said.

Bernadette “Bernie” Ganino, president of Saugus SEPAC, said she was glad to have a speaker discuss ADHD. She said the mission of the group, which was established in 2011, is to work toward the understanding, support and appropriate education for children with special needs in the community.

“We help educate parents,” Ganino said. “We help parents if they’re having issues with the school system. We’re somebody they can come to and we can help them – both from an educational and a getting help for your child point of view.”

Ganino stressed the positive working relationship between the group and Saugus schools, a relationship that she said was not the case in many other towns.

Ganino has an eighth-grade daughter with ADHD. She said that when her daughter was diagnosed in first grade, she really didn’t know anything about it and didn’t know the right things to do to help her daughter. She mentioned one father at the meeting who said he was concerned about what happens when children with ADHD who receive accommodations in school grow up and have to get a job.

“He’s thinking the same way I’m thinking,” Ganino said. “You want to accommodate your kid, but you don’t want them to learn to use a crutch. You want them to be able to be a functioning adult.”

Ganino said some people believe accommodations give those with ADHD an advantage, but stressed that kids with ADHD are already at a disadvantage and accommodations are meant to level the playing field.

“When she showed those colors, that’s like their life,” Ganino said, referencing the color exercise Fried had parents try. “When you ask someone with ADHD to write something, it’s like trying to read those colors. It’s a lot harder to do things that other people think is nothing.”

Ganino said after hearing some of the concerns of parents at the meeting, she hopes to share more of what she has learned through her own experience with the group.

“There are things I’ve learned myself, there are things I’ve learned from other parents, on how to help kids with ADHD,” she said. “I’d love to do a presentation, since this is such a prevalent thing and tonight we had such a good turnout, to be able to share different tricks – things to do at home, things to have the teacher do, things that are simple and easy and that work.”

Saugus SEPAC will hold its next seminar May 11 on language versus non-language learning.