ADHD: 7 Life Skills Your Teen Should Master

You probably take some life skills for granted, like knowing when to wake up for work or take your medicines, and how to balance your checkbook. Yet to a teen with ADHD, those tasks can become huge hurdles.

Kids with ADHD tend to be much slower than their peers to learn how to organize, plan, and prioritize, says Cindy Goldrich, EdM, ACAC. She is a certified ADHD coach and parenting specialist with PTS Coaching in Long Island, N.Y.

Kids and teens with ADHD know what they need to do. They just have trouble doing it.  

"This is not a challenge of intelligence, this is a challenge of performance," Goldrich says. "They need more structure and more skill support."

With college or a first job on the horizon, here are seven life skills you need to start teaching your child today.

You may have gotten used to doing everything for your teen. Break that habit.

"The teen years need to involve a gradual shift of responsibility to the teen," says Kathleen Nadeau, PhD. She is a clinical psychologist and director of the Chesapeake ADHD Center of Maryland.

Let your child start doing things for herself now, like doing the laundry, cooking dinner, or setting her own dentist and haircut appointments. She'll need those skills in a few years when she's out on her own.

Kids with ADHD have a false sense of time. "They don't always accurately judge how long things should take," Goldrich says.

During middle or high school you make sure he finishes his homework. Once he gets to college, you won't be there to do that.

Goldrich recommends teaching time management skills with a timer. Figure out how long it takes your child to finish each assignment. Then, break up the total time into chunks.

"Set the timer for 20 minutes and take a 5-minute break. Do that a few times and then take a longer break," Goldrich says.

Use the timer on your smartphone to help him remember other tasks, such as when to wake up for school, take a shower, and eat lunch.

Resist the temptation to pick up the piles of clothes, books, and other messes in your child's room.

"If you keep organizing their room, they will not learn what works and what doesn't," Goldrich says.

Find a system that works for your child, such as bins or a bucket to hold their school supplies and shelves for their books.

Nadeau suggests keeping a "launching pad," a spot to put things kids regularly use, such as their keys and phone, if they have one.

View the original article here

High-Frequency Noise Boosts Math Skills in Study

But the treatment isn't ready for prime time yet, expert says

By Randy Dotinga

HealthDay Reporter

THURSDAY, May 16 (HealthDay News) -- Could you someday zap your way to a smarter brain? Preliminary new research suggests that it's a possibility: Scientists report that they were able to improve the math-calculation skills of college students by buzzing their brains with doses of random high-frequency noise.

But don't go searching for a brain zapper at Walmart just yet. It's not clear why "transcranial random noise stimulation" might boost thinking skills, and the necessary equipment isn't sitting on the shelves at your local hardware store. The treatment is considered to be harmless but has only been studied for a few years, and the study findings aren't definitive.

For now, though, the results of the new study are promising, said author Roi Cohen Kadosh, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Oxford, in England. "We can enhance one of the most complicated high-level cognitive [mental] functions and improve brain response after just five days of training, with a long-lasting effect six months later."

Scientists have only been studying transcranial random noise stimulation for about five years, Cohen Kadosh said. Researchers use the technique to stimulate the brain's cortex by putting electrodes on the scalp and delivering random bits of electrical noise. "It is non-invasive, painless -- the level of current is generated by home batteries, and is very low -- and relatively cheap," he said.

Transcranial random noise stimulation is considered to be harmless, and several studies haven't mentioned any adverse effects in those who have been zapped. Researchers are interested in one possible positive effect, though: changes in how the brain processes things.

"The brain is working on electricity, and in some cases poor behavior and cognitive [thinking] abilities appear when there's less activation of regions that are otherwise active," Cohen Kadosh said. "We thought that if we can make it easier for neurons to fire, it will allow an improved performance."

In the study, appearing May 16 in the journal Current Biology, researchers recruited 51 Oxford students and gave them five days of training and testing as they performed arithmetic tasks. The tasks tested their ability to remember math facts (like 4 x 8 = 32) and make calculations (like 32 - 17 + 5 = 20), Cohen Kadosh said.

Some of the participants received transcranial random noise stimulation when they performed the math tasks. Those participants were two to five times better at learning things, he said. And, six months after the stimulation, they were 28 percent better at making calculations than the other participants.

Scientists aren't sure why the stimulation treatment may boost learning and thinking, but Cohen Kadosh said it may have something to do with activating neurons in the brain.

Why might brain-zapping be a good thing? "We all want to improve our learning and to make it faster if possible, and we also want to help those who have problems in learning" due to disease, developmental problems or aging, he said. Also, "around 20 percent of the population finds math challenging."

View the original article here

Video Games May Sharpen Focusing Skills in Kids With Dyslexia

By Randy Dotinga

HealthDay Reporter

THURSDAY, Feb. 28 (HealthDay News) -- Here's one possible treatment for dyslexia that kids won't complain about: video games.

Italian researchers report that they found that children with the reading disability scored better on tests after they played an action video game for hours, possibly because their minds temporarily became more focused.

It's not clear if video games directly improved the dyslexia in the kids. If it did, no one knows how long the effect might last or whether the strategy is a better approach than traditional treatments. In other words, dyslexic children shouldn't necessarily play a couple of video games and call their reading specialist in the morning.

Even if video games do help dyslexic kids, "we are not suggesting a 'do-it-yourself' training by any means," said study co-author Andrea Facoetti, an assistant professor with the Developmental & Cognitive Neuroscience Lab at the University of Padua in Italy. However, Facoetti said, video games could become a tool for reading teachers who teach kids with dyslexia, a learning disability that prevents people from properly understanding written words.

In the study, one group of 10 dyslexic kids played a Wii video game called Rayman Raving Rabbids for 12 hours over several days while another group played a video game that didn't focus on action.

The kids who played the action game improved their reading speed by as much or more than a dyslexic child normally would in an intense reading program, Facoetti said.

The video games may train the brain to pay more close attention and focus on things, Facoetti said.

The findings deserve to be taken seriously, said Guinevere Eden, director of the Center for the Study of Learning at Georgetown University and a past president of the International Dyslexia Association.

"It's exciting to see an unconventional approach to try to improve the speed or fluency of reading," she said. It's difficult to improve reading comprehension in dyslexic kids because they read slowly, she explained: "By the time they get to the end of the sentence, they can't tell you what it's about."

The difficult therapy to improve dyslexia is another drawback, she said. "It's hard work, and it's not fun."

If video games help kids with dyslexia read more effectively, shouldn't dyslexia cases have fallen drastically in recent decades during the rise of video games? Study co-author Facoetti said the new research can't answer that question because the children tested hadn't played video games before.

Eden, who's familiar with the findings, said: "I don't have a great answer for you, but there are a couple of things: I don't think we have a good sense of whether dyslexia is going up or down because the whole definition is variable. What's interesting here is how it might be that what we think of dyslexia may be changing, not just because of video games but because of technology in general."

What's next? Eden said researchers should focus on trying to understand why video games may improve the symptoms of dyslexia.

While the study showed an association between playing action video games and improved reading scores among kids with dyslexia, it did not prove a cause-and-effect relationship.

The study was released online Feb. 28 in advance of publication in the March 18 print issue of Current Biology.

More information

For more about dyslexia and other learning disorders, visit the U.S. National Library of Medicine.

View the original article here