ADHD Summer Camps

ADHD Summer Camps
Me, My ADD Coach and I
Parent Coach Cards
Dr. Dave's Advice

Summer Camps

It's that time of year again. School will soon be out and many of us will be seeking activities for our children. Often, we look to summer camps and schools to help our children remain active and help them retain what they've learned during the school year.

I would like to take this time to caution EVERY parent to investigate thoroughly, any school, camp or program that you might be considering placing your child in. Especially, those where your child will remain away from home for any length of time.

Over the last couple of years there have been some camps that have taken advantage of parents with ADHD children. Many promising on site specialists in ADHD and curriculums that will help our children learn both socially and academically as well as gain self confidence and self esteem. Instead, parents have been charged huge sums of money and found their children in environments that were horrendous and where drugs, verbal abuse and allegations of sexual abuse were present.

Please be sure that you check each camp or school out thoroughly. Be sure that the state and/or county that the program resides in have safeguards in place that regulate and inspect these programs. In the past, the problems have been that some of these camps do not fit under any regulatory or licensing guidelines in place by the states. Because of the curriculum outline or program, some of these programs can not be governed due to the fact that they are not required to be licensed and fall under no existing agency that can supervise or regulate these programs.

It is not my intention to scare parents or frighten them from utilizing summer camps and programs that could be very beneficial to their child. My only wish is that parents use every resource available to them to be sure that they are sending their child to a safe and happy place.

Me, My ADD Coach and I

David Giwerc and the ADD Coach Academy has created a wonderful videotape called "Me, My ADD Coach and I". This tape has been reviewed by several respected members of the ADHD community and has been well received. I watched this video tape and found it to be very informative. It recognizes the needs of ADD adults and explains how coaching can be beneficial. See what others are saying about this new video!

Me, my ADD coach and I is a must-see for anyone who has ADD, or who works with ADD adults. In this compelling video, ADD coaches and their clients tell stories of lives transformed through the power of the coaching relationship. Information packed, the video is the best vehicle I have ever encountered for educating people about ADD and how to work with it. Kate Kelly R.N., ADD Coach Co-author of the well-known ADD books You Mean I'm Not Lazy, Stupid or Crazy?! Optimal Functioning Institute, President

For more information and details on Me, My ADD Coach and I, visit www.addcoachacademy.com/video.html to learn more!

The Parent Coach: The Column For Proactive Parents
Dr. Steven Richfield April, 2000

What advice do you have about bullying? Our sixth grader is a smart and pleasant kid who usually enjoys school. His teachers describe him as a capable and enthusiastic learner who gets along well with his peers. Unfortunately, they don't hear the taunts and see the bullying that takes place behind the scenes at recess, within the cafeteria, or on the bus. In fact, the boys responsible for the bullying also have a reputation as "nice kids." What do we do?

Bullying is a serious and pervasive problem in today's schools. It may take the form of verbal teasing and name-calling or actual physical contact, such as pushing, tripping, or shooting rubberbands at one's chosen target. One only has to think back to the catastrophic effects that such behavior has led to in schools such as Columbine to appreciate the damage it inflicts upon the inner fabric of children. Yet, even if a child target of bullying would never retaliate, he or she can may carry emotional wounds that can affect their future decision-making, self-image, and socialization.

Today's children who hurt their peers often don't fit the stereotyped profile associated with bullies. Instead of being the unhappy, isolated figure with poor self-esteem, they may appear as the friendly, popular, and good student. Also, the bully may mistreat only one child, rather than display a bullying demeanor towards the peer group. And perhaps most daunting is that today's bully has become very adept at concealing his/her mistreatment of their chosen target, thereby leaving intact their reputation as a "nice kid." These variables make it especially important for children confronted by bullies to feel safe to confide in parents and teachers, and to be empowered by actions taken on their behalf. Here are some suggestions to help your child become "bully-wise:"

Don't minimize the significance of what is happening to them. Children may experience much pressure not to "tattle" due to the associated negative connotations. Parents are wise to validate their children's feelings and perceptions, rather than simply tell them to "deal with it." Emphasize that their rights to feel safe in school are being violated, and promise them that you will take action to correct the situation.

Help your child consider if their behavior draws them into the bully "firing zone." While not excusing the bully, gently suggest to your child that they may be drawing negative attention to themselves. Bullies tend to target children who possess certain "red flags." These include poor hygiene, clothing that is immature for their age, attention-seeking and/or regressive behaviors, and self-control problems. If your child displays any of these red flag behaviors, offer to help them upgrade. Explain that even after the bullying stops, others in their peer group will make negative decisions about them based upon these behaviors.

Report the bullying to the teacher and school principal. Certainly the school must be notified of the events reported by your child. Provide as much detail as possible as to the exact words and actions attributed to the bully. Request that your child not be questioned in the presence of the bully. Ask the principal to call the bully's parents. Ask your child to listen to your conversation with the principal so that they can model this type of self-assertion.

Lastly, but most critically, call the bully's parents. Do not allow the solution to be the dominion of the school. Allow the bully's parents to hear about your child's struggles in a respectful and tactful manner. Suggest to them that you are calling as a gesture of good will, since you would want to be similarly informed if they were calling the school to complain about your child. Parents of bullies have the most pointed impact upon bullying behavior, but only if we can stand up and let them know about it. Dr. Steven Richfield's column appears monthly. Richfield can be contacted at www.parentcoachcards.com or (610) 275-0178.

One of the most profound effects that ADHD can have on children's development is in the area of academic performance. Numerous studies - several of which have been reviewed in ADHD RESEARCH UPDATE - have documented that children with ADHD are at substantial risk for academic difficulties, and that the majority fail to achieve at a level that is consistent with their academic ability. As indicated in the study reviewed above, children with high levels of attention problems but not high levels of conduct problems were at specific risk for academic difficulty over a 6-year period and to require special educational services. In my own work, I have found that attention problems specifically - and not hyperactive/impulsive symptoms - exert substantial negative effects on the development of children's reading skills.

A study published recently in the Journal of Clinical Child Psychology provides an extremely interesting look at how ADHD can have an adverse impact on skills related to academic performance even before academic problems are likely to be evident. In this study (Sanchez, R.P., Lorch, E.P., Milich, R., & Welsh, R. (1999). Comprehension of televised stories by preschool children with ADHD. Journal of Clinical Child Psychology, 28, 376-385), the authors looked at how preschool children with and without ADHD might differ in their understanding of televised stories.

Televised stories- actually, they used a series of clips from Sesame Street - were used because the children were young enough so that most of them would not yet be expected to be reading. In addition, the benefits of using television to examine young children's comprehension of stories is that it is a familiar context for children, it captures children's attention at an early age, and can provide a less-monotonous context than do many laboratory tasks that are used to investigate ADHD.

It is certainly a common experience for parents to observe that their child with ADHD can attend faithfully to his or her favorite tv shows for an extended period of time, even though the same level of attending to homework is rarely evident. Children's ability to understand and comprehend televised stories can thus serve as a useful medium to learn about their comprehension of story material more generally. If problems are evident in this context - which probably captures children with ADHD operating at their best in terms of attending - then it can inform parents, educators, and clinicians about the struggles that are even more likely to occur in a classroom context.

Participants in this study were 27 boys and girls with ADHD between 4 and 6 years old and 52 comparison children without ADHD. About 75% of the children in each group were male and almost 90% were Caucasian. All the participants with ADHD had been diagnosed with ADHD, Combined Type. Thus, they had the inattentive and the hyperactive/impulsive symptoms as opposed to the inattentive symptoms only. Although many children were being treated with medication at the time of the study, care was taken to be sure that children were medication-free when actually tested.

All children viewed a 23 minute videotape that consisted of 13 separate segments of Sesame Street. Four segments that were embedded in this larger group of segments were the actual target stimuli for the study. All of the target segments had conventional story structures and were narrative in nature. In other words, they were typical of Sesame Street stories.

Children were assigned at random to one of two viewing conditions. Half of the children in each group viewed the segments with attractive toys present and available to play with; the other children viewed the tape without any toys around to serve as potential distractors.

Each child was videotaped while watching the Sesame Street stories. This tape was used to identify the amount of time that participants were actually focusing their attention on the screen where the tape was playing. Thus, an accurate record of the visual attention of each participant was available. Each child watched the videotape individually, so that other children were not present as another possible source of distraction

Children were told that they would be watching a tv program and that afterwards, they would be asked some questions about what they had watched. In the condition where toys were present, it was simply mentioned that they could play with the toys if they wanted to. Thus, they were neither specifically encouraged to play with the toys or discouraged from doing so.

After the tape was over, the experimenter returned to ask each child questions about the stories they had watched. Questions were asked about the 4 targeted stories in the order that these stories had appeared on the tape. Pictures of the characters from each story were presented to the child, and the names of each character was provided to try to help cue their recall of what they had watched.

Two types of questions were asked: factual questions (e.g. What does the man do with the fish he catches?") and causal relation questions (e.g. Why does the man kiss the fish?") The former questions thus test for children's recall of specific events that occurred in each story. The causal relation questions, in contrast, required the child to draw upon several different elements in the story and to recall the relationship between these elements. Between 12 and 15 questions were asked for each story, and these were divided equally between the factual and causal relation type questions.

* RESULTS

The first question the authors examined is how children in the two groups compared in terms of how attentive they were to actually watching the videotape and whether this varied according to whether toys were present. Overall, as might be expected, children without ADHD were more attentive (i.e. actually spent more time looking at the screen) than children without ADHD. In the no-toy condition, the % of time children in these groups were observed to be "observing the screen" were 90.4% and 80.3% respectively.

For both groups, the presence of toys substantially reduced their level of attention. The % of time attending dropped to 30% on average for children without ADHD, and all the way to 7% for children with ADHD. In other words, even though the toys were a substantial distracter for both groups of children, the adverse impact on attending to what they needed to was even greater in children with ADHD. Thus, this is experimental evidence of the far greater distractibility in children with ADHD, which, after all, is one of the core symptoms of inattention.

Here is something even more interesting. Even though children without ADHD reduced their attending behavior when toys were present from 90% to 30%, the proportion of questions that they answered correctly DID NOT CHANGE. This strongly suggests that these children were "strategic viewers" who could systematically divide their attention between the tv stories and the toy play such that their ability to recall and comprehend the stories did not suffer.

For children with ADHD, however, the findings were quite different. When toys were not present, children with ADHD were about as accurate as comparison children in their responses to factual questions. Thus, in the absence of distraction, they answered factual items every bit as well. In the toy-present condition, however, their performance was adversely affected such that they now did much worse than comparison children. In this condition, in fact, they answered correctly to about 50% fewer questions.

What is important here is that even though the comparison children also "paid less attention" to the stories when toys were present, they were still somehow able to divide their attention between toys and the stories such that their recall was not hurt. Children with ADHD, however, apparently could not do that. Thus, not only did they attend less when distractors were present, but they were unable to divide their attention in such a way that their level of performance was preserved.

Results for the causal relation questions were somewhat different. Here, the children with ADHD did worse than the comparison children regardless of whether toys were present as a distracter. Thus, even when their visual attention to the program was high, children with ADHD still did not do as well in responding to questions that required an understanding of how the different elements in a story fit together.

It would be quite interesting to know whether similar results would have been obtained for the comprehension items even if the children with ADHD had been receiving their medication when testing occurred.

* IMPLICATIONS

The results of this interesting study have potentially important implications for educating children with ADHD.

First, as has been demonstrated in the past, the presence of distracting stimuli appear to have a significantly greater adverse impact on the performance of children with ADHD than of other children. Not only is a child with ADHD less likely to pay attention to what he or she is supposed to when an attractive alternative stimulus is present, but he or she is also apparently less able to effectively allocate attention to competing activities in ways that help maintain a good level of performance.

These data support the benefits of arranging the environment for many children with ADHD in such a way that potential distractions are minimized. In a classroom setting, of course, this is not always easy to do, particularly without isolating a child in a way that can be stigmatizing. At home, however, when it comes to getting homework done, this type of intervention may be easier to accomplish. Please note, however, that although reducing distractions may be helpful for many children with ADHD, there will always be exceptions. Thus, evaluating whether such environmental modifications are helpful for a particular child always needs to be carefully evaluated.

The comprehension results seem especially important. These data indicate that comprehension may be an area of particular difficulty for children with ADHD, and that such difficulty may be evident as early as the preschool years. This result is consistent with another study of reading comprehension in children with ADHD that was reviewed in an earlier issue of ADHD RESEARCH UPDATE. (See http://www.helpforadd.com/reading.htm)

Careful assessment of the comprehension abilities of a child with ADHD, even for a child whose basic reading skills or ability to recall factual information about stories appears adequate, may thus be quite useful in identifying necessary targets for intervention. This, however, is rarely done.

When difficulties in this area is identified, specific training to help a child with ADHD understand cause-and-effect relations, both in stories and in real-life social situations, may be quite helpful. This may be best done by a reading specialist who is aware of specific techniques and strategies to assist children in their comprehension skills. Such training may have benefits not only for academic performance, but for a child's social relationships as well.

David Rabiner, Ph.D. Licensed Psychologist Duke University http://www.helpforadd.com

ADD Coach Academy: www.addcoachacademy.com/
LDLearning.com -www.ldlearning.com
1-800-THERAPIST- www-1-800-therapist.com/adhdnews.html
ADHD Research Update by Dr. Dave Rabiner Ph.D www.helpforadd.com
Parent Coaching by Dr. Steven Richfield Ph.D Cards www.parentcoachcards.com
Reed Martin J.D Special Education Law - www.reedmartin.com



Copyright 2000 Brandi Valentine. All rights reserved. This Newsletter is copyrighted by the authors and/or publisher and is registered with the Library of Congress.

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