50 Ways to Improve Your Child’s Behavior and Attention Span

without Drugs, Labels, or Coercion

• Provide a balanced breakfast.
• Consider the Feingold diet
• Limit television and video games
• Teach self-talk skills.
• Find out what interests your child.
• Promote a strong physical education program in your child’s school.
• Enroll your child in a martial arts program.
• Discover your child’s multiple intelligences (link)
• Use background music to focus and calm.
• Use color to highlight information.
• Teach your child to visualize.
• Remove allergens from the diet.
• Provide opportunities for physical movement.
• Enhance your child’s self-esteem.
• Find your child’s best times of alertness.
• Give instructions in attention-grabbing ways.
• Provide a variety of stimulating learning activities.
• Consider biofeedback training.
• Activate positive career aspirations.
• Teach your child physical-relaxation techniques.
• Use incidental learning to teach.
• Support full inclusion of your child in a regular classroom.
• Provide positive role models.
• Consider alternative schooling options.
• Channel creative energy into the arts.
• Provide hands-on activities
• Spend positive times together.
• Provide appropriate spaces for learning.
• Consider individual psychotherapy.
• Use touch to soothe and calm.
• Help your child with organizational skills.
• Help your child appreciate the value of personal effort.
• Take care of yourself.
• Teach your child focusing techniques.
• Provide immediate feedback.
• Provide your child with access to a computer.
• Consider family therapy.
• Teach problem-solving skills.
• Offer your child real-life tasks to do.
• Use "time-out" in a positive way.
• Help your child develop social skills.
• Contract with your child.
• Use effective communication skills.
• Give your child choices.
• Discover and treat the four types of misbehavior.
• Establish consistent rules, routines, and transitions.
• Hold family meetings.
• Have your child teach a younger child.
• Use natural and logical consequences.
• Hold a positive image of your child.

 

Another way of looking at A.D.D./A.D.H.D. children....

 

The author of the book, "The Myth of the A.D.D. Child: 50 Ways to Improve Your Child's Behavior and Attention Span Without Drugs, Labels, or Coercion" Thomas Armstrong, P.h.D., suggests that we reenvision the negative behaviors of A.D.D/A.D.H.D. in a positive light. He writes:

 

Instead of thinking of your child as....	Think of him/her as......
hyperactive	energetic
impulsive	spontaneous
distractible	creative
a daydreamer	imaginative
inattentive	global thinker with a wide focus
unpredictable	flexible
argumentative	independent
stubborn	committed
irritable	sensitive
aggressive	assertive
attention deficit disordered	unique