This Mother’s Survival Guide

If you’ve followed my blogs over the past couple of years, you know I try to insert as much humor as I can into the concept of living with ADHD.

It’s a fact that persons with ADHD can be funny and the situations that affect the family can be side-splitting hilarious. For instance I wrote about my daughter with ADHD who liked to pretend she was a mannequin, and how her impulsive actions or comments cause us to literally bend over with laughter.

I’ve also written numerous examples of how Hubby with ADHD thought and behaved totally outside the box in the earlier days of our marriage.

My soul still bears the marks and bruises of some of those actions.

But today I share another truth about ADHD in either yourself or your family member: the behaviors and symptoms associated with attention deficit often bring dilemmas and aches. One of my acquaintances calls them pain points.

Because of pain points and the daily struggles my readers face, I created a convenient mini course A Mother’s Survival Guide to ADHD.

In it I cover such topics as:

        ADHD’s long, credible history

        ADHD families suffer in silence

        Simplifying the stress

        Building positive behaviors

And several other practical topics

I endeavor to touch on some of the pain points families with ADHD encounter on a daily basis, and I offer solutions or remedies to help families find ways to alleviate the pain.

I hope to interact with you at one of your pain points and gift you with support and encouragement.

A few of the solutions I recommend include:

Learn the unique ways your family member brings color and texture to a linear world.

You can bring order to chaos and bring space to your life.

Parents and children can learn to be partners for successful behavior management.

You will hear me say such things as:

The first medical writings on symptoms similar to what we now know as ADHD began to appear in the late 1790’s in the works of Sir Alexander Crichton, a Scottish physician, when he described persons who are distracted from attending fully to a task or object.  Sir Crichton said “When born with (this set of behaviors) , it becomes evident at a very early period of life, and has a very bad effect, inasmuch as it renders him incapable of attending with constancy to any one object of education. But it seldom is in so great a degree as totally to impede all instruction”. 

Wise parents learn how to pick their battles and remain calm in escalating situations. Experienced parents learn to identify behavior triggers. Successful parents know that a sense of humor helps to defuse potentially explosive situations. It also helps parents maintain a positive perspective on the situation. Remember, sarcasm is not a form of communication.

These only touch the tip of the wealth of information that you will discover in the mini course, information I learned from both scholarly studies and from nearly one-half century of personal experience.

You can find it on our web page at www.coachadhd.com/joomla3/courses.html, and I invite you to take time now to obtain the course and to recommend it to friends with similar struggles.

If you have other questions, phone us at 316-655-9807316-655-9807 or 316-6557079.

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Tax Day

April 15^th. The dreaded Tax Day. Possibly you’re among many tax-paying Americans who don’t dread the deadline to file your Income Tax forms. You’re done, and your tax return is in the mail.  If so, then congratulations.

However, for many adults with ADHD, filing tax forms often brings a sense of guilt or gnaw of defense and plethora of excuses as to why the forms are not ready to mail by midnight. On the other hand, the same adult can take heart.  You can easily overcome tax quandaries this year and can be ready for next year’s tax season.

If you’re not ready to file you tax forms this year, quickly expend the time and effort to consult a tax preparation specialist, and learn how you can file for an extension. If you have the forms, but not the money you need to pay, talk to the tax specialist on how you can file now and pay later.

Keep the promise to yourself that you will be ready earlier next year to get your tax forms done on time. Orderly record keeping may not be the most interesting project for you to carry out, but it can be done. When tax time rolls over us, it's important to have a head start on the process of filing.

Whatever it might be, your personal system for organization can serve you well in your record keeping. Possibly for you, it is a simple matter of a large paper grocery bag. I’m not kidding; I saw it work well for a late friend. She was a professional, and she made a super income. She just did not like to take on the challenge of sorting papers related to income tax. The current year’s brown sack sat on the corner of her desk.

Any paper, bill, receipt she thought might be related to taxes went into the sack. “I take it to my tax lady and let her sort out the important ones,” she told me when I laughed at her system. “That’s what I pay her to do.”  It worked. No guess work as to what the tax preparation specialist might need.

Other persons find that they do well with color-coded files, and they make them simple in case another member of the family may need to get to the information. Pick a color that matches your concept of what goes in the file. For example, red is often associated with medical expenses. Yellow is matched with contributions and charity donations. Whichever color you use, it must remind you of the content. Keep these files in a crate or desk drawer that you will see each month. Whenever a tax record comes across your desk that month, file it immediately in the correct file folder. Other persons use open small baskets or containers of different colors. Open baskets allow for a quick toss when sorting important pieces of information.

Of course, you need an incentive for filing those papers each month, so think how you might reward yourself when you do. Undeniably, you are bribing yourself to do something that needs to be done anyway, but persons with ADHD often focus better on any task when there is have a reward or reason for doing so. I expect you will know exactly what works well as an incentive for you.