attention deficit disorder

I remember the reknown narrative therapist Michael White commented in a lecture about 5 years ago: "have you noticed how ADHD has replaced childhood". He was warmly applauded at the time: the general feeling is that diagnosis of this condition is out of control and partly driven by drug company balance sheets. Diagnosis is very flakey and medication is often the first resort when other approaches need to be tried: looking at slepp patterns, exercise, the child's prefered learning style, teaching metacognitive and thinking skills. While there are a few kids around with real ADHD it is massively over-diagnosed and there are usually better and more holistic explanations.

It sounds like you did a great job with boosting his feelings about himself. Its interesting that the problems reemerged at secondary transfer as this is a difficult time for students. Secondaru schools have very different expectation and teaching methods and there is more of a one size fits all approach which might not fit with your sons learning style (ie visual, auditory or kinesthetic; activist, reflector, pragmatist, theorist)

Youir son may have a speciifc problem with aspects of memory functioning. However without a full psychological assessment it is hard to say. You might want to pick up some books on accelerated learning which give a whole range of creative and effective teaching and learning methods: try Alistair Smith's stuff for instance. However, these kinds of approaches haven't got into a lot of schools yet.

Are there areas where he does well: is there a pattern. What is his profile of strengths and weaknesses?

Paul Myszor

I've no personal experience, but I've heard Tad James (NLP trainer and hypnotherapist) talk about ADD/ADHD - his view is that children diagonsed with ADD generally just need to learn an effective learning strategy.

He says that one of the most effective things to do is to teach children (playfully) to use peripheral vision, which is a good learning state and will calm them down.

A book that I've not read, but been told is good is Rediscover the Joy of Learning by Don A. Blackerby. (Just looked at Amazon.com - it's got good reviews!)

Best wishes

I'm not sure if this is at all helpful, but anyway.
During my schooling years I had to learn to cope with bullying, much of which was in the classroom. What I had learned to do was to 1.daydream away from the classroom and the workbooks or 2.Befriend the bullies and keep them occupied in conversation so as they would spend less time hurting me.(consequently I learned little more than survival techniques).
The end result was that I never developed a decent level of concentration on subjects and left school with low grades.

Maybe worth checking this out. (my parents never really found out because I was too ashamed to admit to being bullied).

Mission.

Paul Myszor wrote:teaching metacognitive and thinking skills.

What are metacognitive skills?

Hi Jules

Did you check out this earlier thread?

Kathleen

You say he is more careing and thoughtful than his siblings, is he also more emotionaly sensitive than his siblings/peers? If so his self esteem is constantly at risk and he will need someone (you) to be vigilant of his need to be reinforced.