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Tuesday, January 09, 2007

You mean I'm not just stupid?

I was glancing through the book Understanding Girls with AD/HD by Kathleen Nadeau, Ellen Littman, and Patricia Quinn as I prepared to process it, and gleaned the following:
    Girls with ADHD:
  • lag in maturation (I always did better with kids that were younger than I, although my mom thought as a result that I was more mature than my peers)
  • have trouble applying learning to new situations (they'll learn in one situation but not apply it to a different one, even when the underlying problem is the same)
  • have trouble being self-aware
  • have trouble dealing with several stimuli at once
  • have trouble with change or transitions
  • have a need for structure to overcome a lack of self-motivation and overcome inertia
  • tend to react badly if 1) there is too much stimulation in their environment or 2) not enough
  • many have a hyper-sensitive central nervous system, affecting such senses as touch, hearing, taste, and vision.
  • may have coordination difficulties
  • may have obsessional behaviours
  • may have bladder issues into the teens--I once lost control during a 7th grade vocabulary test and nearly fell through the floor in shame
  • experience an abundance of shame
  • may have psychological distress
  • may be emotionally needy
  • may eat to calm themselves
  • may have disturbed sleep
  • may have a need for extended wind-down time before sleep
  • may have trouble with social skills and missing social cues
  • have trouble belonging, seeking out younger children or much older people rather than peers during school-age interactions
  • have trouble planning and following-through
  • have trouble prioritising and sequencing
  • have trouble with their memory, particularly with accessing and retrieving stored information, assuming it got stored in the first place
  • may have trouble writing and listening at the same time--in the game this is also a trouble because of having to interact whilst writing

There were more issues discussed, but those were the ones I found applicable to me.

Now the problem is, how do you overcome those things? The book seems to have some good suggestions. I may check it out after I get it on the shelf.

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