On this week’s episode of Single Mom Stories, Kelly welcomes Avigail Gimpel to the show to talk about her work, both personal and professional, involving children living with ADHD. She starts off by addressing the recent spike in prescribing medication and attributes that to people incorrectly using medicine as a form of discipline. Avigail notes that when you really start to listen and pay attention to kids with ADHD, you will find that helping them is about so much more than a dosage. In fact, her own daughter was diagnosed with ADHD only after transferring to a much more pressure filled school. What Gimpel found was that there was an incredible lack of accommodations for children like hers, so she took it upon herself to do the work. 

Gimpel learned that people with ADHD tend to be all or nothing. They may have intense reactions to otherwise minor issues, but if you start to break things down into manageable chunks, you and the child will be able to identify their trigger. Together, she and Kelly draw this episode to a close by talking about the importance of structure, feedback, and boundaries for children living with ADHD, and how Avigail details this and all of her valuable findings in her book, Hyperhealing.

The Finer Details of This Episode:

• Medication for the sake of discipline
• ADHD behaviors in the classroom
• Avigail’s daughter
• Lack of accommodations
• Creating manageable segments
• The value of feedback and boundaries
• Finding comfort in structure

Quotes:

“The most intriguing were the students with ‘special energy’, the ones who were trying to drink from a waterfall instead of a glass. I love that. The ones who dreamed all day but then said something that no one else thought of. The ones whose engines ran on instant gratification… They were creative, funny, out of the box, and struggling.”

“The minute we moved back to Israel, that was a crash and burn. And that's when I went for her diagnosis, because suddenly I put her into a classroom of 28 students and a much more high pressured school where they were not tolerating.”

“It never occurred to me that this amazing kid was a bother to anybody.”

“I just started reading and just dragging information from everywhere in order to help my kids, and that's how the book started taking shape.”

“They're all or nothing. So if they don't get part of the morning right, they wake up a little bit too late, and it all goes in the garbage. ‘Forget it. I'm not getting out of bed’…So we divide that up.”

“I didn't realize that kids with ADHD and adults really too, are more sensitive to others and about things happening to them.”

“A lot of times we look at the kid and say, ‘Just respond normally. What is all of this tantruming? Why are you crying in the supermarket?’…But they're not able to because we didn't help them break it down and really understand what the trigger was.”

“We're not psychologists. We’re moms and dads. So I give the parents the tools to ask the questions a certain way, be patient, and tell your own personal stories. There are things we can do to get the child to be less shameful and to be able to share what they're really feeling.”

“The reason I did it was, because I feel like parents do not have informed consent when it comes to their kid’s intervention program. So the first book really gives the parents an alternative program.”

Links:

Kelly Travis 

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