In our case, in addition to ADHD and learning differences there is a slight twinge of anxiety that creeps into our daily lives.  Our son is really happy at his school and with his school friends.  He also is still very close to his best friend from growing up and is always happy to have him over for a play date.  Outside of this, anxiety tends to creep in and affect everything else.

When our long term favorite babysitter needed to take extra classes in order to finish college, we needed to find a new babysitter for the afternoons before my husband and I are done work.  We ended up hiring two girls from our local college who were very nice and sweet.  The change, however, was too much for our son and he proceeded to lock himself in the back upstairs room of our house every day for a month.  Not a good situation.  We kept hoping that he would get used to the idea and give the girls a chance.  We talked about it with him and tried different strategies to no avail.  I felt horrible for our son in that this kind of change was so traumatic for him.  I also felt badly for the girls and for us.  Juggling work, homework, kids’ activities, laundry and commitments on a daily basis is challenging enough.  Throw in a healthy dose of anxiety and it becomes that much more difficult.  In situations like this, I tend to go through a full range of emotions from sad to supportive to angry.

So when college ended for the year in the beginning of May, we found ourselves with no babysitter and no support in the afternoons.  My husband and I juggled everything together and the kids probably spent a little more time in front of the TV than they should have.  Neither my husband nor I could face just yet the trauma of finding another babysitter.  We also needed to make some decisions about the summer which would determine the amount of hours that we would need from a sitter.

I then had an epiphany when asking a friend about the local college job boards.  He joked that they had gotten a response from an attractive male college polo player that we might want to consider.  His twin nearly teenage girls and an attractive male college polo player was not a good match for them.  I immediately laughed at his joke and we went on with our conversation.

However when I hung up the phone, I thought about a male babysitter.  It could work.  We had always had female nannies and au pairs.  Maybe it was time to consider something different that our son might be comfortable with.

So we met with a friend’s son about babysitting and he started this week.  SUCCESS.  Our son loves having a male babysitter and looks forward to seeing him every day.  (Okay today was only day 3).  No running to the bedroom or back room to hide – just soccer, baseball and giggles.

So maybe this solution was not so creative but it did require for my husband and I to think “out of our box” that we had created regarding babysitting!  So we have a new babysitter but no anxiety, for now.  Hooray!!!!  And so I celebrate a tiny success.

Until next time …. Take care.

 
The recent diagnosis of ADD (ADHD inattentive) for our son has resulted in a major framework shift or me. Learning that he has a lifelong disability that will make life more difficult than it already is causes waves of sadness to come over me. I realize that in order to move on from these feelings, I need to face them and embrace them and then let them go.

 

 
Learning Issues, ADD and Grief

So I call my little peanut, my little onion as well because we just keep peeling back the layers to understand more. As you know, we recently got a diagnosis of ADHD (inattentive) for our son. This, I recently realized, has been a dramatic framework shift for me. Let me explain.

Because he is young, we have been working on and with his learning issues and trying to figure out which issues are based on learning differences and which are based on immaturity. The learning needs school that he has been attending is a transition school. This means that they work with the child to discover their strengths and to establish methodologies and frameworks that work to help the child address their learning weaknesses. They also teach the child to advocate for themselves and their learning needs. When the child has a strong learning toolset and the understanding and mindset to be their own learning advocate, the goal is to transition them back to a mainstream school.
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Dr. Dan Gottlieb is a renowned psychologist and three time author of books on grief and healing. He also hosts a NPR show, “Voices in the Family.” Dr. Gottlieb offers his insights on how best to cope and heal with the loss of a child. This is a Lipstick Wisdom produced video. Run Time of 3:16.

Please share this video with family and friends by clicking on “Share This”.

This VideoJug expert video explores the following questions:

1. What are common emotions after losing a child?
2. How can I heal my marriage after losing a child?
3. How do I talk to my spouse about the death of our child?
4. How do I explain the death of our child to our other children?
5. How do we get through the holidays without our child?
6. Are there ways to memorialize our child at home?
7. Will I ever get over the death of my child?
8. What support is available to parents who have lost a child?

David Kessler is Director of Palliative Care, Citrus Valley Health Partners and Hospice.

David Kessler is an accomplished journalist, international lecturer and author who has dedicated his life to helping people understand the complex emotions attached to death, dying, grief and loss. His work has been discussed in the Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Business Week and Life Magazine and has been featured on CNN, NBC, MSNBC, PBS. He has written for the “Boston Globe,” “ LA Times” and “The San Francisco Chronicle.”

Bereavement: Losing A Child

Grief is a process with no time limit or prescription that people must go through after the death of a loved one. Discover how to deal with grief after death with tips from a hospice community development director in this free video on dealing with death.

There are multiple articles within this post:

Let Us Bury the Stages of Grief – for Good!
By Ursula Weide, PhD, JD, LPC, CT
http://www.coping-with-loss-and-grief.com/vatech.html

On April 17, 2007, one day after the Virginia Tech massacre of 32 students by another student, the Washington Post published an article entitled “Survivors of Shootings Grieve in Stages.” The author quotes an “educator” who counseled Columbine survivor families as describing specific, time-limited stages to occur in a particular order. The educator explained that in the first stage “the body shuts down in shock for seven days. It is a piercing grief; you stumble through what has to be done.” The second stage, beginning at about six months, “is defined by intense sorrow. You go back to doing normal things but everything is colored steel-grey.” One of my bereavement support group members pointed out that, apparently, the survivors cease to exist from day eight until the beginning of the second stage. And since she herself was just a few days beyond the six-month anniversary of the sudden death of her young husband and clearly able to perceive my fuchsia outfit while not seeing “steel-grey”, the group – facetiously – concluded that she must “not be grieving right.” According to the educator, the third stage, “about a year after the event, is sadness tempered with joy at getting on with your own life.” None of us, past our first-year anniversary, recalled having jumped with “joy.” But there is hope: “You know that you’re there when it does not feel bad to feel good.” We are still waiting! Needless to say, the above meaningless language is easily picked up by a society which itself wants to “be done” with death and trauma and thus is reassured that there is an orderly course of grief and that, yes, you will actually “get over it.” But does this reassurance help the survivors?

The so-called “stages of grief” theory originated in the1980s when Elizabeth Kubler-Ross had the temerity to put the subject of death, considered rather taboo until then, on the national agenda. While she deserves much credit, it is common knowledge by now among mental health experts that there is no particular sequence of “stages” as Kubler-Ross had initially postulated. Neither does a survivor experience all or necessarily even any one of them. Kubler-Ross provided us with some early concepts of “grief responses” such as denial and acceptance which were helpful for further research but are not necessarily useful descriptions of a person’s emotional responses. Neither are they necessarily concepts upon which grief therapy should be based.

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