In order to help you understand your child's experience of the world, you need to understand exactly what goes on in the mind of a young person with ADD. Here?™s a way in which you can begin to understand the experience of a child with ADD. I want you to imagine that you?™re driving in a rainstorm without the windshield wipers on. Pretty frustrating, isn't it? Imagine the effort it would require to keep your mind focused on the road ahead just in order to keep yourself and others feeling safe and protected. Yet, that is precisely what goes on in the mind of a young person with ADD. The screen simply becomes blurred without the ability to use the wipers to get rid of unnecessary cloudiness. She is trying as hard as she can to process all of the information coming into her experience. Of course, what often happens is that the conscious mind becomes overwhelmed and she may simply shut down, stop paying attention, and give up or it might be played out physically in the body which might be seen as anxious, aggressive or hyperactive behavior.

The first step in helping your child to learn effectively is to help her determine what her particular strategy is for learning and then to teach her very precise, effective strategies for learning information most effectively. A visual learning strategy is the most effective strategy for learning academic tasks like spelling words, math facts and vocabulary words; learning visually makes learning fun, interesting and much less time-consuming.