The most important thing for you to do as a parent is to stay calm and upbeat, always having a smile (or at least smiling eyes) to offer your child. If your eyes say “Go away, don’t bother me” instead of “I love you!” or “You’re OK” you’re just not in any place to parent that kid. The problem is that some kids need that type of affirmation every few minutes, all day long. It’s pretty easy to get tired, right?

So what can you do? Here are ten ideas that we’ve learned through the years:

1. Good nutrition and vitamins. Very important to not deplete yourself physically. High stress requires replenishment of vitamin B and Calcium. Make sure you take a supplement, and eat lots of fruits and vegetables.
2. Exercise. Get 20 to 30 minutes of aerobic exercise at least 3 times a week.
3. Sleep. Make sure to get plenty of sleep, 10 to 12 hours per night at first. If you’re a 2 parent family, you might have to stagger sleep time.
4. Take some time off. At least once a week do something for yourself that you enjoy – bowling, gardening, a bubble bath, take in a movie or dinner out – whatever works for you. “You” time.
5. Call in the reserves. If you’ve got some friends that can watch your kids for an hour or two once a week, take advantage of it.
6. Couple time. If you’re married, make sure to spend some time together as a couple – at least once a month, and hopefully 2 or 3 times a year take a weekend a way. It’s amazing how much a relaxing weekend can rejuvenate you.
7. Check yourself for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder or Depression. Nancy Thomas in her book When Love is not Enough has 3 checklists for Depression, PTSD, or secondary PTSD. If you’re the parent of a Reactive Attachment Disorder kid, you almost surely suffer from secondary PTSD.
8. Don’t wonder “Why did they do that?” Many parents spend countless hours trying to make sense of why the kids do what they do. Stop it! That’s the whole point – it’s crazy behavior! It doesn’t make sense. Don’t try to make sense out of the senseless!
9. Establish a support system. We have found this to be crucial. It’s easy to get isolated and totally obsessed with parenting, and sometimes you just need to talk about other things with people who understand what your life is like.
10. Laugh! Figure out a way to get a few laughs in, even if it’s at yourself! Yesterday, my wife and I laughed really hard about something that had happened that way that was just silly, but it sure felt good!

These are a few ideas on how to take care of yourself – I’m sure if you start putting your mind to it you’ll think of many more!

Looking for more parenting help?

One tool that we’ve used is the Total Transformation program by James Lehman. It’s given us a lot of solid, common sense ideas for parenting our challenging children.

One example is sports – Dad dreams of having a son that plays football, basketball, and baseball like he did when he was a kid. He enrolls his child in T-Ball, Pop Warner football, and so forth, faithfully attending all the games and encourages him all along the way. But the kid wants to be in band and debate. So Dad needs to drop his dreams, and encourage the child in the child’s dreams.

Having a special needs child is another great example, used by James Lehman in the video above. He talks about you having to be a special needs parent in order to be able to give that child the tools he needs to survive and be successful in the world today.

Total Transformation gives you those tools. This program is not for parents of compliant, well-adjusted children. It’s designed for parents of defiant, out-of-control children who may suffer from ADD, ADHD, ODD, Asperger’s, and many other disorders. Take a look at their website and see if what he talks about resonates with you in any way. It’s helped our family, and I bet it can help yours too!

We have five adopted kids, and one of the main things you need to be aware of if you’re going to adopt is that the child is most likely going to have some attachment issues. Reactive Attachment Disorder is a very real and very serious problem, but it is one that can be reversed and the child can become whole and well again.

What happens when a child is abused, neglected, or any number of other things, is that their brain does not fully develop in a healthy way. They get used to doing all of their thinking in the back or “Flight, Fight, or Freeze” part of their brain and the neural pathways never develop to the logical, front part of the brain. This is a very simplified explanation of what happens and being that I’m just a dad and not a doctor or scientist, I’ll leave it at that. You can learn more from a neurotherapist in your community if you’re interested. However, I can speak to what happens to the behavior of the child.

Our kids have been having neurotherapy sessions once a week for 3 months now and I can truly say the results are astounding! One of them would get very stuck: if he didn’t want to do something or thought it wasn’t fair, he would become extremely belligerent, verbally abusive, he would act out, and be totally illogical for hours or days on end. He didn’t care who he hurt or offended – he was miserable to be around! In the last 2 or 3 weeks, we have seen the most remarkable change! He is able to articulate his feelings and to handle adversity and the word “no” much better. It seems like he’s grown up 5 years in the last 2 months – we can’t believe it!

We have another kiddo that is 11 and has always had the worst handwriting. About a week ago my wife looked at one of his papers and said “Who wrote this for you?” He stated that he did it, and she couldn’t believe it! It was 50 times more legible than it had ever been in the past.

Another one of our guys is 12 and he’s always been pretty ADHD. Since we started the neurotherapy, we’ve taken him off of his medication, and he’s much calmer and doesn’t have to be in control like in the past. It’s great!

So how does this work?

The first thing they do is go in for a “Brain Map”, which involves putting a electrodes all over their heads and measuring their brain waves – basically an EEG. This is how the therapist determines which areas to work on.

Then the therapy starts – watching movies and video games! They put these little sensors on the kid’s fingers which measure heart beat, breathing, and sweat, then they make a car go in a video game if they’re able to stay calm. This helps to remap the brain somehow – don’t ask me how, but I know it works!

After that, the child picks out a movie and the therapist puts sensors on each ear, and on one spot on their head (in the area they want to “fix”). The kid watches the movie, and if the brain does something that it’s not supposed to, the movie stops for a split second. The brain then “reprograms” its action, using a different pathway that’s more appropriate and the movie starts again. This teaches the brain to use the right pathways instead of the wrong ones, and builds up that communication between the back and the front of the brain.

It seems wild, I know, but it works! If you’ve got a kid that has RAD, ADD, ADHD, or autism I would highly recommend trying out this therapy! What have you got to lose? Here’s a video I found about one child’s experience, take a look.

What else can you do?

The best book we’ve found for parenting our RAD kids is When Love Is Not Enough by Nancy Thomas. For parents of children with Reactive Attachment Disorder this is a must have.

We’ve also had much success with Total Transformation by James Lehman. Though it’s not written specifically for RAD kids, the techniques we’ve learned in it have worked very well for ours.

James Lehman, MSW (Masters of Social Work) worked for more than 30 years with troubled teens, children, and their families to educate, treat, and assist them in improving child behavior. He certainly had the experience to help these families, as evidenced by his own life.

James was born in 1946 and was abandoned at the age of 2 by parents unable to care for him. He was adopted by Teddy and Marguerite Lehman, who went on to raise him. He exhibited defiant behaviors as he grew up, and they gradually grew more severe, until he quit school, left home and lived on the streets of New York City. He started using drugs and alcohol, which eventually led to a life of crime. He spent more than 6 years in various prisons. He was then given an opportunity to participate in an accountability-focused treatment program.

After graduating from that program, he became a staff coordinator and his career as counselor and therapist began. He went to several schools including Fordham University and Boston University where he graduated with a Master’s Degree in Social Work.

While working at a residential treatment center, James began private practice and started providing treatment and training to families, schools and state agencies. This is where he started providing the tools to parents, teachers, and case workers that eventually were developed into the Total Transformation program, which is designed to teach kids problem-solving skills so they would be able to be successful in life without using disrespectful and abusive behavior.

James Lehman has a no-nonsense but compassionate way about him, and though most of the things he tells you in his program seem very simple and “are just common sense”, there were a lot that I didn’t think of on a daily basis. He has definitely helped our family to learn to problem solve, and our house to become a calmer, more peaceful place. I totally recommend the Total Transformation Program to anyone that has difficult children they are trying to bring up properly.

Note: Information for this article was obtained mainly from the Total Transformation website and personal knowledge of the life and methods of James Lehman.

Nancy is the mother of three birth children, two adopted children, and one child being raised s legal guardians. She has been a Therapeutic Parenting Specialist since 1985. She has worked extensively since that time with children with all of the following ailments: borderline psychotic, ritualistically abused, abusive to animals, mood disordered, Reactive Attachment Disorder, Asperger’s, ADD, ADHD, Tourette Syndrome, Bipolar disorder, and some with histories of homicide and arson.

Nancy and her family live in Colorado in a home centered around healing the hearts of children. Nancy and her husband Jerry have shared their life and home for over 30 years with children with attachment problems. In fact, ninety percent of the kids placed in her home have killed! She has an 85% success rate with rehabilitating these kids. She specializes in bonding and conscience development.

Her accolades go on and on, and you can read about her in more detail here.

One of the most important things she has done is establish a summer camp program for unattached kids. At these camps they are able to learn with their parents in a healing environment. She holds these camps at her place in Colorado, as well as in many locations throughout the United States. Though we have yet to attend one of these camps, we know several families who have and they say it has done wonders for their families!

One of the other things that she’s recently developed are “intensive weeks” where a family can go meet with her to work on reactive attachment disorder issues in a one-on-one setting, thereby accomplishing in one week what might take you months or years to accomplish on your own at home. The people we know that have been through this program have been amazed at the change in their children.

Nancy Thomas is an amazing, caring, and knowledgeable woman dedicated to helping children heal so they can live productive lives. You can get more information on all the services and products she has to offer on her website, www.attachment.org. This is where we have obtained some of the details for this article.

The Total Transformation by James Lehman

If you’ve been looking for Total Transformation Reviews on the internet, you’ve stumbled across the right site. Quite often, the people that review products don’t actually use the product, they’ll just listen to the CD’s or read the book, and write a review based on their feelings whether the product will work or not. This is especially true about parenting courses. Unless you actually have kids to “try it out on”, you won’t know for sure whether it works or not.

So what makes us different? We’ve got five adopted kids, that’s what! With the oldest being 17 and the youngest being 11, we’ve had plenty of opportunities to test many, many different parenting styles, programs, books, courses, etc. Our kids have issues including Reactive Attachment Disorder, ADHD, ADD, Sensory Processing Disorder, Oppositional Defiance Disorder, and more. If you want to learn all about the different disorders that can affect children, all you have to do is adopt five of them!

So what have we discovered? That there are tools and techniques to be gleaned from most of the resources that you try. For Reactive Attachment Disorder kiddos, our favorite is When Love is Not Enough by Nancy Thomas. This is the RAD bible, as far as we’re concerned. If you have RAD kids, you absolutely must get this book!

With all the rest of our children, we’ve found the Total Transformation program by James Lehman to be most helpful. The good thing about the Total Transformation is that it puts many different techniques together in one set of CD’s, DVD’s, and a workbook. If you want to listen to a preview from some of the actual CD’s, click here. You’ll very quickly get an idea what the program is all about.

What are some of the things that have worked for us? Here are 3, just to get you started:

1.       Transition time. This is one of the most important tools we’ve learned, and possibly one of the simplest. The way it works is that when Dad or Mom get home from work, they get 10 minutes of “Transition Time” to read they’re mail, emails, change their clothes, etc. until they’re approached by the kids for requests or problems. It can also work the other way, too – kids get a 10 minute break when they get home from school to “wind down” and relax a bit before they have to do and chores, or are reminded about areas where they need to improve. Here’s a fun video we made showing this technique.

2.      Direct statements. When you want something to happen, be very firm and clear. Say something like “Don’t talk to me that way. I don’t like it”. Then walk away. This is very powerful because you’ve held the child accountable, no matter how he or she reacts.

3.      Be an empowered parent. Unempowered parents are unable to empower their children with the problem-solving skills necessary to be successful. Use whatever social, environmental and legal options you have at your disposal. If your child won’t get up for school, let the school deal with it in the way they would with any other truancy issues, because that’s what it is. Don’t let the kid make it your problem – put it back on them.

These are 3 skills to get you started. There are hundreds more in the Total Transformation program. It’s worked for us, it can work for you too!

Focus Formula - Click On Picture For More Info!

I would like to share our story with ADHD natural remedies. Our family has tried all sorts of avenues, and we have found that each child is unique in their response to different alternatives. We have explored and found success with different medications, behavioral modification programs, and natural ADHD remedies. This article is focusing on our experiences with natural ADHD remedies.

As it seems to be more common than we thought, 3 of our 5 adopted kiddos have ADHD or ADD. Our 15-year old took medication for 4 years, but in her “I am my own person” stage has refused to continue. Sadly, her impulsivity has got her into trouble some.

My son, who is eleven, has started on some medication and it has helped him with bedwetting at night, and is doing well. He can now better enjoy sleepovers.

My littlest lamb also suffers from ADHD, and it is only one of many health concerns he is dealing with. Some of the things that are making his ADHD near impossible to deal with are sensory integration disorder, and cerebral palsy. Smells out of the ordinary and textures in his mouth his body will physically reject. After attempting a couple of different medications, we discovered that this was the reason that he could not take his meds (we have set up a counseling fund already due to this setback!).

Believe me, I tried everything! Hide it in ice cream, sprinkle it on waffles, pushing it back on his tongue. He just couldn’t swallow it and he could definitely taste the bitterness. So then we tried the patch.

Unfortunately it was only available in stimulant form, which made things dicey in that when the medication wore off he exhibited a destructive streak and would be sobbing. This was not getting us anywhere.

A naturopath suggested that caffeine could balance out the symptoms our son was showing. So, much to his delight, he enjoyed a Diet Pepsi with his lunch everyday for about six months. It couldn’t contain sugar as this would be counterproductive. There wasn’t much change. The doctor informed us to look into other issues besides the ADHD. I couldn’t take anymore.

Exasperated, I googled “my son has ADHD and can’t take meds”. I thought I might be on to something when several homeopathic remedies came up. After doing some research, I took a hard look at Focus Formula from Native Remedies. On the upside we found that it was made from all natural ingredients, and on the downside, we found that it would take at least three weeks before we would see results. We forged ahead anyway.

The results? I just ordered my second bottle. My baby went from earning zero points for staying on task at school to earning 11 (the maximum). After 3 months, he is able to self start on his homework, stay focused on it, earn an average of 8 points at school and his frustration level is way down. The best thing – drops instead of pills. We put it in root beer, and he slugs it right down! He knows it’s in there, he even does it himself!

I am ecstatic and he is happier. Success in life has a way of doing that for a boy! If you’re having trouble and have the same “pill swallowing” problems that we did, maybe one of the natural ADHD remedies like Focus Formula is for your little one.