The interesting and factual truth about ADHD - According to leading researcher Dr. Russell Barkley

I was one of four hundred teacher fortunate enough to attend a speech given by Dr. Russell Barkley - the leading scientist in ADHD research. If you come across an empirical study dedicated to ADHD, Dr. Barkley's name will most likely be associated with it. He said that telling a student who suffers from ADHD to stop moving and to pay attention would be like telling a person in a wheelchair to roll up a flight of steps. Or it would be like telling a dyslexic person to read on grade level.
He spoke eloquently about his field of expertise to the delight of the crowd. According to Barkley, the mind of an ADHD child operates without one of the main functions of the frontal lobe. In turn, the parents and teachers of these young ones become surrogate frontal lobes. We have to provide them with structured time increments since Barkley says that they suffer from "Time Blindness."
Not only do they need detailed (perhaps even picture) schedules they also need someone to make sure they remain on task.
One of the main problems for any ADHD child is controlling inhibitions. Simply put, they cannot do it. It is not biologically possible. "Their environment becomes more compelling then the job at hand", said the good Doctor. This problem evolves from a lack of working memory. Working memory is basically our ability to keep attention while using our short term memory and the ability to return to a task after an interruption. For instance, as I was typing this article my cat was swatting at a gecko that was on the other side of the sliding glass door. I took many tiny breaks from writing to observe my frustrated and bewildered feline. "If I could just ease my paw through this darn glass", she thought to herself. Every time I paused from typing to watch her, I was able to return to my writing without the least bit of hesitation. This is because my working memory is doing it's job. If I had adult ADHD, then I would lose my train of thought, become overly obsessed with my cat, leave my blog article for another day, and start drawing pictures of the gecko.
Interestingly, Dr. Russell Barkley pin-pointed how children get ADHD. Firstly, he put all of the parents in attendance at ease by saying that it has nothing to do with child-rearing methods; you cannot create an ADHD son or daughter because you are a struggling parent. It is 65 to 75% genetic. The most likely way to tell if your child will have ADHD when it is born is to ask yourself if you or your spouse have it. If you smoke while your pregnant then you are 3 to 5 times more likely to have a child with ADHD. If you couple smoking with drinking then it jumps to 10 times more likely. Also, if a child is born prematurely then it will most likely have ADHD due to the commonness of brain-bleeding. To sum up, ADHD is a hereditary disorder that is by further complicated due to problems during pregnancy and/or birth.
Dr. Barkley and his team discovered the main-brain culprit of ADHD: The Basal Ganglia. The Basal Ganglia is not the culinary spice that you put in homemade soup, it is a group of nuclei in the fore brain that are responsible for motor control and learning. It is 4 to 10 times smaller in the brain of ADHD children. Also, the cerebellum is smaller. This will definitely be the case if there are infections during pregnancy.
Sadly, half of the children who are diagnosed with Leukemia get ADHD because the poison that is given to them to treat the disease effects the brain in a very harmful way. Talk about kicking someone when they are already down.
In my next blog article concerning ADHD I will give the top ten things a parent or teacher can do to help a child with ADHD, according to top researcher Dr. Russell Barkley.

He has an amazing website to educate people about this disorder. Plus you can see what he looks like!
www.RussellBarkley.org.