ADD: The Game Plan

Self-concept

ADD: The Game Plan

As a former high school coach, I couldn't leave you without a game plan. Your opponent is attention deficit disorder. Because ADD can attack and impact on your child's life in a variety of ways, I've provided assessment tools to help you determine the best game plan (or plans) for your child. ADD affects children and adults in six areas, so I've designed defenses for each of them. Because each child's ADD symptoms are different, let's first assess how your child is affected within each of these six areas:

• self-concept
• behaviors
• home relationships and harmony
• social relationships
• spiritual life
• school life

I realize that each of these areas has been covered in previous chapters, and I would certainly hope that you will look back to those chapters for guidance and direction. But you cannot just follow one approach at a time. That creates confusion, and if there is not a major success with one approach, it might be thrown in the dump as unusable when it could be very powerful in conjunction with another. The message is that your child needs an integrated plan that includes a mixture of approaches. ADD is not a single problem and it cannot be helped with a single solution. That is the reason for this chapter, to start with the big picture.

For each category of assessment there will be a 1-to-10-point rating scale, with 1 meaning no impact of ADD in that area, and 10 meaning that the effects of ADD are having dysfunctional impact in that area of life. Each of the rating scales has different relevancies to determine how well your child is functioning; however, the underlying ratings are based on the general scale below.

Self-concept
In this category we'll look at how your child feels about himself by looking at his self-esteem, self-assurance, and self-sufficiency. There are many ways to determine a child's self-concept but I've found the best method is to simply ask the child basic straightforward questions: "How strong do you feel when you are facing tough problems?" or "How confident are you in your own abilities?" or "How well are you going to do on a test next week?" Have your child respond to those questions using the ten-point scale below.