Thanks to our friends at InfiniTeach, join McMillen Health in this free webinar to listen to Dr. Tony GiaQuinta talk about ADHD and your children, how to improve it, what you as a parent can do and the role that medicine can play. This will be 20 minutes of discussion with 10 minutes for questions.

• Once my child is diagnosed with ADHD, when should I start to look into an IEP Plan/504 Plan? Should I wait until the school mentions it or be proactive?

  Definitely be proactive! Do pursue www.insource.org, there are many wonderful tips and suggestions for getting this done. You definitely do NOT need the school to initiate this.

• In regards to using evidenced based practice when working with children, what are your recommendations?

  Filtering through all the studies to formulate a ‘best practice’ is difficult with children, mostly because we have to be very careful that we aren’t treating kids as ‘test’ subjects. However, whenever I look for advice, I always go to the experts! In this case, I like going to the American Academy of Pediatrics for resources. It is an organization of over 80,000 pediatricians and their parent website, healthychildren.org, is fantastic! I also have been recommended the books ‘smart but scattered’ and ‘taking charge of ADHD’ as worthwhile books from a local child psychologist.

• My son does not want to take his ADHD medicine, what can I do?

  Oh this can be a BIG challenge! in general, ADHD medicines can be given as liquid, pills, and capsules. If swallowing capsules or pills is a huge fight in the morning, I actually find that opening capsules onto applesauce (or even pudding) is the best way to get compliance, but be sure that he/she is getting all the medicine, so sometimes just sprinkling on a spoonful is best. The liquids can taste very good, so that is another option. Finally, they do make a patch for some medicines that stick onto the arm, but this can be irritating and I honestly don’t have a lot of experience with it.