Helping Families Cope with The Challenges of ADHD
As the year draws to a close, I’m pleased to say it has been another year of progress here at BUSHkids, and one which has seen a number of key achievements. Most significantly, with your support we are continuing to help those children and families most in need of allied health supports across regional, rural and remote Queensland. During the financial year we helped nearly 9,000 clients with over 20,000 support sessions, a great achievement we can all be very proud of. Our teleBUSHkids Centre, which donors such as yourselves helped us build and fit out, provided 683 remote telepractice sessions and we are now successfully running a number of support programs from this state-of-the-art facility.
One of the programs I’m particularly proud of is our attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) program which is designed to help parents help their kids with ADHD. ADHD often begins in childhood and manifests itself in children as having a limited attention span, impulsiveness, and hyperactivity. As well as being challenging for parents, if not managed through early intervention it can lead to severe detrimental effects on a child’s future outcomes in life leading to poor school and work performance, low self-esteem, difficulties forming stable relationships and depression.
ADHD is actually the most common form of neurodivergence and developmental disability with five to ten percent of kids in Australia receiving an ADHD diagnosis; however, it is often overlooked as a condition requiring early childhood support and currently it is not recognised under the NDIS as a permanent disability or impairment. To help kids with ADHD in rural and remote communities BUSHkids has developed a six-week program for parents with children displaying the classic behaviours associated with ADHD.
Providing both face-to-face and using telepractice from our teleBUSHkids Centre at our Toowong precinct, the program is designed to build capacity in the community, empowering parents with the knowledge they need to help their child and helping build strength in the community to create a supportive, nurturing environment around the child that promotes long-term developmental success.
The program helps parents understand the ADHD brain style and provides them with techniques and strategies to respond to their child’s needs, focus on their child’s strengths and to help them help their kids overcome the challenges ADHD presents in their day-to-day life, learning and development. While it is designed to help the kids most of all, the program also gives parents a platform to join together and share their knowledge and lived experiences, and a forum where they can advocate for their child’s support in a welcoming and inclusive environment.
One such family the program has helped is mum Kayla and her daughter Millie who live out on the Western Downs. While Millie’s parents had always known there was something different about her, they couldn’t put their finger on what it was. On the surface she appeared a model student, but after holding things together at school all day when she got home as her mum says “it all came out” in massive meltdowns. The ADHD program’s online sessions have helped Kayla understand her daughter better and helped her put in place strategies to help Millie overcome the difficulties ADHD presents in her day-to-day life. Most of all it has made Kayla secure in the knowledge that there are many kids and parents throughout Queensland who are faced with similar challenges.
“[Online] you’ll have a group of parents who come from different locations and backgrounds,” said Kayla. “Their kids are all different but the insights and strategies they can provide are really good… It makes you feel you’re not alone”.
As part of BUSHkids’ community capacity building approach, we have extended the ADHD program with a 90-minute module for primary school teachers. It is designed to help them understand ADHD and how to better support kids with the condition they are teaching, and we are working to develop a similar module for kindergarten educators. Kindy plays an important role in laying the foundations for learning and building capabilities that lead to positive educational outcomes in later life, and as Millies’s mum says, “If we can get in and help these kids prior to school it’s going to make the world of difference”.
You can find out more about our pioneering ADHD support program in our video, including an interview with Millie’s mum Kayla https://vimeo.com/1005694331/d66c049bec?share=copy
With your ongoing support we will be able to help provide and develop this, and similar programs, to help more families like Millie’s across regional, rural and remote Queensland. Any gift of $2 or more is tax deductable and to make donating easier, you can give online through our website; go to bushkids.org.au and click on the ‘Donate’ button.
We couldn’t continue to provide our free services without your generous support. Thank you again for being part of our BUSHkids family and I would like to take this opportunity to wish you and your family a Merry Christmas and a very Happy New Year.
Yours sincerely
Carlton Meyn
Chief Executive Officer