Thanks to Beyond Meds for sending me this bang on article about examining your own parenting skills when trying to help your child. This mother is courageous. I am embarrassed about my own shortcomings as a parent. I haven’t laid it all out for the reader and don’t know if I can bring myself to do it. You would think less of me . . . I think less of me. Is it okay if I just point you in the direction of self-examination and you can trust me that I’ve been there, too?

ADD book by Katherine Ellison focuses on parent

Ellison questions whether it’s “maternal sacrilege” to point to parental behavior as contributing to ADD. Whereas mothers in the 1960s were customarily blamed for a whole range of mental illnesses, including autism and schizophrenia, the psychiatric pendulum swung in the ’80s and ’90s to targeting brain chemistry – freeing mothers from guilt but leading to an uptick in pharmaceutical treatment…..

What sets Ellison’s personal story apart from the countless ADD books is the degree to which she implicates her own parenting behavior – and her own ADD – as contributing to her son’s behavior issues. She writes that “kids like Buzz do best with parents who aren’t having tantrums right back at them.”

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/10/11/DDT41FKEFH.DTL&ao=2#ixzz12EjFR9NV