Excerpt from: http://www.brainbalancecenters.com/blog/2014/10/essential-oils-adhd/
A search on the Internet results in a lot information about essential oils for ADHD children, with claims that certain types of oils help kids concentrate better. Parents looking to essential oils should approach them with caution because there isn’t much scientific research on the topic.
What Are Essential Oils?
Essential oils are extracts from the leaves, roots, stems, flowers and seeds of various plants. The oils are distilled into extremely concentrated forms and contain active ingredients that are thought to have beneficial effects. The use of essential oils as treatment for various ailments is known as aromatherapy.
Great article with great safety tips for using aromatherapy with infants:
Using Aromatherapy for Anxiety due to Premature or Difficult Birth Conditions: Babies and Children 0 – 2 Years
Read the article at: http://reachingtolearn.com/resources/aromatherapy-for-children/
As a socio-economist focused on studying the changes brought by new media to our social lives, I understood networks as a space of knowledge production that could give me and my children access to informal communities of interest and practices focused on similar issues. In my mind, the internet has a become a sort of “Living library” where peers share their lived experiences and knowledge, potentially giving each other new perspective and ideas to apply to their own context. I knew that the emerging digital learners are going to have drastically different learning needs than analog children.
For one, they have or are learning to find what they want in terms of information and content, when they need it. Their learning is out of the classroom for many things such as dancing, media making, etc.
Secondly, their social world is rapidly becoming embedded in mobile technologies. They exist in hybrid spaces where the distinction between space social/ institutional /personal boundaries are being eroded. They learn and live in real time. Their notion of is going to be radically different and a lot more based on a hybrid between virtual and physical space and time continuum.
Thirdly, their future success will be defined less in terms of a competitive edge and educational degrees but much more in terms of diy survival abilities defined by varying sustainable, local, cultural needs as well as appropriate solutions to problems, that we as adults can barely imagine, let alone prepare them for, if our teaching methods and our approaches to what learning is don’t change.
We can use digital media to learn how to redefine our approaches to the world from a deeply sensitive lens, and part of this project is to understand how.
Unfortunately information on the subject was limited to a few books so I began to search the Internet for all material that seemed related to sensory processing and HSP health. This is where my professional training became very useful. As a university researcher, I had been studying the use of digital technology by young children for some time and one thing became very evident to me.
I have been part of a group of Ryerson new media researchers[i] involved in the creation of a new research lab called EDGE. EDGE (Experience Design and Gaming Environments)[ii] lab research projects focus on the studying, fostering and/or developing new media practices such as serious gaming, trans-media, adaptive design and socio-economic designs.
EDGE researchers explore the aesthetics of current “making” culture and peer-to-peer culture. My own research focuses on studying and developing informal-learning communal practices that promote self-determination and the physical autonomy of marginalized individuals and communities in order to enhance social integration.
What we noticed is that objects all have a bias implied in their design, which often isolates individuals from other potential aspects of social life. Institutional aesthetics such as those of the medical community or other “expert” communities often disregard the experience (sensorial, social, mental and/or physical) that these objects create in their users. Within a new media perspective, this experience has to become key, which implies a co-design approach that involves the user community as much as the “expert” in the creation of artifacts.
In recent years, I have witnessed mesmerizing new realities made possible by new media co-designs such as the emergent digital lives of people normally marginalised, if not oppressed, by dominant communication infrastructures. Much self-determination has developed in virtual worlds: Paraplegics dancing, people meeting virtually and marrying in real life, autistic children expressing themselves with ease, physically disabled children learning about the body through gaming, communities of people helping each other cope with depression and cancer by creating art and spaces to share experiences, poor communities developing sustainable economies and virtual protesters influencing governments’ decision making.
Key to all these activities has been an incredible sense of community where people share experiences, care and help each other in order to enhance their social lives. In the physical world, I have witnessed a little girl called Zoe become an active social actor in Ryerson’s Early Learning Centre through the use of a cardboard chair build for her. The thing is, Zoe cannot move easily, nor can she talk. She had to sit in a baby chair with a caregiver constantly by her side. The semantics of this experience were tacitly excluding her from the possibility of a social life with the other children. By acquiring some physical independence from her caregiver, she became a peer and began to be integrated in other children’s social lives. Her chair is a new media object, through which Zoe acquired a new social dimension.
<< Nurturing Sensitivities Digital Native Learning>>
[ii] The EDGE Lab is funded by the Canadian Foundation for Innovation and the Ontario Ministry of Research and Innovation. Research projects in the lab are funded by: SSHRC, MITACS, The School of Early Childhood Education’s SRC Committee, Bell Broadcast and New Media Fund, the OCE Interact program, NCE and GRAND.
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Children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) are impulsive, inattentive and hyperactive, while children with sensory modulation disorder (SMD), one subtype of Sensory Processing Disorder, have difficulty responding adaptively to daily sensory experiences. ADHD and SMD are often difficult to distinguish. To differentiate these disorders in children, clinical ADHD, SMD, and dual diagnoses were assessed. All groups had significantly more sensory, attention, activity, impulsivity, and emotional difficulties than typical children, but with distinct profiles. Inattention was greater in ADHD compared to SMD. Dual diagnoses had more sensory-related behaviors than ADHD and more attentional difficulties than SMD. SMD had more sensory issues, somatic complaints, anxiety/depression, and difficulty adapting than ADHD. SMD had greater physiological/electrodermal reactivity to sensory stimuli than ADHD and typical controls. Parent-report measures identifying sensory, attentional, hyperactive, and impulsive difficulties varied in agreement with clinician’s diagnoses. Evidence suggests ADHD and SMD are distinct diagnoses.
via Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and sensory modulation dis… – PubMed – NCBI.
Aerobic exercise can help kids with ADHD improve attention, sharpen social skills, and learn more effectively. Learn how to incorporate physical activity into your child’s daily routine.
via ADHD and Exercise: Physical Activity Before School Matters.
One of the saddest aspects of narcissistic abuse is our children can suffer.
Sadly when narcissists are trying to hurt and discredit their ex-partners in every shape or form, children can be used as ammunition and get caught in the cross-fire.
This can leave us dismayed, and in deep disbelief when we view the narcissist as having no conscience when it comes to the treatment of the children. When he or she has no issue with involving them, using them as pawns, and actually enjoys trying to turn the children against the ex-partner.
With narcissists anything or anyone may be fair game, including children.
You may find it hard not to resent how the narcissist can deny you and hurt you – but this pain can escalate to a whole new level when he or she withholds shelter, money and support from your children also.
The potassium salts (bicarbonate and citrate) plentiful in fruit and vegetables, play an important part in improving bone health, researchers have found. For the first time, the results also showed that these potassium salts reduce bone resorption, the process by which bone is broken down, therefore increasing their strength.
via Potassium salts aid bone health, limit osteoporosis risk, new research finds — ScienceDaily.
After making sure you will be undisturbed for the next 30 minutes or so, you settle in your favourite meditation posture – on your mat or cushion – close your eyes and…..nothing!
Your mind keeps buzzing noise for almost all the length of the session. Jittery thought fragments, ‘mind popup notifications’ of things left undone and other God-knows-what mental clutter streaming up the corridors of your conscious mind. But hey, that’s normal. It happens to me, you and people who have been meditating for the past few decades.
I do have those days when no matter how good my intent to meditate is, I just feel there is more mental noise to wade through than normal. That’s where I discovered and started using meditation music or more technically, Binaural beats or brain wave entrainment.
Sound Waves & Brain Waves:
Through various studies about the brain, it had been discovered that different mental states or levels of activity produce different frequencies or waves.
via How Your MP3 Player can be your Best Meditation Tool Ever | MyScienceAcademy.
Ontario Healing Fields 