A Word from Laura

I hope this finds all of you well and looking forward to spring.  Our temperatures are finally up and there is no snow in the forecast!  Hurrah!

If you live in the Sydney, Australia area you may be interested in participating in a study of play in ADHD children and their playmates.  Just email Sarah for more information at swil8454@uni.sydney.edu.au.  It sounds like a really interesting study.

News for You

Tics & Temper Tantrums: Isa’s story

By Jenny Conlon

Reprinted from Pure Facts, the newsletter of the Feingold Association of the United States, www.feingold.org.

I fully appreciate the work Dr. Feingold did and that he stood his ground in the midst of all the negativity from critics, food manufacturers and the FDA.  I will forever be in his debt.

In August of 2007 my two-year-old daughter began experiencing tics, and within months she had many more issues.  I documented them and her various behavioral reactions as they happened, and here are some of the things I wrote:

·         She is extremely hypersensitive to sounds, particularly the coffee grinder and hair dryer.  The sound of Cheerios pouring into a bowl causes her to cover her ears and tell me it’s too loud.  A high pitched violin sends her out of the room, sobbing.

·         She spends most of the day in constant motion, jumping from the couch to the ottoman to the chair and back again.  She runs back and forth on the couch like a child possessed, and nobody can stop her.  She will even flip off the side of the couch, cry because it hurts, but just get up and do it all again.

·         She makes constant noise, screeching and banging things together.

·         She wrings her hands, bites and sucks on her fingers, chews her clothes, chews furniture, sucks on metal, and picks at her lips until they bleed.

·         She suffers from night terrors 4 to 5 times a week and grinds her teeth constantly.

·         She doesn’t play with other children, and cannot hold a conversation.

·         She won’t play on the playground, but likes to watch the other kids.

·         She likes to line up her toys, but won’t play with them, other than drawing materials.

·         Her tantrums last for hours if I don’t console her.  She has multiple tantrums each day and they aren’t normal, but filled with rage.

These are just some of the things I wrote down.  When Isa was three, I met with the intervention team at what was to be her new preschool.  I brought in the full book for her intake evaluation after her neurologist diagnosed her with mild autism.  At that meeting they gave me a lot of information on autism and local support chapters.  Her actual evaluation was scheduled for a month from then, but in the meantime I knew I had to do something.

I was frazzled, at the end of my rope, and a big lump of nothing by the time my husband got home from work.  I couldn’t survive like that anymore.

I had heard about Feingold on a message board but I have to admit I thought that they were crazy moms who just were on some weird trip and were a little bit neurotic.  BUT, I was at the end of my rope.  I had tried everything else but meds and as an ADD child myself I know how horrible those meds make you feel and I didn’t want that for her.  So I ordered the kit and tried it.

Within a week I was turned into one of those crazy moms on a neurotic trip!  I realized…hmmm…maybe I shouldn’t be so judgmental, there may be something to this.

Isa slept through the night after three days on the program.  By the time her evaluation was to take place they weren’t quite sure why I had brought her in and actually said she may be intellectually gifted rather than autistic.  We also began seeing a new neurologist at about that time and he couldn’t understand why she had been diagnosed with autism.  I did!

Isa still has an occasional night terror; sometimes she is hyper but it’s not the constant every-second-of-every-day hyperactivity.  She does still line up her toys and has tantrums, but now they are normal kid tantrums that I can work with and begin to stop.  Her tics are still here but less than they were.

After being on the Feingold program for 5 months now, she holds conversations and loves to play with other children and recently went down the big kids’ slide all by herself.

The diet didn’t take care of everything, but it made our lives manageable and today Isa is a completely changed child.

[Laura’s note: Isa’s mom is a trooper and my hat is off to her!  It’s possible Isa has sensitivities to some common foods such as milk, chocolate, wheat, corn, citrus, egg and legumes.  A simple elimination diet would uncover these.]