[00:00] Ellen Brown: They may have had a child that’s been diagnosed with ADHD and that they’ve found the school system’s not working.
[00:07] Lindy Hadges: They wanted help and guidance about, was school the best place for their kids? Would homeschooling be a better option?
[00:15] Dympna Brbich: They mask their behaviour and they mask their information and they mask their study…
[00:21] Ellen Brown: You make the learning the child’s, rather than trying to make the child adapt to the learning.
[00:28] Lindy Hadges: If your child is at school struggling with ADHD, don’t just push on for another three, four, five years.
[00:34] Narrator: Welcome to the Future Learners podcast, the home for parents and students thriving with homeschooling in Australia. Your hosts, Brett Campbell and Ellen Brown, are the co-founders of Euka Future Learning, Australia’s largest online K-12 homeschooling provider. Join them as they guide you from uncertainty to complete confidence. Let’s get into it.
[00:56] Ellen Brown: Welcome to the Euka Future Learners podcast. Today we’ve got the topic of ADHD, and we’re going to talk to some experts in the field, which will be really helpful if you’re a parent who’s navigating the various situations with school, or you have a child that has ADHD, or you’re a little bit unsure about such things, this will be a fantastic podcast for you. And the whole idea behind the podcast today is to be able to give you some support, some helpful hints and tips, and some information from experts in this area. So today I’m joined with two wonderful experts. The first is Dympna Brbich, who is the chair and founder and director of the ADHD Foundation Australia, and Lindy Hadges, who is director of ADHD Foundation Australia, also a homeschooling parent of 30 years with five children, worked in HEA media relations and helpline for 12 years.
[01:56] Ellen Brown: So very qualified experts here that we’ve got today, and really excited to have you. Thank you both for joining us today.
[02:04] Lindy Hadges: Thank you. Lovely to be here.
[02:05] Dympna Brbich: Thank you.
[02:07] Ellen Brown: Great. So as you know, we have a lot of families that come to Euka, and they’re coming to us not necessarily because they’ve decided they want to homeschool, but often because they’re coming out of the school system. They may have had a child that’s been diagnosed with ADHD and that they’ve found the school system’s not working, or they might be a child that they’re thinking maybe or they’re getting some expert support in that area at the time, but they’re coming to Euka and they’re saying, you know, here we are, and we’ve got these extra challenges that we’re trying to navigate. And I know this is an area that you’ve had a lot of experience in.
[02:48] Ellen Brown: So perhaps we could start with you, Dympna, to tell us a little bit about the ADHD Foundation and what gap you were trying to fill when it started.
[02:58] Dympna Brbich: Sure. So the ADHD Foundation, we started maybe 2017, and by the time we got going, it was in 2018. We started because there wasn’t a national place for people to come to. There was confusion. There was all kinds of things that happened in the system. People were googling. People were trying to find information. And it wasn’t information that was helpful for them. It was confusing. And someone who was confused just became more confused. So the ADHD Foundation commenced to start filling the gaps in that area. There’s no single, there was no single place in Australia for someone who could say, I need help, where do I get it? So, that was the reason we started.
[03:50] Dympna Brbich: We could see the need. Adults were calling because they couldn’t get diagnosed. Parents of teenagers were calling because high school had become overwhelming. Teachers were calling because they didn’t know how to support their students. And slowly, word spread. And the part that surprises most people is the ADHD Foundation is not funded by government. Not a cent do we receive from the government to run our helpline. We’re a community-run organisation built by the community for the community. We’re 100% volunteer operated and we don’t pay staff and we don’t have offices to finance. Our help that we provide is through the helpline and people come for all kinds of different services that we establish. Each year, we grow and we continue to grow and meet the demand that people with ADHD require.
[04:53] Dympna Brbich: So we currently provide lots of information about what people can do, what direction they can go. Most parents are coming to us with their child, as I mentioned maybe before. They’re coming when the child hits high school or they’re coming when the child goes to school in the first place. So we’re getting a lot of parents who come through and, you know, they only come to realise that their child has difficulties when they either turn up at school for the first time or when they hit high school. They may have been able to manage through primary school, and then all the complications of high school and meeting deadlines and turning up in different classrooms causes a lot of problems for people.
[05:48] Ellen Brown: Absolutely. And we certainly see that. We’ll talk a little bit more about the actual what happens when and what we do see in school, but we certainly do see those numbers explode when it comes into high school. So we will talk about that a little bit more. And it’s wonderful to hear about what you’re doing because, like everything, when people don’t know and don’t have factual information, they get little snippets from everywhere and develop lots of myths. So I’m sure that you’re doing a lot of myth busting in your role. Lindy, can you tell us a little bit about what you do as part of that organisation?
[06:30] Lindy Hadges: So, I’m one of the directors on the ADHD Foundation, and that’s because I’m over passionate. My world, just for whatever reason, has ended up being, I’m, you know, surrounded by people with ADHD. I’m in private practice, and I’ve been in private practice for 20 years or so, and my area of expertise ended up being with ADHD and neurodivergent clients. I’ve homeschooled for 30 years and being on the helpline, you know, I noticed just anecdotally that an enormous amount of parents that were ringing up had kids that were living with ADHD and, you know, they wanted help and guidance about was school the best place for their kids? Would homeschooling be a better option? So I often ended up having many conversations with parents about managing ADHD and school. And so, you know, when the opportunity came to me to be a director on the Foundation, I jumped at that because that just brings lots of passions and places together, which is a really good thing.
[07:34] Ellen Brown: Fantastic. It’s so important. So look, like I said about myth busting, this is a really good opportunity to do a little bit of that. Dympna, maybe we’ll start with you. If you can tell us a little bit about what ADHD actually is, as opposed to what people think it might be.
[07:54] Dympna Brbich: Okay. So ADHD is a neurodevelopmental condition, and it is not, it doesn’t, it seldom travels alone. It has lots of different areas like anxiety, depression and many other issues that causes people to have ADHD in various forms. So it’s a continuum. Some people can manage ADHD along the line of their lifetime, and some people need help at certain points along the lifetime. So that’s where we generally find that it can be hereditary. So it’s often that we find that when a parent takes a child off to, you know, to have some help from a paediatrician or a psychiatrist, they find out that it’s hereditary, and so the parent also needs to be diagnosed.
[09:08] Dympna Brbich: So we find that it is hereditary. We find that there’s no one way to explain ADHD. It doesn’t have a certain agenda. You know, we have hyperactivity, we have inattentive and we have combined. So somewhere along the line, some people can have a variety of those symptoms. Or we can have someone who has something they can manage with some help, some counselling perhaps, some management of their life through coaching or some other organisations along the way. Or they can need some medical interventions. So it is not one size fits all.
[10:08] Ellen Brown: That’s a really helpful one. I think one of the things that we are hearing a lot from parents is exactly what you just said, that, you know, they’re discovering in adulthood that it’s something that they have been dealing with and never really understanding, you know, why they do what they do or why certain things make them very anxious. And all of a sudden, not only are they unlocking areas that have been really tricky for their child, but they’re having this new sense of self. So I was speaking to a parent just last week, actually, who, after having three children, has just said, you know what? I feel like I, having now been diagnosed, can parent in a way that is more responsive to what a child needs rather than…
[10:56] Ellen Brown: She found that for all these years she spent so much time worrying, doing this, but worrying about that. And it was never present, you know? So it’s just been so interesting how, you know, what you just said is something that’s been very new to what we’re hearing from parents as well. Lindy, what would you like to share about that? When people say, well, what is ADHD? Is it just that the child can’t sit still? Well, you know, because you know what it’s like the old school people would say, oh, well, are they eating too much sugar? Or, you know, those myths about, oh, well, you know, if they were more disciplined. So can you share a little bit about how the general public is starting to now understand ADHD and what you see as far as, you know, the kind of challenges that a child who has ADHD or a parent might have.
[11:51] Lindy Hadges: Yeah. Yeah. I really appreciate that question because unfortunately, you know, there’s some old leftovers from the 1980s, A Current Affair that, you know, ADHD is naughty boys climbing rooftops of houses, which is such a reductionist, you know, posture to ADHD. And that really pains me whenever I hear that. Or grandparents that say, well, you know, they just need to be smacked. They just need a little bit more discipline and I’m like, no, no, no, no, no. That’s not the case. You know, we know like Dympna was just saying, it’s a genetic neurodevelopmental disorder that sits in the prefrontal cortex of the brain. It’s very real. And, you know, it exists on the fact that two neurotransmitters that are essential for executive functioning of the brain are low. Dopamine is low.
[12:40] Lindy Hadges: We know there’s about a 40% reduction in dopamine, and dopamine is not our feel-good hormone as we hear out in the community a lot. Let’s bust that myth. It’s our motivation hormone. It’s our hormone that gets us up, gets us motivated to start a task, to activate a task, to take the task to completion and have the reward. So hence ADHD people lack that. They procrastinate. They don’t get the satiation of completing the task and the reward that comes at the end. They get distracted. And noradrenaline, which is your everyday adrenaline, not your crisis adrenaline, that’s low too. So if you’ve got two neurotransmitters like that low, that actually makes life incredibly difficult to get motivated, stay on track, not get distracted, stay focused and complete a task and you know that has flow-on effects down the track that’s happening every day.
[13:33] Lindy Hadges: That starts to impact your self-esteem and your self-confidence. Because children and particularly teenagers start to look around at peers and go, well, they can do that, but I can’t. And so it starts to have a complex negative flow-on effect. So it’s very real. And you know, I like to talk to all my clients about, while it’s not the same, diabetes is a physiological condition. You know, if your pancreas is low on insulin and you can’t process sugars, that’s a problem. Well, if your prefrontal cortex is low on dopamine and noradrenaline, important transmitters for focus and executive function, then that’s a very real problem. And there’s no shame in that.
[14:14] Lindy Hadges: You know, there’s no shame in diabetes, no shame in ADHD.
[14:18] Ellen Brown: Absolutely. Yeah. I absolutely love that. And actually, you’ve explained that in a way that even I have been able to learn something new from that because that whole feeling, like we’re seeing, you know, we said there’s more and more teenagers that we’re seeing being diagnosed now. And one of the things we hear is, you know, from parents, well, they were fine when they were young. They never had a problem. So did they catch it? How can it be that they’ve got it? They were totally fine. They could concentrate on their Lego for hours when they were young. And now we can’t get the room clean and get out the door by 9 am? What would you say to that?
[15:00] Lindy Hadges: Well, you know, there’s lots of different factors that interface with ADHD, and two of them that we’re just really starting to look into more and more, which I’m so glad we’re finally doing, is how hormones interface with dopamine and noradrenaline reduction, because the amount of 55-year-old women that are coming in and being diagnosed with ADHD is at an all-time high, which is wonderful. So suddenly we’re understanding how the loss of female sex hormones like oestrogen, progesterone, and testosterone impact ADHD. Well, it’s the same in the teenage years. So hormone interfacing with neuroreceptors is really important. And the other thing that’s going on is we’re just starting to explore the epigenetics of ADHD. How does the environment actually alter our DNA to, you know, cause ADHD to be expressed. And that’s a very uncharted field.
[16:00] Lindy Hadges: And there’s lots of people we need to do research into that, because I’m sure in two decades’ time we’re going to look back and go, oh my gosh, look, we didn’t understand how heavy metals or microplastics were impacting our DNA and changing the structure of our DNA and causing, you know, ADHD to be expressed more often. That’s to come, I guess. It’s a complex scientific field, right?
[16:27] Ellen Brown: Yeah, absolutely, it is. Dympna, I’ll go to you and ask you, you know, what you’re hearing when parents say to you, what are they saying to you when they say school’s not working? What are the kind of things they’re seeing?
[16:42] Dympna Brbich: So they’re seeing children that one day are calm and delightful, and the next day, the smallest thing sets them off into a meltdown. We’re seeing that parents are saying to us, what’s changed? You know, how can I get my child to be, you know, level each morning when he gets up and when he wants to go? You know, he doesn’t want to go to school. He has a lot of problems with this and that and all the other things. And we’re finding that parents are probably becoming more involved in their child’s school, you know, and in their child’s health and welfare, well-being and education. We’re finding that parents are wanting to learn more, wanting to understand how to manage their child in the right way for them.
[17:36] Dympna Brbich: We find that a lot of parents are calling us up asking us to assist them, to advocate for their child at school because their child is getting bullied. You know, and bullied is a wide word because it can be from just ignoring them to, you know, physical behaviour between children. So, and we do find that a lot of children are lonely in the classroom. And those are kind of a lot of what’s coming forward at the moment to us. Parents are sort of concerned about that part of their child. You know, is medication not working? How are they managing, you know? Should they be changing their medication? Should they be doing it at a different time? Should they not be giving their child medication?
[18:29] Dympna Brbich: All of this to try to understand how to make the child’s school life a lot more happier. And yeah, so we’re hearing a lot about that. And parents, you know, are absolutely exhausted sometimes trying to manage these children. And especially at those transition periods, like a child going to school for the first time or transition, you know, into high school, sometimes these transitions are like, you know, they feel like they’re climbing a mountain. And after school, many children, you know, they have been masking their ADHD for the whole day to try and fit in, to try and understand, you know, try and be part of the team, the group, whatever it is that they’re doing. And when they get home, that’s when the mask falls off. And, you know, there’s lots of drama and lots of concerns from parents when the child returns home because they’re just absolutely exhausted.
[19:35] Dympna Brbich: And of course, you know, we all know that children with ADHD, many of them have trouble sleeping. And that doesn’t help.
[19:44] Ellen Brown: No, absolutely. It’s a tough job being a parent, a very tough job, and makes it even more difficult when maybe you’ve got a child that isn’t diagnosed yet. And that’s a real tricky time because it’s everyone else’s opinion that’s on you or the spotlight on your child. And that can be such a lonely road for a parent as well. And as you were talking before and you were saying, you know, about being bullied or perhaps not wanting to go to school, it’s so interesting how there’s these buckets which really don’t exist, where we say, you know, the school refusal rates or the bullying rates or, you know, all these types of things, when really ADHD can be part of all of those different things, rather than just thinking it’s just a group of students that are coming to homeschooling because they’ve got ADHD, you know? And so it really does. It does blur there.
[20:39] Ellen Brown: What would you like to say about that, Lindy, in your experience, about if there’s… And because we’re talking directly to parents here. So you might be a parent that’s currently in school and struggling. You might know your child’s got ADHD because you’ve been diagnosed, or you might be worrying or the teacher’s saying to you. And sometimes to even receive that kind of information from a teacher can be really hard to get your head around. What would you say to a parent who’s struggling with that at the moment?
[21:12] Lindy Hadges: Yeah. Well, look, I can’t help myself. I’m a 30-year homeschooler, right? I’m a big advocate for homeschooling. Having done that myself with five kids. So I think the reality is that ADHD children are not built for school, and the school system is not built for them. The ADHD brain reaches capacity really quickly, so to go to school from 9 to 3, five days a week is a very tough gig. The ADHD brain runs out of steam, and it just can’t manage it. So homeschooling is ideal for ADHD children because they can move at a much slower pace. They can play in the garden and come back in and do some schoolwork. They can go for a ride on their bike, come back in and do some schoolwork. They can read their favourite book and then do some more schoolwork. You know, it’s much less intense. It’s much less pressure.
[22:07] Lindy Hadges: It’s child-led education. So ADHD children always have passions because they’re strong. You know, they’ve got strong loves because of hyperfocus, the way that the brain works in the ADHD mind. And so homeschooling is ideal for it. Now, having said that, I appreciate if you’re a single mum or if you need two incomes. That’s just not possible. But we need to find ways. We need to keep working in schools to allow for those spaces for ADHD children to actually go off into a corner and just sit and maybe build Lego or Duplo for a bit, or just play with the manipulatives, actually have brain breaks. Not need to be switched on like a neurotypical brain from 9 to 3 with all of that masking and then just go over. And in my practice, I talk about the brain girdle, and the brain girdle comes off from all that masking, and then there’s a complete meltdown because we’ve had to hold all of that tension in all day. So homeschooling is ideal for that. And I used to get that on the helpline all the time. Parents saying, my child’s just not coping at school.
[23:19] Lindy Hadges: And in a way, I used to like to give them permission to say, well, if you’ve rung the HEA, the Home Education Association, what if you give homeschooling a try? What if you see if that fits? And look, I don’t know what the current research is. It would be really interesting to see what it is. But my anecdotal experience, because I’ve run a homeschool community group for 25 years, is that percentage of ADHD and ASD children is higher in the homeschool community because of that, it’s a better fit for them. Frankly, they just get to mooch. They just get to live at a lower pressure that their brains can actually adapt to much more comfortably. That’s just kinder and more compassionate in my world, you know.
[24:08] Ellen Brown: And productive, and strangely enough. I was speaking to a Year 12 student of ours who’s just gone off to university to work in software technologies, but he said that coming out of the school system and into homeschooling allowed him to see his ADHD as a superpower, rather than as this thing that he had to try and overcome because it meant that he could have short spurts of time where he could be totally focused and engrossed in the topics that he was really interested in, and then take time out when he needed to, or, you know, skip through, tick the boxes that he needed to that were not part of his real… And at the end of the day, the fact that he skimmed through geography and focused his time on the technologies that he was loving has not had any impact on his future, because I’m sure if one day he decides he wants to go to Italy, he’ll work out everything he needs to learn about it when the time comes.
[25:08] Ellen Brown: So I think that’s one of the things that is wonderful about, you know, when you talk to a student themselves who’ve had that experience where they’ve said… And actually, there’s something I wanted to ask you, Dympna. If you could just share a definition here. You mentioned and Lindy mentioned the word masking. Now, if people who are listening or watching are new to ADHD, can you just explain what that looks like and what a parent might notice about that too.
[25:39] Dympna Brbich: Yeah. So masking is something that happens to a lot of ADHD children. In fact, it can happen to a school child that’s not ADHD because they mask their behaviour and they mask their information and they mask their study habits to cope. It’s a coping mechanism for them to be able to feel that they are not different to someone else. You know, even a child that doesn’t have ADHD or another developmental condition, if they are struggling with maths or spelling or some of those other different science subjects that are difficult for some people, they will mask their understanding of it. And then it takes a lot of energy and a lot of planning, mentally, to mask that and get that done. When they get home, the masking falls off.
[26:47] Dympna Brbich: They are absolutely exhausted. That’s when, you know, the disruptive behaviour happens when they want to lash out at siblings, when they want to scream or not do what they’re told. They’ve been trying really hard all day to manage something that’s difficult for them.
[27:12] Ellen Brown: Absolutely. Lindy, you’ve had the five children go through their homeschooling, and you’ve got a really good knowledge about ADHD. What are some of the tips and tricks if we’ve got parents that are either considering coming to homeschooling or they’re new to it? You know, it’s not unusual when you’ve been brought up in school yourself and you might have had a child in school, the first thing that we all tend to do, and I say we all, because I was one of those people. I went to school. I was then a teacher in school for 20 years, and then I decided to move into homeschooling, and I did exactly that. I said, oh, good, we’ll all have a desk and I’ll let you know when it’s time for lunch and we’ll all do, you know. And I had that whole school at home idea.
[28:02] Ellen Brown: In my mind, it didn’t last long. But how do you best suggest some of the tips for people who are new to homeschooling with a child that’s got ADHD or they think may have ADHD? What are some of those tips that you could give those parents?
[28:17] Lindy Hadges: For sure. A great thing that you can do, as a mum or if you’re a dad, a lot more dads are homeschooling these days. In my community group, I’ve got a huge influx of dads, which is lovely to see, is take time to observe your child. Actually work out what their passions are because with ADHD, it’s really important to play to your strengths, to build that self-confidence, not to play to weaknesses. So if your child absolutely hates maths and loves acting, play to the acting. Develop maths strengths through acting and downplay, you know, maths textbook work. You’ll get to it, but get to it later. You know, don’t focus on weaknesses for a time. The other thing is ADHD learners are primarily kinaesthetic and then visual.
[29:05] Lindy Hadges: So they learn through their body. They encode information through their body. So they need to be moving. And this is why school is not ideal for ADHD children, particularly boys that might be diagnosed with ADHD type 1, which is hyperactivity. How do you get them to sit still at a desk for hours and just listen to an auditory lesson, which is their least productive way of learning. So I used to encourage people on the helpline, get them moving while they’re learning. Learn their times tables while they jump on the trampoline. You know, talk to them while they’re riding in circles on their bike. You know when you’re reading to them make sure they’ve got Lego or drawing or Play-Doh, something that they can be moving with while you’re talking to them.
[29:55] Lindy Hadges: And make lessons if you want to have a more of a structured school way of doing things, make lessons short and sharp, playing to those strengths, allowing for movement. You know, homeschooling creates a wonderful opportunity to play to the differences and, you know, know your children’s passions. I worked with a model called the Angel in the Marble, which was based on Michelangelo’s concept of being delivered a block of marble to the piazza in, you know, in Venice. And he just looked at the marble and everyone saying, what are you doing? What are you doing? He’s going, I’m working out what’s in there. And I think as homeschool parents, we have time to observe our children and see their passions and strengths and then play to it. Work to that.
[30:44] Lindy Hadges: They can learn every subject through that strength. It’s completely possible.
[30:49] Ellen Brown: I love that. I love that, and I’ve got to say, one of the things that you said there about adapting learning for the child, that’s one that I really want to encourage parents to have confidence to do, because the Euka program is a structured program. We have your subjects and you have your topics, but that doesn’t mean it’s the law. It is a starting place, a springboard. So we always say to parents, you know, just because it says you need to, see them as suggestions. But every activity, every single lesson has a practical hands-on component. And if you come to that and it says, draw a poster of a volcano and your child’s not someone who enjoys doing that, then make a volcano if you want to with your Mentos and your Coca-Cola. Whatever works for your child, feel confident to take the lesson and say, how will my…
[31:42] Ellen Brown: And then once they get older and they get into high school, they’ll be very clear. They’re very independent. Mine certainly were. I’ve now homeschooled my last three. I’ve got five as well. But my last three have just finished and gone off through homeschooling for their high school years, and they were very clear about the way they liked to learn, the things they liked to learn, the things they didn’t like to learn. Like I said, you just tick them off and keep on moving, and the things that they are very passionate about, you give them more of that. So I love that you have said that, you know, really empower yourself and realise there’s no one way of doing something.
[32:25] Ellen Brown: Just because something’s written down and it says you should do a poster or you should do your times tables, you know, sitting here or there, like you say, go on the trampoline, get outside with a piece of chalk and make hopscotch. We’ve done plenty of rap songs with spelling words and things like that. So it’s about being open to what your child really enjoys and feeling confident enough to make changes and tick things off, you know, and say, this is something we’re not going to do and this is something we are going to do, so that you make the learning the child’s, rather than trying to make the child adapt to the learning. That’s a really important thing that I really want to highlight.
[33:10] Ellen Brown: And now one of the questions that I’ve got here, I’ve got a couple of questions from our community itself. So we reached out to our Euka homeschooling group and said, have you got some questions that you would like me to ask today? So one of those questions is, and this would be good for you, Dympna. What kind of support can I receive while I’m waiting for my child’s diagnosis?
[33:34] Dympna Brbich: Okay, so again, we’re back to the age group of the child. If the child is going to enter into… Usually children are diagnosed not before seven. So, and backing back to even earlier, three. And that’s when we get a lot of parents coming through because they realise at three years old that this three-year-old is not doing normal three-year-old activities, either not doing them or being hyperactive. And that’s when they start to worry. So between that and seven is quite a traumatic time for parents. And what we try to do is educate the parent in ways that will help them to understand their child, to manage their child and perhaps at the outset, come to terms with the fact that the child has a learning condition of some kind, whether it’s ADHD or something else, there are some different psychological services that help those young children, you know, like they can go through working with a neurodevelopmental psychologist, perhaps, and look at other issues and try and perhaps by the time they get to seven, they have more identified what the child needs help with first, because when a child is three years old, four years old, it’s quite hard to determine, has my child got ADHD or not? And we do get parents calling us up with three- and four-year-olds saying, my child’s got ADHD. I need to get an assessment.
[35:29] Dympna Brbich: So and that does take time because paediatricians are heavily booked and because it is covered under the public health system. Getting on to the public health system is the most economical way for a lot of parents to actually reach the destination of having a diagnosis, a formal diagnosis, perhaps with medication. But getting there can be difficult for a parent. So we do get more parents with that age group child coming to us than the older children. But it’s not unique to that age group. By the time a child is going into high school, for example, they have been through a lot of that, a lot of those processes and a lot of those diagnoses to find out what they have.
[36:27] Dympna Brbich: So generally, they will be diagnosed with ADHD by the time they get to 14 or 13. If not, it’s more easily identified. It’s more easily identified that if they have, you know, dyslexia or one of these other things that can help, you know, that can help eliminate other conditions. So what is needed is a diagnosis. But we do find that parents mostly are looking for education for themselves to learn much more than what they thought they knew or heard or saw on Google or different other places. And I’m pleased to say that a lot of parents and families are now reaching and requiring scientifically evidence-based information, not hearsay or my child got this or, you know, give your child this and that before they go to bed.
[37:31] Dympna Brbich: And that’s going to make them sleep, you know, because it doesn’t. So, you know, the stories that we hear from parents and the paths that they have been down to try to help their child, you know, all failed, you know, because they’re listening to somebody else.
[37:53] Ellen Brown: They’re not addressing the actual problem.
[37:57] Dympna Brbich: No. And focusing on all of these different aspects of, you know, hearsay and do this and do that, it’s exhausting for parents as well. And financially, you know, it eats into finances. Many, many parents have said to us, we’ve spent hundreds of thousands of dollars and achieved nothing. So what we’re saying is, you know, the helpline is a great place to come to as a first point. It’s a national organisation and we pride ourselves on ensuring that we don’t give out those ideas that they find in Google or Facebook or these places. Only scientifically evidence-based treatments, and only recognised and qualified recommendations for psychiatrists and paediatricians and anyone else that we need to provide to parents.
[39:03] Dympna Brbich: So we really do stand our ground in that way to be ethical and, you know, make sure that information is very sound.
[39:13] Ellen Brown: Yeah, that’s really important. What we really want from this podcast, more than anything else, is really useful advice, which we’ve obviously been able to give, but also, you know, next steps. Like if a parent’s listening to this and they’re thinking, okay, well, I feel like this is something I need to explore for my child. I’m hearing a lot of things here that resonate with me. What is the very first step? What do you do? And I know we talked about age being different, but let’s talk about, say, a child, I don’t know, a ten-year-old, let’s say, and all of a sudden they’re starting to see this school refusal happening. We’re seeing a child come home and explode after school.
[39:56] Ellen Brown: We’re hearing the teacher say they’re not able to focus. What is your very first step? Or if you’re not even in school now, you’ve already removed them. You’re homeschooling. Where do you go first or what can you do?
[40:10] Lindy Hadges: Well, one, you can start by ringing the HEA and getting some support for exploring. There’s lots and lots of information on the HEA, the Home Education Australia. The HEN is in Victoria. The SHEN, S-H-E-N, is also in New South Wales. There’s lots of national bodies on homeschooling, where you can get all sorts of enormous amounts of information on the homeschool journey, if that’s an alternative that you want to take, you want to remove a child from school to take that pressure off them. But other than that, I’m a big advocate for formal diagnosis. I think information is power.
[40:49] Ellen Brown: So you go to your doctor first? Is that your first point of call? Just a GP?
[40:54] Lindy Hadges: Yeah. So just recently we’ve had some changes across the country in terms of diagnosis and the processes of that. So previously you had to be diagnosed through a paediatrician or a psychiatrist. But that’s just changing. New South Wales, Victoria and Tasmania have just had some changes. Dympna might be able to comment on where the other states are up to in that, but you need to see your GP. Get a referral. See a paediatrician, this is for a child. Go through the diagnosis. Look at a medication trial. And then changes are happening in terms of a GP being able to oversee the care of ADHD and medication, which is fabulous. You know, I just had a client recently, for example, who are going for their quarterly check-up with the psychiatrist, cost $450 a term every quarter, and then suddenly they could go and see the GP and it cost them $70. And so those changes are brilliant.
[41:54] Lindy Hadges: We’re very thankful that those changes are coming. And of course ring the Foundation and get support from them. I’ll hand over to Dympna. I’m sure she’s got some things she’d like to say about that.
[42:08] Dympna Brbich: Yes. Yeah. So you’re right, Lindy. And it is a great change that is progressively happening in different states, but it’s not there yet in most states. Every state health department has taken the government initiative to train GPs in different ways depending on their budget. So we have in Western Australia, we have, I think it’s 100 GPs that have been formally trained in ADHD. The West Australian government state health department focused on regional and rural areas before coming into the metro area. But we do have a list of those GPs and they are willing and able to diagnose a child from seven upwards. We’re working with them because recently the ADHD Foundation has introduced a GP support.
[43:11] Dympna Brbich: So we’re using our psychologist, who’s very expert in ADHD to do the screening to support the GP because the GP has been trained to understand about ADHD and medication from the medical side. But it takes a long time for them to understand all of the things around that child. So we recommend that parents have the screening from the ADHD Foundation that gets distributed to the GP. It can be, if the parent agrees, a 16-page, fully assessed document explaining everything from executive functioning to all kinds of things that the GP would never have the time to do. So we’re actually getting quite a lot of support, and we haven’t advertised it yet, but we will be. I think we’ve got like 20 GPs registered on our portal now.
[44:18] Dympna Brbich: So we’re going to be heading that way to support the GPs to help their patients. For general purposes, the patient will need to get a referral from the GP in order to get the screening. Because the screening has a Medicare rebate. If they don’t have a referral, they don’t get the Medicare rebate.
[44:45] Ellen Brown: Right, right.
[44:46] Dympna Brbich: So, and, sorry, we offer the counselling then for the parent because sometimes it’s devastating for a parent to think that their child is not, let’s say, normal because we hear that word a lot. So they’re different. And so they can have some counselling to help them understand that their child is not deficit in anything, you know. So that’s where we work practically with parents and adults, you know, and children as well to provide that. Yeah. So that’s sort of what’s happening around the ADHD Foundation. So I would recommend, as Lindy said, for them to jump on the ADHD Foundation website and complete one of our enquiry forms so that we can get the right person to call them back.
[45:42] Ellen Brown: Wonderful. Thank you so much. Look, I appreciate your time. I know that what you’ve been able to share with parents will be very beneficial. And it’s probably a lot of people that are just thinking through everything that you’ve said. Is there something you’d like to finish off with, something you’d like to share before you go? Maybe we’ll start with you, Lindy.
[46:02] Lindy Hadges: Oh, well, I guess because Euka helps people to homeschool with some structure, right? Is, you know, if your child is at school struggling with ADHD, don’t just push on for another three, four, five years. Actually stop and think about bringing that child home and exploring. And I know it’s tricky on families and finances and careers and all that sort of thing. But, you know, I think it’s absolutely worth it. I just loved my homeschool journey with my five children. I had a ball. Doesn’t mean that it doesn’t have challenges. It means that, you know, the floor gets mopped once a week at midnight, and my house isn’t as tidy as everyone else’s. But you know, the relationship that I have with my children is so worth it.
[46:46] Lindy Hadges: So if your child’s struggling at school with ADHD, don’t just keep persevering. It could actually hurt them more. Think about homeschooling and think about reaching out to the Foundation for support. And by all means, go for formal diagnosis and a medication trial if you need it. It can change everyone’s life. Between homeschooling, formal diagnosis, medication trial, things can be much smoother than what they were with an undiagnosed child pushing on at school who’s miserable, and they can actually end up being depressed. And then you’ve got serious problems as they move into their teenage years. You’ve got much bigger problems to solve then.
[47:25] Lindy Hadges: So I think get onto it earlier rather than later.
[47:28] Ellen Brown: That’s really helpful advice. Thank you, Lindy. Is there anything you’d like to finish off with, Dympna?
[47:34] Dympna Brbich: Yes. Just for any parents listening right now who had an awful morning and are wondering whether they are failing their child, I would say you’re not failing. You’re parenting a child whose brain works differently, and you’re doing your best with the information you have. Your child doesn’t need perfection. They need you. And we are here to support both the child and the parent.
[48:01] Ellen Brown: Fantastic. Thank you so much for your time. And everybody who’s listening, we hope you have a fantastic rest of the day. Thank you.
[48:11] Dympna Brbich: Thank you very much.
[48:13] Lindy Hadges: Bye.
