The ADDEdge Family Focus Issue 5: Are you perfect?

Well, as I think about our children and their challenges I am immediately brought to the thought of self-esteem. Why is our children's self esteem so low? Why does it seem that we struggle daily to convince them they are good people? And why does it seem that other times we spend the same amount of time trying to convince ourselves of the same thing?

One theory is our concept of perfection. It is believed, in fact proven, that part of the reason for a person's poor self-esteem is due to our concept of perfection and our belief that we are not.

We spend so much time measuring ourselves against our idea of perfection that it is no wonder we have a low self image. I do not know of anyone who is perfect. In fact, the thought of that is somewhat alarming. Can you imagine attaining perfection? Having nothing further to work for in life? Knowing you will never be better or smarter or healthier than you are right now?

Once we are able to let go of our idea of attaining perfection and embrace the thought of being constantly changing individual, we will surely feel better about ourselves! The amazing thing is that we can coach our children in this same technique!

One of the best things my mother ever taught me is that being perfect would not only be boring, but it would be a lot of pressure too! I grew up being grateful and relieved knowing that perfection was to be strived for, but never truly achieved. She had me fully convinced (and she was right) that being perfect would be boring!

The most amazing thing is that she convinced me of that without ever telling me that! She would ask questions like "Don't you think it would be boring to have nothing to work for?" or "Wouldn't you hate knowing what your grade was before you ever got a paper back?" Her gentle suggestions were enough to allow me to come up with my own opinions.

She allowed me to be able to judge myself against what was right and wrong, not against my idea of being perfect. I encourage you to do that with your children, and yourself.

If we can eliminate this idea of perfection, we will think more highly of our kids, and in turn allow them to think more highly of themselves.

So, over the next week I encourage you to try to drop the thought of reaching perfection, and keep in mind that you are the perfect you! No one is better at being you than you are! You have achieved your own perfection, and the great thing is that by defining perfection this way, you will continually be able to strive for improvement.

If you would like to comment on this topic, please visit
TheADDEdge blog and post your thoughts!

Until next time...

~Stay Strong

Tracy Hoobyar is a personal trainer for academic, personal and professional excellence for people with ADHD, and those who love them. After graduating from the University of Nevada, Reno with a degree in Psychology and working with children as a substitute teacher and volunteer, she learned what an incredibly widespread problem ADHD can be. Through her training in NLP, Psychology, and her experiences working with all these children, she has finally developed a unique yet effective program to help those living with ADHD. She blogs about various parenting issues affecting all those concerned and she is a frequent guest blogger on Sew Cute’s blog. Learn more by visiting www.ADDvantageForLife.com

The ADDEdge Family Focus Issue 4

Good Day! Hope all is going well and you've been able to implement the tips from the last three newsletters to make a difference in your life. This week's newsletter will have a slightly different format, designed to share more information in an easier way for you to take advantage of it. Please let me know what you think of the new design.

TheADDEdge.com Tip #4
People, children or adults, with ADHD are perfectionists. Now, this fact came as a HUGE surprise to me, one that I argued with and refused to believe for quite a while, until I talked with my daughters. You see, I watch this beautiful, strong, intelligent child scraping by in school and life and figure she simply doesn't care. It never occurred to me that she did care, and it was simply easier to swallow that she didn't do well because she didn't try, rather than she wasn't able.

Oh man! Now that made sense. How many of us, when we think back, remember trying to act cool when we goofed? Well, it's kind of the same response, just more intense (not surprising when dealing with ADHD).

So, this tip actually relates back to tip #2 to some extent. If you remember that was to give yourself a break. So this week, give your kids a break. Now this DOESN'T mean to let them off the hook and have no rules. In fact, as we'll discuss in a later issue, rules are important. What it does mean is to remember they want to do well. But more than that, they don't want to fail!

I'll tell you what. This piece of information has made an enormous difference for me. It has helped me to be less frustrated and more sympathetic to my kids. It has helped make sense of their behaviors that before this made me scratch my head in confusion. And, most importantly, it has made the number of arguments in this household far less frequent.

So, that is this week's tip, Give Your Kids A Break. Just try to remember where they are coming from, don't lower your expectations, just lower your frustration level when the expectations aren't met. Your kids are already feeling bad enough about letting you down, another topic we'll tackle later on.

Until next week, take care and stay calm!

Recommendation of the week
For a ton of great product ideas, visit http://www.theadhdmall.com/. There you will find products to help you with anything ADHD related, from organizational tools for you to toys for the kids to help entertain, educate and occupy them. Visit them today for additional ideas and helps around the house!

Organizing Tip Of The Week
Today, take 5 minutes and get rid of all shower items you haven't used in more than a month. We all tend to get stuff, open it once and forget about it or decide we don't like it. Somehow though we forget to discard it. Now is the time. Simply complete the task of getting rid of any shower items you don't use. You can move them into the guest bath (you never know what your surprise guest will have forgotten to bring) or transfer partially used bottles into travel containers. Barring that you can donate unused items and throw away already opened containers. However you decide to clear the shower clutter, just don't stop until you've completed this one task, then enjoy a calm and clutter free shower!

e-Class Beginning Soon
There is a new, FREE eClass currently being offered ($47 value). Simply visit the site, http://www.theaddedge.com/free_eclass.htm and sign up! You will get fantastic information, learn a lot, and gain a greater understanding for ADHD. Don't miss this opportunity!

Parenting Tip of the Week
Ask kids to clip and organize coupons for grocery shopping. This will allow them an outlet for organizing, one that doesn't have a lot of consequences like school, and help them understand the cost of living. This is a great activity that works for any age group and will allow you something to teach your kids but give them some control too. You may be surprised at the coupons they cut out!

Tracy Hoobyar is a personal trainer for academic, personal and professional excellence for people with ADHD, and those who love them. After graduating from the University of Nevada, Reno with a degree in Psychology and working with children as a substitute teacher and volunteer, she learned what an incredibly widespread problem ADHD can be. Through her training in NLP, Psychology, and her experiences working with all these children, she has finally developed a unique yet effective program to help those living with ADHD. She blogs about various parenting issues affecting all those concerned and she is a frequent guest blogger on Sew Cute’s blog. Learn more by visiting www.ADDvantageForLife.com

The ADDEdge Family Focus Issue 3

Welcome to another week of The ADDEdge Family Focus. So far we've talked about some of the thought processes you can work on to make a distinct and noticeable difference very quickly. Today let's discuss something concrete that will continue to help you make changes in your household or with the children and families you are helping.

Tip #3

These kids/adults are visual people and learners. They process information in their heads a little differently than society expects them to, therefore they're "different". Reality is these kids learn and function as well as anyone else, but things need to be structured to meet their needs, rather than expecting them to bend to meet society's.

So how do you do that? With the right instruction set it's fairly simple. Adjust things so that the information they need to use and learn is set up in a visual way. Here is one of the most useful things I found to do in our household.

We wrote lists in color. We asked/insisted that my daughters' teachers give them their assignments for chunks of time rather than daily. My youngest daughter got her assignments weekly, that was 5 days worth, and my oldest got them at least bi-weekly.

We then took those assignment lists and wrote them on a big white board, checking it off every day. Each child got a different color. They had to read me their own upcoming assignments thereby getting the information into their verbal memory also. I wrote them down on the board while they watched, this helped my own ADD by not making me jsut sit there. It also helped the kids as they watched their assignments get written in color.

What I noticed is that this helped them remember the work without looking at the board! The information being in colors actually helped them access the information in their brains. I would watch them as I asked what they had due the next day and they would ALWAYS look up to remember. They were picturing the board in their heads!

Well, that is this week's topic. These kids are visual. They are great and exciting, and they are visual. Next week we will continue talking about concrete things that you can do bring out the best in your kids!


Tracy Hoobyar is a personal trainer for academic, personal and professional excellence for people with ADHD, and those who love them. After graduating from the University of Nevada, Reno with a degree in Psychology and working with children as a substitute teacher and volunteer, she learned what an incredibly widespread problem ADHD can be. Through her training in NLP, Psychology, and her experiences working with all these children, she has finally developed a unique yet effective program to help those living with ADHD. She blogs about various parenting issues affecting all those concerned and she is a frequent guest blogger on Sew Cute’s blog. Learn more by visiting www.ADDvantageForLife.com

The ADDEdge Parenting Weekly Issue 2

Welcome to week two of TheADDEdge parenting weekly blog update. I hope you've been able to take some time and implement what we talked about last week. It can be so tough to parent an ADHD child, and even more challenging if you have more than one child with ADD/ADHD.

So, knowing you probably have about 4 minutes to read this before someone screams and needs you, I'll get right to it.

Tip #2
Give yourself a break. This is a very important part of the process. It seems that through the traditional routes of parenting children with ADD or ADHD we are conditioned to believe that things would be better if we would only do something differently. If we would only be more stern, or more lenient, try different medication, or no medication, spend more quality time with them, or stop catering to them.


Tracy Hoobyar is a personal trainer for academic, personal and professional excellence for people with ADHD, and those who love them. After graduating from the University of Nevada, Reno with a degree in Psychology and working with children as a substitute teacher and volunteer, she learned what an incredibly widespread problem ADHD can be. Through her training in NLP, Psychology, and her experiences working with all these children, she has finally developed a unique yet effective program to help those living with ADHD. She blogs about various parenting issues affecting all those concerned and she is a frequent guest blogger on Sew Cute’s blog. Learn more by visiting www.ADDvantageForLife.com

The ADDEdge Parenting Weekly Issue 1

Welcome to the ADDEDGE weekly blog update. You can look forward to receiving helpful, practical advice that you can implement immediately to begin to change the way you and your ADD child/teenager interact. So, rather than waste your time with a lot of fluff, let's get right into it.

Tip #1
Understand that ADD/ADHD is not a choice. It is not their way of being defiant. It is not them expressing their independence. It is a real, valid, scientifically documented difference in learning styles. Notice I do not call it a disorder or deficit? That is because it is not. It is a gift. If people with different learning styles were all labeled with a disorder, imagine how much we would be spending nationally on an annual basis to support and teach these kids. ADD/ADHD is a defferent way of learning and thinking. The first thing you can do as a parent is accept that it is not a choice, believe that it is not a disability, release any guilt you may have about your role, however large or small, in your child's ADD/ADHD. You also have to acknowledge that learning some different ways of dealing with your child can make your days (and nights) so much calmer and more productive. I promise you, the time you spend learning different ways of coping with an ADD/ADHD child will c ome back to you ten-fold in the quality of your relationships.

That is the tip for this week. It is not a small task, changing your thought process regarding ADD/ADHD. So many of us have been conditioned to believe that ADD/ADHD is a challenging disorder that must take a lot of patience, arguements with the teachers, constant struggles with our children, and any number of co-morbid disorders, it is hard to look at it as a gift. But it is. If positioned correctly, you will see enormous changes in your child/ren, however to start the change you must believe. So, this week I want you to work on your belief set. Figure out what you tell yourself about ADD/ADHD and parenting a child with this learning style. Once you figure out what you believe about it, you will have an easier time changing that, and re-framing it to the gift that it is.

Please feel free to email me with the beliefs that you come to realize you hold around ADD/ADHD. I am sure you are not the only one with your particular belief set, and others may benefit from knowing they are not alone in it either.

So, until next week, take care and stay strong!

Tracy Hoobyar is a personal trainer for academic, personal and professional excellence for people with ADHD, and those who love them. After graduating from the University of Nevada, Reno with a degree in Psychology and working with children as a substitute teacher and volunteer, she learned what an incredibly widespread problem ADHD can be. Through her training in NLP, Psychology, and her experiences working with all these children, she has finally developed a unique yet effective program to help those living with ADHD. She blogs about various parenting issues affecting all those concerned and she is a frequent guest blogger on Sew Cute’s blog. Learn more by visiting www.ADDvantageForLife.com

Welcome to our blog!

Welcome to Sew Cute’s new blog! We’ve decided to join in on all the blogging fun! Our blog will be updated several times weekly with a wide variety of baby, toddler, especially-for-mom, and parenting topics coming to you from a team of writers made up of moms – who know exactly what you’re going through. Allow us to introduce ourselves:

My name is Ida Combast and I am a mom of two very active children, 5 and 8. Before my son was born, I worked in a daycare setting and had lots of fun! We did lots of crafts using children’s handprints! So get ready! They are coming next week. I currently work from home while homeschooling my children. Our aim is to promote wellness in all homes across America: www.livetotalwellness.com/ida

I’m Amanda Holbrook. Based outside of Lexington, KY, I wear many hats, including mother, wife, freelance writer, Tastefully Simple consultant, accounting assistant and more! I hope to publish a fiction novel one day. I will be blogging about general parenting topics, and doing reviews on books, movies, etc. Visit my site at www.tastefullysimple.com/web/aholbrook

My name is Tracy Hoobyar and I am a personal trainer for academic, personal and professional excellence for people with ADHD, and those who love them. After graduating from the University of Nevada, Reno with a degree in Psychology and working with children as a substitute teacher and volunteer, I learned what an incredibly widespread problem ADHD can be. Through my training in NLP, Psychology, and my experience working with all these kids, I have finally developed a unique yet effective program to help those living with ADHD. I will be blogging about various parenting issues affecting all of us. You can learn more by visiting http://www.addvantageforlife.com

Hello. My name is Makeda Paul and I am the owner of bluebasins bath & body, Canada's premier line of all natural skin care products. An Aromatologist by trade, I developed all of our products using only the best ingredients suited for your skin. Our products take care of you and your baby's skin the way nature intended, naturally. Begin now with bluebasins bath & body at www.bluebasins.com

I'm Lucie Kroeplin and I live in greater Toronto, Ontario with my husband and two active boys, 4 and 1. In addition to being a wife and mom, my other callings include working as a teacher, and running Sew Cute, a home-business based on my love of good, old-fashioned embroidery where I personalize clothes for babies and toddlers. Check out our designs at www.sew-cute.ca

My name is Cynthia Marcano and I was born and raised in New Jersey. I am a stay at home mom of two. My hobbies include scrapbooking, crafting and other creative pastimes. In my spare time I enjoy running my princess party website, www.princesstreasurechest.com and writing articles about party ideas and gift giving.

My name is Lisa Smith and I live in Arizona. I have a BA in Psychology & am the Owner/CEO of Regionz Kidz, a multi-cultural infant & toddler clothing line featuring ethnically diverse characters and designs. I publish a blog on my website http://www.regionzkidz.com that discusses cultural diversity and children, and I am a frequent guest blogger on other blogs and websites regarding parenting and children’s issues. I am also a monthly contributor to Educated Mommy Magazine.

Please come back to visit us several times weekly for our exciting and informative updates!

Let us know in the comments - what do you want to read about?