Three Things I Wish I Had Known About FASD Part 3 Show Notes
Hi, Kathleen Guire here. Welcome to this episode of trauma-informed parenting. I am finishing up my series on FASD fetal Alcohol spectrum disorders for the month of September, which is FASD Awareness Month. Now, this is not all-inclusive. This is all you need to know. This is my experience. I am not a doctor or psychologist. I am a mom. I do have some trauma-informed training, but what I’m sharing is what I’ve learned through research and what’s worked with my kiddos. Let me just encourage you to find out what works with your own.
Now, I ended up last week sharing from my book How to Have Peace When Your Kids Are in Chaos. The book is full of my research, trial, and error, and many, many failures, what was working with my kids.
the three-pronged approach
I developed this three-pronged approach. It’s not scientific, it’s not super detailed. In fact, it needs to actually fit the child. And the three-pronged approach is
Good nutrition–
staying away from sugar, and being gluten-free if you can. Not for every child. But some children benefit from that.
outdoor exercise
structure.
It’s pretty simple. It’s an approach that you can alter to fit your child. But from all the research I did on all the different Capital Letter Syndromes- ADD, ADHD, SPD, or on the spectrum etc….
I have a stack of books and I would take notes. And I said last week, I even did a Venn diagram. And it was super fun because I love that kind of stuff, where I just drew these circles and wrote down the symptoms or the things that the kiddos deal with. And adults, too, myself included. What the overlapping symptoms were in the middle was amazing to me.
overlapping symptoms
And that’s why I think that even though this is very general what I’m talking about, it can have exponential benefits for your family, for your kiddos, avoiding sugar. Because what is alcohol? It is sugar. It turns to sugar when it hits the body. And last week I talked about the Monday morning hangover. I just started calling it Hangover Day. Because my kids would get all this sugar at church, and Monday they could do nothing because they were having a sugar hangover. And it mimicked the hangover from drinking alcohol, the headaches, the dehydration.
I’ve never had a hangover myself. I’ve never been drunk, so I’m only seeing this from research. But if you have been drunk and you know what that feels like, then you know what these kiddos feel like after having a sugar hangover.
So the next one on the list after nutrition, as I said last week, you know, do some research, find out what works for your kiddos. Obviously, we know I’ll just backtrack here for a second that whole foods are God-made foods like fruit, vegetables, and fresh things are going to be better for you. And having the meat instead of chicken nuggets, chicken. And yes, some kids will need to live on chicken nuggets, but get the best chicken you can.
diverse needs
I understand there are diverse needs when it comes to feeding children. You want to get food in them. And my youngest son was born with a cleft palate, so as a toddler, he still hadn’t had his second surgery to repair that. So eating was very difficult. So I understand there are diverse needs. The food processor was my best friend during that season because if it could be processed into a liquid and I could literally, almost literally… he had this special bottle… and he would just pour that down his throat on his own. So anything I could get into that pureed fashion to get more nutrition in him, I did it.
So I understand that there are diverse needs when it comes to eating and nutrition, and some kiddos have the texture, and he had all sorts of issues, but as much as possible, make the food nutritious.
outdoor exercise
Outdoor exercise is what I wanted to talk about. Children need to run and play outside, even teenagers, even adults. Now, you don’t have to run. If you’re an adult and you don’t like to run, don’t run. But you need to move. And children with FASD and adults especially, do not need to spend hours in front of a television or a computer screen.
They will tell you that they need to play games and that games one of the things that my son used to say, and one of my daughters, too. I’m sure heard it from multiple children, is it was their stress reliever when they could put it into that many words. It is not I mean, scientific studies will tell you that it’s not relieving their stress.
I was playing some games with my grandkiddos- Mario Kart. I’m terrible at that. I can drive a real car. I can’t drive a video game car for nothing. I just can’t do it. Anyway, I was playing multiple players and we were racing. I was laughing so hard at myself because I kept hitting things and they were saying “Nini, you need to do this!” One of my grandkiddos, Pip was just like, “hit A, hit A, hit A, Nini.” I’m terrible at that.
But I will tell you, after playing with them while my daughter was fixing us food, I felt like a kiddo. I’m sitting there playing video games, and my daughter is fixing us lunch. They started getting angry, and the volume level rose between them. You want to do this and do this. So we ended up my son-in-law came in and said, you need to play a different game anyway. We were just having fun.
lymph nodes
But I am telling you, I have seen broken controllers, broken pieces of furniture, all those sorts of things because eventually the anger comes out and your body is not moving. It’s tensing up. It’s sluggish. And our lymph nodes have no drainage system. You know we are designed to move. You have to get up and move. And what happens is all those toxins in your lymph nodes begin to build up as you sit too long and you begin to feel yucky.
Sometimes we think, oh, my gosh, am I getting sick? If you’ve sat too long and you need to get up and move and you can look this up for yourself, you don’t need to trust me. As I said, I am not a doctor, but I have studied these things at length, and that’s one of the reasons that besides the brain, many other people talk about this.
Dr. Jarod Brown, who’s going to be a guest on the show, I know that he’s done several podcasts on how screen time affects the brain and how it affects the body, and how there are effects from it. So not too much screen time.
Your kiddos will say some of them will say, I don’t want to go outside. I don’t want to do that. Well, you need to make a way that you provide that in the most appealing way. And one of the things that we used to do, and I still do this, is take a hike. Pack up everything and go take a hike. And then it’s a family thing. And that doesn’t mean you have to go 5 miles or 10 miles.
One of the trails that we used to go to every single week, I think some of my kiddos would make it a fourth of a mile because even though you can look these things up online, we had to carry the book with the flower identification, the bug identification. We had all these little books, and usually, they ended up in my backpack. But it was such a good time for these kids because they’re getting outside, they’re moving, they’re squatting down and examining things, looking things up in books.
Getting outdoors in nature has so many benefits for all of us. We need to be out in the sunshine. We need to be out, even if it’s cloudy. And this is something we learned in Poland, which is really cool. When we were there, the kiddos went outside to play, even if it was dark. When we were there in December, it was getting dark around 3:00 in the afternoon, and the kids were getting home from school about 2:oo or 2:30, and maybe even earlier than that. I would have to look that up. Don’t quote me on that.
you don’t have to be comfortable all the time
But anyway, they would go outside. They would take them all outside, even if it was dark, if it was raining, if it was icy, if it was snowing. And I think in our country we’ve gotten a little bit too lazy or comfortable. We always want to be the same temperature. We always want to be the same. You know, we want it to be 70 degrees all the time, and we can’t go outside.
In fact, I rode my bike the other day, and we do live in the mountains. It’s September, and I rode my bike the other day, and I’m telling you, I thought the wind chill factor was really low, even though it was 65 degrees. The wind was going right through my yoga pants and stinging me. And I just started laughing because I was like, you know what, it’s okay. I know I’m going off on a tangent, but I’m trying to make a point.
I did this 75 hard, I think it was called. This challenge started in January with my daughter, where you did two workouts a day. You monitored your nutrition, but one of the workouts had to be outside, no matter what the weather. Because the premise was – we’ve gotten too comfortable. We should enjoy the outdoors no matter what. So I was snowshoeing, or sometimes I would just go out on the back deck when it was 29 degrees and do some sort of workout.
Anyway, so the point is, it’s okay to go outside if it’s not 70 degrees and sunny. And I think it’s good for kids. My boys would get to go down in the woods. They had a little camp set up, and they would take things from the kitchen, like tea, and sugar. Anyway, the important thing is to get them outside. And it doesn’t have to be perfect weather. The more that you go outside when it’s not perfect weather, the more accustomed and it will become a habit to go outside.
sensory issues
Now, if there’s some sort of sensory thing with the rain, there are always decisions that you need to make that are best for your child. And if there are sensory issues because of the snow and the cold air, yeah, you have to make those decisions for your child.
You can’t just say, for instance- I had this friend when she first started homeschooling- she would call me every single day, and I love her. She’s still a great friend, but she would say, “What are we doing today? What do we focus on today?”
She was just kind of getting into the groove of it. Then she would turn around and tell her children, “Well, Kathleen said…,”
Don’t do that. It’s not what Kathleen said. Instead – I listened to this podcast. She gave some good suggestions. But these don’t work for our family, and these do. You have to decide.
So anyway, get outdoors, form a habit. As I said, our weekly habit was we went to the same trail every week at the same time, and we got all of our little handbooks, and we still do that. I do that with my grandkids now, get all our little nature books, and put them in a backpack.
In fact, three of my granddaughters were here a couple of weeks ago, and we took them to the Seven Bridges Trail, which is along the lake, and oh, my gosh, we were there for an hour and a half. I would say that ten minutes of that was walking, and the rest of that was just exploring nature and finding things and climbing on rocks and climbing on tree branches.
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cause and effect
And just to put into perspective, I read last week that one of the issues that kids with FASD, and I would say other Capital Letter Syndrome kiddos struggle with is cause and effect. Doing something and understanding what the effect is. If that’s not connected in the brain, one of the ways that we can help them with that is to let them experience very not dangerous effects. And that doesn’t mean that’s going to change the brain. It’s going to form a habit. So it is changing the brain. But what I’m saying is, because FASD is a brain-based disability, it’s not all of a sudden, like, boom. The executive function is all restored, functioning normally.
But if you are out with your kiddos in the woods and they jump from a rock that is six inches high, they do that the next week and the next week and the next week, and then they try one that’s 18 inches high, and they do that the next week, the next week. Then they’re forming that habit like, oh, I know I can jump off that rock and I’ll be okay, which makes them feel more at ease, more comfortable, more excited to get outdoors and do those things.
I know that I’m kind of rambling, but all those things are so important. And don’t ever say just because your kid says, I don’t want to go outside, or your kiddos will say to you, I don’t like going outside, maybe find out what the reason is. Are they struggling with felt safety?
I know one of my kiddos had some eye issues, and she had to have two surgeries on her eyes. And once she had those surgeries, then her whole perspective, no pun intended, of the outdoors changed. But before that, she literally had to hold my hand or somebody else’s hand when she was outdoors to make her feel secure.
So whatever you need to do, I’m going to finish up with this quote from Last Child in the woods saving our children from nature deficient deficient disorder. Yeah, I can talk.
“What are kids missing that soccer and little league cannot provide? Generalized hour-to-hour physical activity is the likely absent ingredient. The physical and emotional exercise that children enjoy when playing in nature is more varied and less time-bound than organized sports.”
Richard Louv
So in this book- Last Child In the Woods– Which I recommend. I’ll link it. He talks about how actually depression. ADHD. Symptoms. All of these symptoms of these other Capital Letter Syndromes are reduced from playing outdoors. Unorganized. Unrestricted. Like the hikes, I was speaking of.
Those things are actually mentally and physically and emotionally and spiritually going to help your children no matter what. No matter if they are suffering from symptoms of one of these Capital Letter Syndromes or FASD.
Now, when I say suffering from symptoms, I’m not like they’re suffering from these symptoms and that makes them this label. No, that’s not what I’m talking about. When we are suffering from symptoms of something, it’s the thing, the circumstance that happened to us, it does not define us. It’s not who we are and it’s not who your kids are. They’re valuable. They have so many amazing gifts and if you’re wondering, yes, there is hope. Your kids can thrive. They can. And I’m going to finish up with that. I don’t know that is so strong in my heart to tell you there is hope. That something they’re struggling with, the frequency and the severity that’s really bogging down the whole family is something that it’s not the end. It’s not the end. There is hope. So thanks for joining me today and I will see you next week. Bye.