Are Schools Preparing Our Children For The Real World?

Airing Thursday, 22 October 2015, 7:00 PM ET

In today’s schools, our children have to be good at everything, but in the real world, they only have to be REALLY good at something. We have to change the message we giving to our children, and especially the ones diagnosed with” learning disorders” because when it’s time to get a job they have a hard time “selling” themselves because their education has focused so much on their weaknesses.
Many of the symptoms of ADHD can be seen as the side effects of deep imagination. For example, one symptom is “easily distracted by irrelevant thoughts.” This is an important stage of creativity called incubation, where you do not directly try to solve a problem but allow space for inspiration to occur.

The single most important factor in creating something new is imagination. All children have fantasies and those diagnosed with learning issues, like ADD and ADHD have lots of them. These can be a distraction, but can also give students the power to create a new world.

We need to educate creative minds by valuing creative minds, encouraging rather than discouraging imagination. We need to remind kids and parents that studying leads to good grades, thinking leads to problem solution, and imagination leads to world changers. This week, Dr. Lara Honos-Webb offers some tools to translate symptoms into needs and explains how you can give your child permission to meet those needs.

About the Guest Dr. Lara Honos-Webb

DR. LARA HONOS-WEBB is a worldwide ADD expert and offers ADD coaching. She is a clinical psychologist and author of The Gift of ADHD, The Gift of ADHD Activity Book, The Gift of Adult ADD, The ADHD Workbook for Teens and Listening to Depression: How Understanding Your Pain Can Heal Your Life.

Her work has been featured in Newsweek, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, Prevention Magazine, The Chicago Tribune and Publisher’s Weekly as well as newspapers across the country and local and national radio and television. Honos-Webb completed a two-year postdoctoral research fellowship at University of California, San Francisco, and has been an assistant professor teaching graduate students. She has published more than 25 scholarly articles. Learn more about her work at: www.addisagift.com