Children with ADD / ADHD and Treatment Approaches Clearly, there
are stressors that can impact our children’s emotional and
behavioral health. It is important that we keep these stressors
in mind when we assess treatment approaches for our children. By
simply treating symptoms, we may neglect to look deeper into the
underlying causes of the problematic behaviors. Thoroughly
exploring these issues also helps prevent misdiagnosis and
consequently, inappropriate treatment. Scott Shannon, MD,
pediatric psychiatrist and author of the book Please Don’t Label
My Child, notes that his first step in treatment when working
with families is to help them sort out any external forces that
may be affecting their child. He refers to these external forces
as “brain stressors” and identifies several he regularly
encounters in his work with families: When the family system is
stressed, signs and symptoms of that stress may quickly present
itself in a child’s behavior. Happenings such as a new baby,
strained parent-child or oth