Laura Jenkins Facebook ad: “Read this if your child has ADHD”

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My 6 year old with ADHD screamed the entire flight from San Diego to London. Even the flight attendants were giving me looks. ⠀ It's been 7 months and I still can't hear the seatbelt chime without my stomach dropping. I'm not being dramatic. I hear it on a TV show and I have to leave the room. ⠀ I've never written anything like this. I'm doing it because 3 months ago I was on my phone at 2am searching things like "will my son ever be okay on a plane" and nothing came up except packing lists. So this is the thing I wish had come up. ⠀ If you've never had a kid like mine, this will sound like I'm exaggerating. If you have, you already know every single thing I'm about to say and you're already bracing. ⠀ We were flying to my husband's mum's 70th. Jonah is 6. He'd been diagnosed 4 months before and we had a referral and a folder and honestly no idea what we were doing, which I think is where a lot of us are at 4 months. ⠀ And I want to be really clear about how much I prepared, because the thing people say afterward is "did you bring stuff for him," and I want to scream. ⠀ Two pairs of headphones. Nineteen episodes of Bluey downloaded. A sticker book I gift wrapped so he'd have something to open at hour 5. A fidget cube. Playdough. Washable markers. Snacks with no sugar, which I researched, like an actual research project. We watched airport videos for 3 weeks. We practiced the seatbelt sign at the kitchen table with a lamp. I got him the window seat so he'd be boxed in between me and the wall. ⠀ I did everything. I did everything you're going to tell me to do in the comments. Please don't. ⠀ He lasted 50 minutes. ⠀ The seatbelt sign came on over Nevada and it stayed on, and he needed to move, and he couldn't, and he asked me what happens if you need to move when the sign is on, and I said we wait, and he asked again, and again, and I could feel it building in him like watching a pot, and the sixth time it came out as a scream. ⠀ And if you know that scream you know. It's not crying. It's one note and it's held and the whole plane does the same movement and then 200 people are looking at the back of your head. ⠀ He kicked the seat in front. The woman in it turned around and looked at him and then looked at me and said nothing. I would have paid money for her to say something. ⠀ He screamed that he wanted to get off. Over and over. Get off, get off, I want to get off. He's 6. We were over Nevada. There was nowhere to get off to and he knew it and it made it worse. ⠀ I did the calm voice. I did the hand on his back. I put the headphones on him and he ripped them off and threw them and they went 2 rows back and a man passed them forward to me without looking at my face. ⠀ Hour 2, a flight attendant crouched down in the aisle and said, "Is there anything we can do to help him settle." And I know that voice now. That voice means please make it stop. ⠀ Hour 3, the couple across the aisle asked to be moved. And they were moved. And I watched them get moved. ⠀ Hour 4, a man 2 rows back said, not even quietly, "some people shouldn't fly with kids." And nobody said anything to him. And I sat there and realized the whole plane agreed with him, and honestly, in that moment, so did I. ⠀ I took Jonah to the galley and held him for 40 minutes while he kicked my shins. I took him into the bathroom and locked the door and sat on the toilet lid with him on my lap and cried into his hair where he couldn't see me doing it. ⠀ Then I brought him back to the seat. And it started again. ⠀ He slept for 90 minutes somewhere over Greenland. Ninety minutes out of 11 hours. That's the only stretch I remember being able to breathe. ⠀ I keep calling it the worst day of my life and my husband gently pointed out that nobody died. And he's right. But I have never in my life wanted to not be me as badly as I did in row 34. Not a better mum. A different one. One whose kid does what the other kids do. ⠀ And I want to say the part I'm ashamed of. ⠀ Across the aisle, one row up, there was a boy about 8 with a Dog Man book. He read it. He ate snacks out of a little box. He watched a film. He fell asleep on his mum's arm for 4 hours. And his mum read her own book. An entire book. On a plane. With a child next to her. ⠀ I hated her. I'm not going to pretty that up. I had prepared exactly as hard as she had and my son had terrorized 200 people for 11 hours and hers turned pages. ⠀ At hour 9, with Jonah finally asleep, she leaned across the aisle. ⠀ I braced. I'd been braced for 9 hours, what was one more. ⠀ She said, "Mine was yours. Two years ago. Manchester to Orlando. They wrote a report." ⠀ And I started crying again, which I was so tired of doing. ⠀ Her name was Claire. She said, "What have you tried," and I did the list. The whole list. The headphones, the episodes, the sticker book, the seat, the practicing, the fidget, the snacks with no sugar. ⠀ She listened to all of it and said, "That's all for what goes in." ⠀ I didn't get it. ⠀ "Every single thing you packed is to keep stuff off him. Noise off him, boredom off him, sugar off him. None of it does anything about what doesn't come back down." ⠀ She said the stress chemical is cortisol. It goes up when something is hard and it's supposed to come back down after. In a kid like ours it doesn't come down. So the security line is still in him at hour 3. The engine noise is still in him. The seatbelt sign. Nothing drains. So the little thing at hour 4 isn't landing on a kid who's had a little thing. It's landing on a kid who's already full to the line. ⠀ "You can't pack for that," she said. "There's no snack for that." ⠀ I asked her what she did. ⠀ She said saffron. ⠀ The spice. I said something rude, which I regret, because she had been nothing but kind to me. ⠀ She said, "I said the same thing. Then I read the studies." ⠀ Researchers have been looking at saffron for years because of what it appears to do with the same chemical messengers the standard medications act on. ⠀ Dopamine is what lets a person start a thing and stay with it. Serotonin holds mood level, so a small setback stays a small setback. Jonah's brain makes both. That was never the problem. They get released between 2 nerve cells, do the job, and get pulled back in and recycled. If that happens too fast the signal is gone before it's finished landing. A compound in saffron called safranal slows that down. It's not making more of anything. It's leaving what he already made there long enough to arrive. ⠀ And there's a trial, in children, where a researcher named Baziar put saffron head to head against the standard stimulant medication. Double blind. Six weeks. ⠀ Both groups moved about the same amount. ⠀ Not in mice. In children, against the real thing. ⠀ I said, "Then why has nobody told me this." ⠀ She said, "Because your paediatrician has 11 minutes and this doesn't come with a rep." ⠀ Then she said the part that actually mattered. ⠀ "Don't buy saffron off Amazon. I did. Fourteen quid, 3 weeks, nothing. Turn the bottle over and there was no milligram number and no standardization. It was a jar of nothing. The trials used a standardized extract, about 30 milligrams a day. If the number isn't on the label, nothing was tested." ⠀ The one she uses is called Steady Mood Drops. It's a liquid, 30 milligrams, standardized to 6 percent safranal, both numbers printed on the label. It goes in juice at breakfast, so it's on board before the day starts, not at 4 in the afternoon when everything has already stacked. ⠀ "It did nothing for 2 weeks," she said. "Give it 6. And it's not what you're hoping for. He'll still have bad days. He'll have fewer, and they'll be shorter, and he'll come back from them." ⠀ She wrote it on the back of her boarding pass. It's on my fridge. ⠀ I ordered it on my phone at the carousel at Heathrow before our bags came out, because I did not want to ever feel what I'd felt on that plane again. ⠀ Link is down below. ⠀ It was on the porch when we got home. ⠀ Week 1, nothing. And I mean nothing. Same bedtime war. Same scream in the Target parking lot on the Thursday. I texted Claire "I think it's not working" and she texted back "I know. Keep going." ⠀ Weeks 2 and 3. The first thing I noticed wasn't a thing, it was the absence of a thing. He got in the bath without the fight. Four nights running. I didn't say anything to anyone because I didn't want to touch it. Then a whole Saturday went by and at dinner I realized I didn't have an incident from it. I sat there going back through the day looking for one. ⠀ Weeks 4 to 6 is where it changed shape. ⠀ He still lost it. But it was 10 minutes instead of 50, and he came back from it on his own, and once, in the car, I watched him catch it. His face went, and then it didn't. He looked at me in the mirror like he'd surprised himself. I had to look at the road. ⠀ His teacher pulled me aside at pickup in week 5 and said, "Whatever you're doing, keep doing it." She didn't know we were doing anything. ⠀ And then Thanksgiving. We flew to my parents in Portland. Two and a half hours. ⠀ I almost didn't book it. I sat with the airline page open for 2 days. I packed the bag out of habit. Both pairs of headphones. The sticker book. ⠀ The seatbelt chime went and my stomach dropped and I looked at him and he was watching his movie. ⠀ He watched the whole movie. He ate the pretzels. He asked me what the wing flaps were for and I didn't know and he was fine with that. Somewhere over Oregon he put his head on my arm and fell asleep and I sat there not moving my arm for an hour like he was a newborn. ⠀ The flight attendant, collecting cups, said, "He's a good flyer." ⠀ I said thank you like it was a normal thing to hear. It wasn't. I went to the bathroom after and cried, but the other kind. ⠀ He's not fixed. I need you to hear that. Two weeks ago he lost it at the dentist so badly they rescheduled. If I wrote you a version of this where my kid is fine now you shouldn't believe it. ⠀ What changed is the count. And how long. And that he comes back. ⠀ I wanted this for me too, and someone should say that out loud so it may as well be me. I wanted to get on a plane and not be the woman in row 34. ⠀ But it wasn't the trade I thought I was making. He isn't easier because there's less of him. There's more. He talks more, he argues bedtime with actual reasons, he was so annoying about the wing flaps that I nearly lost it myself. That's my kid. That was always my kid. I just wasn't getting many hours with him. ⠀ Nobody sold me this. A mum across an aisle who'd been where I was leaned over at hour 9 and told me. Now I'm telling you. ⠀ He's 6. Every flight, every restaurant, every school pickup where a room turns around, he collects a little more evidence about who he is. It gets harder to argue with every year. That's the only reason I'm typing this instead of sleeping. ⠀ Link is down below. ⠀ P.S. It did nothing for 2 weeks. Decide now that you're giving it 6, because 14 days is where I would have quit and I would have been wrong. ⠀ P.S. If there's already a saffron bottle in your cupboard you've written off, turn it over. Look for a milligram number and a standardization percentage. If they're not there, nothing was ever tested, and the failure was never yours. ⠀ P.S. It's a liquid, it goes in juice, and it's not for under 6s. It doesn't replace anything and it's not a reason to stop or delay anything. We kept every appointment and we're still on the referral list. ⠀ P.S. If you've ever walked down an aisle at the end of a flight with 200 people knowing exactly which kid was yours, I was the one in row 34. I still can't hear the chime. I wrote this for you. ⠀ P.S. I texted Claire from Portland. A photo of him asleep on my arm, wing flaps out the window. She sent back one word. "Told you."

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