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

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2112326602691350

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Facebook, Instagram, Audience Network, WhatsApp and Threads

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7

EU reach

64

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Parenting & Kids

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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. ⠀ The flight attendants. The people whose job is to be nice to you for 11 hours. When they stop, you know what the rest of the plane is thinking. ⠀ I've told the short version of this at school pickup with a laugh. The short version is a lie. ⠀ We were going to my husband's mum's 70th in Surrey. Jonah is 6. He has ADHD, the diagnosis was 4 months old, and we were between things, the way anyone is at 4 months, with a referral and a folder and no plan. ⠀ I prepared for that flight like it was surgery. ⠀ Two pairs of headphones, one on him, one in my bag. Nineteen episodes of Bluey and 2 movies downloaded. A new sticker book, wrapped, to open at hour 5. A fidget cube. Playdough. Washable markers. A bag of snacks with no sugar in it, which I had researched. The window seat, so he was boxed in by the wall and me. ⠀ Three weeks of prep. We watched airport videos. We practiced the seatbelt sign at the kitchen table with a lamp. He could tell you the rules. ⠀ He lasted 50 minutes. ⠀ The seatbelt sign was the first thing. It stayed on through turbulence over Nevada and he needed to move and couldn't, and he asked me 6 times what happens if you need to move when the sign is on, and the seventh time it came out as a scream. ⠀ I want to describe the scream because you either know it or you don't. It is not crying. It is one note, held, and it goes through 200 people like a fire alarm, and every single one of them does the same movement. ⠀ He kicked the seat in front. The woman in it turned around, looked at him, looked at me, and said nothing, which was worse than saying something. ⠀ He screamed that he wanted to get off. He screamed it over and over. He is 6 and there was nowhere on earth to get off to and he knew that, and it made it worse. ⠀ I did the voice. The calm one. I did the hand on the back. I did the headphones, and he threw them, and they went 2 rows back, and a man passed them forward without looking at me. ⠀ By hour 2 a flight attendant crouched in the aisle and said, "Is there anything we can do to help him settle," in the voice that means please make it stop. ⠀ By hour 3 the couple across the aisle had asked to be moved and were moved. ⠀ By hour 4 a man 2 rows back said, at normal volume, "some people shouldn't fly with kids," and nobody told him to be quiet, and I understood, in my body, that the plane agreed with him. ⠀ I took Jonah to the galley and held him there for 40 minutes while he kicked my shins. I took him into the bathroom and locked the door and sat on the closed toilet with him on my lap and cried where he couldn't see my face. ⠀ Then back to the seat, and it started again. ⠀ He slept for 90 minutes somewhere over Greenland. That's the only stretch I remember the plane being quiet. ⠀ I have never in my life wanted to be a different person more than I did in row 34. ⠀ Not a better mother. A different one. A woman whose kid does what other kids do. ⠀ Because here's what I had spent 11 hours looking at. ⠀ Across the aisle, one row up, was a boy about 8 with a Dog Man book. He read it. He ate his snacks out of a little box. He watched a film with his headphones on. He slept with his head on his mum's arm for 4 hours. ⠀ His mum read her own book. A whole book. On a plane. With a child. ⠀ I hated her. I'm not going to dress that up. I had prepared exactly as hard as she had and my son had terrorized 200 people for 11 hours and hers had turned pages. ⠀ At hour 9, with Jonah finally asleep, she leaned across the aisle. ⠀ I braced for it. I'd been braced for 9 hours. ⠀ She said, "Mine was yours. Two years ago. Manchester to Orlando. They wrote a report." ⠀ I started crying again, which I was tired of. ⠀ Her name was Claire. She said, "What have you tried," and I did the list. The headphones, the episodes, the sticker book, the seat, the practicing, the fidget, the snacks with no sugar. ⠀ She listened to the whole list and said, "That's all for what goes in." ⠀ I didn't understand. ⠀ "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's supposed to go up when something is hard and 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 small thing at hour 4 isn't landing on a kid who's had a small thing. It's landing on a kid who is already full to the line. ⠀ "You can't pack for that," she said. "There's no snack for that." ⠀ I asked what she did. ⠀ She said saffron. ⠀ The spice. I said something rude, which I regret, because she'd been nothing but kind. ⠀ 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 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, standardized to 6 percent safranal, 30 milligrams, 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 for what you're hoping. He'll still have bad days. He'll just have fewer, and they'll be shorter, and he'll come back from them." ⠀ She wrote it on the back of her boarding pass. I still have it. ⠀ I ordered it on my phone standing at the carousel at Heathrow, before the bags came out, because I did not want to feel what I'd felt on that plane one more time. ⠀ Link is down below. ⠀ It was on the porch when we got home. ⠀ Week 1, nothing. I mean nothing. Same bedtime war, same scream in the Target parking lot on the Thursday. ⠀ Weeks 2 and 3. The first thing I noticed was an absence. He got in the bath without the fight. Not once, 4 nights running. I didn't say anything because I didn't want to touch it. Then a Saturday went by and at dinner I realized I didn't have an incident from it. ⠀ 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. ⠀ 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 packed the bag out of habit. Both pairs of headphones. The sticker book. ⠀ He watched one movie. He ate the pretzels. He asked me what the wing flaps were for and I didn't know and he accepted that. Somewhere over Oregon he put his head on my arm and slept. ⠀ The flight attendant, collecting cups, said, "He's a good flyer." ⠀ I said thank you like it was a normal thing to hear. ⠀ He's not fixed. Two weeks ago he lost it at the dentist so badly they rescheduled. I won't pretend that away. A version of this post where my kid is fine now is one nobody should believe. ⠀ What changed is the count. And the length. And the coming back. ⠀ I wanted this for me too, and someone should say that out loud so it may as well be me. I wanted to sit 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 woman 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 urgency here, and it has nothing to do with anyone's shopping cart. ⠀ 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'd have quit and I'd 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're the one who has 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. That is the whole reason I wrote this. ⠀ 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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