All throughout human history, grandparents have raised the young while parents supplied the basic needs for survival. Families either lived together or very close to one another.  Parents and grandparents served as a family "team" supporting and nurturing the young. Children supported their parents and in exchange grand parents looked after the children. Lately however, the family team has broken apart for many as a result of globalisation and the concept of what older people are ‘supposed’ to do.

Times have changed! Grand parents finish raising their children and they have a second lease on life. It is time to travel and take it easy. Family is no longer necessarily the main focus for them as they have done their bit. The simple fact is that many grandparents work full time these days. For many it involves making a life-changing decision to dedicate your life to raising a child at a time in life when you may be looking forward to more leisure and less responsibility.

Some grandparents ask. How do I cope with caring for a grandchild? How do I deal with being a grandparent, and yet sometimes having to act like a parent?

Many grandparents faced with the need to raise a grandchild experience ambivalent feelings.

You have to deal with the reality that taking on the responsibility of caring for a grandchild will turn your lives topsy-turvy. This decision is further influenced by your personality type, values, priorities, life circumstances, how much time and effort will be required to raise a grandchild.

Some grandparents perceive taking on a parental role late in life as a blessing and are grateful for the opportunity to form a deeper bond with their grandchild. Other grandparents while enjoying its pleasures, still resent the responsibility and attendant inconveniences that are involved in raising a grandchild. The health effects of raising a grandchild depend on your basic health, vitality and age.

Naturally, your lives as grandparents undergo great change when your grandchild moves in with you. Instead of spending time with your friends, you become immersed in the social life and schoolwork of your grandchild. And it can be especially difficult when you a grandchild with emotional or behavioural difficulties. You may feel tired, overworked and resent it. You may also feel that raising a grandchild has given you new meaning which compensates for the fatigue you feel.

So, if you are raising your grandchild, expect to have many different feelings depending on the day and perhaps the time of day. On the one hand you will have to sacrifice a certain amount of your freedom. On the other hand, you are saving your grandchild's life. Everything in life is a trade off.

 It will be your responsibility to teach your children life skills and social values. You will have to be consistent. You need a game plan to establish ground rules to make this situation manageable for you. The I Can Do It planner is exactly the practical tool that you need to facilitate this.

 Listening is an active skill, hearing is passive, we hear many things but we do not always listen to each sound. In order to listen one has to "pay attention". This skill of paying attention is learnt in - in the uterus during pregnancy  and is the foundation for brain development.  

 If one is anxious then one is not paying attention. As adults we experience this often, and don't realise that this is also experienced by children. Often I ask parents,  " if you are stressed can you pay attention to what is going on around you?"  Their answer is usually, 'No'. In the same way, when a child is stressed, they too cannot pay attention.

 Often children are anxious but don't show signs of anxiety in the way that adults can recognise it. 

 Anxiety can also take on many masks. Children find it hard to express how they feel and so they act out their frustration or anger. Some withdraw into themselves. In testing children I can determine the level of stress that the child may be experiencing, which would go along way in explaining why they are having difficulty with paying attention. A Brain Profile would uncover much of this information.

Some children may be hyper sensitive to certain 

•  sounds 
•  tastes  
•  smells  
•  textures    
•  touch  

 All of which may be stressing the system. When this happens the child may withdraw from the outside world to get away from the stimulus. Sometimes parents and teachers are unaware of this and as a result don’t realise how stressed the child is.

In my experience, many children who are perfectionists land up being very frustrated with themselves, because they know they should be able to keep up and  they should be able to get things right. These children, depending on their profiles, will either, withdraw and stop trying or will become disruptive and difficult.

These children who are bombarded with stimuli (ASD spectrum) will be so busy keeping the world at bay and don't have enough resources to also be listening to;   

•  suggestions  
•  commands 
•  instructions etc. 

There are many things that can stress a child, we know about emotional stress and even physical trauma, but there are some more subtle ones that some of us are unaware of. For instance;

• Foods high in Colourants, preservatives, sugars,    
• Foods that children may be sensitive or intolerant to.
• Our environmental pollutants are a big problem for all of us, not least of all our children. Visit my site for more information on this www.family-focus.co.nz
• Dehydration – the brain requires water to function properly, many children do not drink enough clean water.
• poor blood sugar stabilization 

This can be so oppressive to a child's system that they are overwhelmed by it. They are not able to say to you "I don't think I feel well and what I just ate makes me feel agitated " but they start to behave differently.  

Chemical toxins play a huge role in our children battling the  'concentration bug'.  

So yes diet is very key, but the one factor that is becoming more and more evident as a serious enemy is the high levels of heavy metals found in all ;

• our foods 
• our drinking water 
• our body creams 
• deodorants 
• toothpastes 
• cooking pots
• make up and in many other places.  

‘Auditory processing difficulties’ is a label that these children could find themselves with.  

My sound advice, is to look deeper into what is causing the child’s difficulties. I use the knitting analogy,  'no one wants to wear a jersey that is full of holes', I believe it is much better to go back and unravel the jersey and start again, rather than to keep patching the holes and hope that one day it will hold together.

 Sound therapy and Brain Profiling are just some of the modalities that I use to assists children with learning, the key, I believe is a multidisciplinary approach. We are dynamic and therefore require a dynamic solution.  

For more information contact www.family-focus.co.nz