How can I help my child with ADHD develop empathy?

The Read Me Like a Book game will help you, your family, and your friends develop one of the most valuable emotional intelligence skills -- empathy. Especially for a child with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), who is prone to impulsive and aggressive behavior, empathy can help to ease social relations, as your child will be more apt to sense and care about how her actions affect others. This fun game can be played with the whole family and with friends.

For this activity, have everyone write the titles of their five favorite books on a piece of paper. Have everyone fold up the papers and put them in a hat or bowl. Each person takes a turn, pulling out a piece of paper and reading the five titles.

Then, the "chooser" tries to guess who wrote down those titles by considering what kind of person would love those books. You need to think about the interests and personality of each person when trying to determine who chose which books, an effort that helps to promote feelings of empathy. It can be fun to figure out who selected which books, but this game asks you to go farther.

Like Sherlock Holmes, the famous fictional detective, you are to try to figure out what it's like to be the kind of person who would choose those five titles. How do they think and feel? What's important to them?

Each player is challenged to come up with more and more details about the person who chose the five favorite books in question. When the player has given a great effort, other players can join in with guesses about who the booklover is or other ideas about what that person must be like on the inside. The game can finish up with the person who actually chose the five books coming forward and offering insight into how accurate the comments were.

Children live in the worlds of their imagination, and research shows that imagination can have powerful effects on feelings, thoughts, and even physical health problems. Your attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) child's imagination can become a powerful resource for containing and channeling her high levels of energy. Following is a few pretend games your child can try.

Tell your child you are going to play a pretend game in which she'll use her powers of imagination. Ask her to sit down and take a few deep breaths. Then tell her to imagine a control room, perhaps an airplane cockpit, that contains a lot of dials and control valves.

Invite her to playfully explore this control room. Ask her to find a gauge that tells her how fast her motor is revving. Ask her to imagine that the gauge goes from 0 to 100 miles per hour, then ask her to tell you what the speed is now.

Tell your child that, just as you can adjust a thermostat to change the temperature in a room, she can change the speed of her motor by adjusting a powerful control valve. Tell her to imagine finding the control valve that determines the speed of the motor. When she finds it, ask her to slow down the motor speed.

If it was at 50 miles per hour, tell her to move it to 20 miles per hour. Ask her how this level of energy feels. Then have her experiment until she finds a specific speed that feels comfortable -- a speed at which she has enough energy to focus and pay attention but not so much that she still feels driven or can't sit still.

Practice this repeatedly, and remind your child that she can use the control valve to change the speed of her motor. Remind her of her target speed, and tell her that she should use the control valve to get to that speed whenever she feels she has too little or too much energy. Spend some time playing with your child to make the control valve and gauge concept more concrete.

She can draw the room or cockpit where the gauge and control valve are located, depicting both of these items in detail. If you can find any toys that look similar to the valve, have her physically act out these control strategies.

I cant really gove you an answer,but what I can give you is a way to a solution, that is you have to find the anglde that you relate to or peaks your interest. A good paper is one that people get drawn into because it reaches them ln some way.As for me WW11 to me, I think of the holocaust and the effect it had on the survivors, their families and those who stood by and did nothing until it was too late.