S.P.A.C.E. ADHD Group

ADHD Parent Support Group

ADHD Awareness Month

By

Happy ADHD Awareness Month!

October is ADHD Awareness Month. We’ll be holding our monthly parent and carer meet up, this evening at The Dog and Partridge in Stockport between 7.00 pm and 9.00 pm.

Here at S.P.A.C.E. we raise ADHD awareness all year round but in October we are a little bit louder. The theme of this year’s ADHD Awareness Month is Awareness is Key. Here at S.P.A.C.E. we know that our families need more than awareness, they need action, but awareness is a good start.

If teaching staff are aware of ADHD and how it may affect their students, then they can take action to support children and young people in the right way. If employers and HR departments are aware of ADHD, they can offer appropriate work place accommodations and access schemes like Access to Work to help their employees do their best work. Eliminating the stigma that is still commonly associated with this condition starts with awareness and improves with action.

We primarily support parents and carers of children with ADHD, but this condition has a strong hereditary factor and over the years, many of our parents and carers have identified that they themselves also have ADHD.

Unfortunately there are lots of myths around ADHD which have led professionals to ignore lots of common ADHD symptoms over the years. Now that we know that ADHD is a life long condition and can present differently to the stereotype of naughty boy behaviour, it’s not surprising that there has been a big increase in people recognising that the root cause of their challenges could be neurodiversity.

ADHD Awareness Month is a great time to find out more about Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (terrible and misleading name) Our useful resources page is a great place to start and we’d love to hear your suggestions for other reputable sources of information that you’ve found helpful.

For us every month is ADHD Awareness Month
For us every month is ADHD Awareness Month

By

Happy ADHD Awareness Month

October is ADHD Awareness Month. Our team do our best to raise awareness and celebrate the strengths of ADHD all year round, but in October we get a little bit louder.

There are those who would question the point of having an awareness month, when of course our children have ADHD all year round, but the point of an awareness month is to amplify the message. As a small charity our voice can only go so far, but when lots of small charities and other organisations all shout together at the same time we get a lot louder and manage to reach a lot more people.

As a small charity, we don’t have the resource to create lots of content, so throughout this month in addition to any new material we’ll also be resharing some videos and other content from the last few years.

Monthly ADHD Meet Up

We will be holding our usual monthly meet up for parents and carers on Tuesday 10th October at The Dog and Partridge from 7.00 pm until 9.00 pm. We meet every month on the second Tuesday of the Month from 7.00 pm until 9.00 pm. Unfortunately there are still a couple of places online suggesting that we meet on Wednesdays, which are doing our best to get updated. A full list of our meet ups for the rest of the year are available on this website. We also have a parent and carer email list where we send a monthly reminder along with any other news we have.

Our monthly meet ups are for parents and carers and provide an opportunity to meet other parents who share the same challenges.

Tuesday is the new Wednesday

Over the next year we’re planning to create some more resources for those who work with people who have ADHD in a professional capacity. Our focus will always be on families but we know that there are lots of teachers, sports coaches and other professionals who’d love to know more about ADHD, so that they can support the children they work with.

Our focus for this year is to keep reminding people of the facts about ADHD and make sure that local parents and carers know that we exist.

For us every month is ADHD Awareness Month
For us every month is ADHD Awareness Month

By

Happy ADHD Awareness Month!

October is officially ADHD Awareness Month.

Here at S.P.A.C.E. we like to celebrate ADHD Awareness all year round, but in October everybody else joins in and the message gets a lot louder.

So why is ADHD Awareness Important?

Unfortunately ADHD, or Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, to use its official name, is a condition surrounded in myths, misinformation and stigma. ADHD Awareness Month helps people learn new things, establish new contacts and generally improve the lives of those with ADHD.

During October we will be sharing more content than usual on our social media channels, including material from other organisations we trust. October is a great time to find new sources of information and support.

What Are SPACE Doing During ADHD Awareness Month?

SPACE Meet Up

We’ll be holding our usual monthly meet up for parents and carers of children with ADHD. This month’s meet up falls on Wednesday 12th October. We will be at The Dog and Partridge pub on the A6 between 7.00 pm and 9.00 pm. We are based in Stockport, Greater Manchester but regularly chat to parents from other places. Sadly not all areas have a local group that parents can go to, so we’re happy to welcome people from further afield.

Tanya Bardsley’s Documentary

A few months ago we were approached by a television production company and asked to be involved in a documentary starring the amazing Tanya Bardsley. Tanya, best known for being a star of TV show Real Housewives of Cheshire, was diagnosed with ADHD just before her 40th birthday. Tanya’s son Rocco also has a recent ADHD diagnosis and she wanted to use her celebrity to improve the situation for families with ADHD.

The documentary airs at 9.00 pm on Thursday 6th October on ITV Be.

Our Artists With ADHD Spotify Playlist

We have recently updated our Spotify playlist to include a number of new artists. Let us know if we’ve missed anyone.

Online Community

As always the SPACE Team are available in our private Facebook group. If you have a Facebook account and would like to join the group, please request entry to the group. Please note that this group is strictly for parents and carers of children with ADHD only.

ADHD Awareness Month
October is ADHD Awareness Month

Have a brilliant ADHD Awareness Month and keep an eye on our social media platforms.

Claire and the S.P.A.C.E. Team

By

Allow Us To Reintroduce Ourselves

As it is ADHD Awareness Month, it seemed like a good time to reintroduce ourselves.

Hi We are Donna, Michelle and Claire and we’re SPACE Stockport, an ADHD parent support group based in Stockport, Greater Manchester. We offer support to parents and carers of children and young people in the Stockport area with ADHD. We’re all parents of children with ADHD so we’ve all been there and we’ve all had that day. 

SPACE was started over a decade ago by a small team of local parents who recognised that living with children who have ADHD could be particularly challenging and that sometimes parents needed a friendly space where they express their thoughts, feelings and frustrations who understood how it feels to raise a child / children with ADHD.

ADHD is a condition which is frequently misunderstood and unfortunately there is a lot of misinformation which can be confusing and unhelpful, especially if you have a recent diagnosis for your child.

Our children spend their lives surrounded by people who don’t understand them or many of the things they do and the results of this can be damaging. Lots of children with ADHD find their time at school difficult and a bad day at school often becomes a bad day at home and vice versa.

We don’t have all the answers but we’re here to share useful information and signpost to local services, so that when parents are presented with the usual ADHD myths, that they feel better prepared to respond to them.

Its hard to parent what you don’t understand  and the more we understand the more we can support our children.

We have friendly informal meetings on a monthly basis. We have a webpage, a facebook page, a private facebook group, a twitter account, an Instagram account and a blog. So if you are raising a child with ADHD, why not come over and say hello.  

By

ADHD Awareness Month 2021

October is ADHD Awareness Month!

October is ADHD Awareness Month. Here at S.P.A.C.E. we celebrate ADHD and raise awareness all year round, as do our families and lots of other organisations working to support those with ADHD.

There is a long way to go before ADHD is properly understood and more importantly that those with ADHD are consistently supported in all areas of their lives. Having ADHD isn’t automatically a bad thing, but you certainly wouldn’t know it sometimes!

The myths and stereotypes associated with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder are pervasive and fuel not only ignorance and stigma about it, but also plays a huge part in denying early diagnosis and treatment to those who start to question whether the challenges that they or their children experience, are actually down to a neurodevelopmental disorder, rather than Anxiety, stress, laziness or good old fashioned bad behaviour.

Awareness Months

Lots of people question why we have an Awareness Month, especially when despite it happening every year, there is still a staggering amount of ignorance and stigma associated with the condition. Here in the UK it is also Black History month and Breast Cancer Awareness month, in addition to several other worthy causes. The annual awareness calendar can make it feel as though there are so many things happening in October, that it’s just one more thing that most people won’t even notice.

The answer to the question of why do we celebrate ADHD Awareness month every year, is that October is an opportunity for lots of different organisations and individuals to shout at the same time and amplify the voices of those with ADHD. This is one of the ways that we are working towards lasting change.

SPACE may not be big, but we know the impact we’ve had on local families over the years. We’re proud of the fact that we’ve managed to educate lots of parents about ADHD, We’re proud of the fact that we’ve helped families learn about the strong hereditary factor associated with the condition. We’re proud of the fact that we are able to use our lived experience to reassure mums and dads that there is light at the end of the tunnel during those difficult days. We are proud that we have walked those difficult paths and we are extremely proud of the people our ADHD children grew into and we love to give that hope to those that are still walking that same difficult path. We proudly show off our adult children (who still have their ADHD, in case you were wondering) We’re proud of the fact that we are able to empower parents to support their children. We are small, but the work that we do is powerful.

We celebrate the ADHD community all year round. We raise awareness every single month and we are here to support local families every day of the year. The work we do is a 7 days a week, 52 weeks of the year commitment. Although we do our bit to raise awareness, fight stigma, correct misinformation and signpost to local services, we are a small charity ran by volunteers. This is too big a job for us to do on our own. We don’t have the resources to change the world on our own. Rather than have lots of organisations shouting now and again, we use ADHD Awareness Month as an opportunity to shout louder than ever. We share information from organisations that we trust. We tell people about events that we couldn’t afford to hold ourselves and we use this month as a time to focus on the task ahead of us.

Access to early diagnosis and support is crucial and can make a huge difference to families, educational achievement, romantic relationships and so much more.

Imagine how it feels for an adult to finally learn that their struggles are due to a lack of strategies for the way their brain works, rather than because of flaws in their character.

Imagine how different it would be for all children to grow up, knowing that they are still clever, even if they learn some subjects differently to their classmates.

We have been imagining for years – it’s time to make it a reality. ADHD Awareness Month is a great time to refocus and start another 12 months of fighting.

Who’s with us?