Hyperactive

This is the 12th post in a series written by Frieda, my mother.  These are her memories of Sara her first rambunctious child and their adventures on the mission field.  Click this link to start at the beginning.

Sara’s second grade teacher said she was too distracted by everything that went on in the environment to concentrate on whatever she was supposed to be doing. (We hadn’t heard of attention deficit disorder.) We took her out of school for a semester and just tried to help her with reading. When she went back, her teachers were a young couple who team taught. One would take a small group of two or three into small room without windows to practice reading, and this helped Sara.

Sometime before this we realized that coffee slowed her down. She always begged for our coffee, but when we started giving it to her and she realized it made her feel tired, she didn’t want any more. A doctor gave us a prescription for something—I forget the name of it, but it was called Speed back then. She took it once or twice and said it made her feel sleepy and weird, so we didn’t make her take any more.

I still hear people say that it is an old wives tale that sugar makes a child hyperactive. We discovered accidentally that it definitely wasn’t good for Sara. One day she was invited to a piñata and came home with a bag full of candy. I figured I might as well let her eat as much as she wanted and be rid of it, just hoping she wouldn’t make herself sick. Well, she was soon almost hysterical, laughing and crying, running and jumping everywhere, all but climbing the walls. We didn’t cut out sugar after that, but were careful not to let her overdo it like that again.