Last Monday I had a meeting with my son's teachers to set up a plan to help him succeed at school this year. My son has some residual emotional issues left over from his years in foster care; his anxieties can generate some behavior issues in school. In addition, he has ADHD which creates many classroom challenges.

Though I know he's a difficult student to have in class, I always hope his teachers see how bright and creative he is. My son has enormous potential and possesses one of the most brilliantly free-thinking minds I've ever encountered. Luckily, his teachers this year have already noticed that about him and they're ready and willing to work with him and help him succeed.

Since meeting with them, I've been searching for other tips and tricks to help my son succeed in class. This article has some great points. However, it's missing an important component -- exercise.

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My son has ADHD and I know how important a good breakfast is for him. When he gets a nutritious breakfast -- preferably with some whole grains -- and gets good exercise in the morning, he's always more focused and better able to control his behavior. Previous research has confirmed what I (and probably every other parent) knew: Breakfast does a kid's body -- and mind -- good.

A new study supports this previous finding and takes it one step further. It turns out that, while beneficial for all, the benefits of breakfast vary in boys and girls. Researchers had half of students in the study eat a standardized breakfast while the other half didn't eat breakfast. All students later took a test to measure cognitive ability and mood. A week later, the test was repeated except the previous non-breakfast eaters ate a morning meal and vice versa.

While there was measurable improvement in focus, all of the students who ate breakfast reported feeling more alert. In addition, boys reported having an elevated mood and the boys performed better on visuospatial memory tests.

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Fish really is brain food. A recent European study of elderly men and women found that those who regularly ate seafood did way better on cognitive tests than those who ate little or none. The more fish these old folks ate, the better they did on their tests. Effects were more pronounced for non-processed lean fish and fatty fish.

If you can't imagine eating a lot of fish, try to think outside the box. You don't have to consume only fillets and steaks. Try some smoked salmon with your eggs or dose a healthy salad with some canned tuna. Like anchovies? They count too.

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My son has ADHD. He has an awesome teacher, but he is one of 32 students in his class. I know that he takes a significant amount of encouragement and redirection from his teacher. I think it's safe to say that he's the most ill-behaved kid in class. As a parent, I always hope that his teacher can remember that -- behind the behaviors -- is an incredibly bright boy with enormous potential. My son struggles to focus on work, to pay attention, and to sit still. But he is not a bad student.

Early this morning I saw a commercial on TV for a free "ADHD Road Map." When you register to receive your copy, you also gain access to online information about their four steps: taking a snapshot of how your child is currently doing, setting goals, taking action, and tracking/rewarding progress.

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Health care for the elderly takes a huge amount of money. In fact, taxpayers subsidize over $70 billion a year on nursing homes alone. That's the reasoning behind why the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services have released a list of the worst nursing homes in our country.

Since there are 16,400 of these facilities in the nation, people have been wanting full disclosure of this information. Interested in hearing which locations were the worst offenders? Check out the list here. They don't enumerate the facilities in order, but they do label which ones were newly added, and which locations had improved. There are over 50 listed as high-risk facilities and did not show much improvement.

While it is up to the states to determine which nursing homes get qualified for this list, they follow a few guidelines to assess the quality. Those places labeled as needing improvement did things like used an unnecessary amount of medication. But this list alone is not a reason to go pull your grandmother out of her bed if you have someone in a nursing home. It might warrant a double-check, but providing health care is difficult and the CMS administrator says this is one step they are taking to stimulate improvement across the others.

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I am happy for October and the overflow of breast cancer awareness packed into each of the month's 31 days. But I'm always a bit relieved when these days come to an end. It means I can get back to living, free of the bombardment of facts of figures, and cutesy slogans, and of all things pink.

I'm lucky to be surviving breast cancer and not another form of cancer. Breast cancer gets attention, funding, programming, and lots of great press. But it makes me feel selfish, spoiled, like I'm hogging too many of the resources that could be spread around to others doing battle with their own deadly diseases.

Where are the other awareness months? Actually, there are a few -- March is the National Colorectal Awareness Month, September is the Leukemia and Lymphoma Awareness Month, May is Skin Cancer Awareness Month -- but we don't know much about them because people aren't shouting from the rafters about these critical causes, like they are about breast cancer.

Normally I don't think that marketing products to children is very honest or ethical. However, I don't have a problem with Dove's latest ad, which is aimed squarely at young girls. The commercial, which you can see at ParentDish in this post by Jonathon Morgan, is the second by the company to bring attention to the sort of (mis)information we are fed by the beauty industry.

The first ad was the one that began with a regular young woman and then fast-forwarded to the same girl transformed into a beauty queen with the many steps necessary to change her look shown in between. The new commercial, titled Onslaught, begins with a young girl and then displays a barrage of fashion and beauty images that promote a thinner, prettier and more perfect ideal. The video ends with a message urging parents to talk to their young daughters before the beauty industry does.

As this piece mentions, the videos are part of Dove's campaign to raise awareness about the industry and more importantly, to raise women's self-esteem. I've seen the ad and I think it's great. What do you think about the video and the campaign?

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Family mealtime matters. It may be hard to accomplish with long workdays, endless errands, household chores, and hectic school and activity schedules, but it's critical for so many reasons.

Eating together allows families to share and listen and learn with one another, to catch up on the day's events and prepare for days ahead. Parents get quality time with their busy bunch. Children feel valued as a result of focused attention. Kids who eat regular meals with their families are also less likely to use drugs, alcohol, and cigarettes. They also improve their chances of fighting off obesity.

According to a Harvard study, the odds of being overweight were 15 percent lower for children who ate a family dinner on most days or every day of the week. Impressive -- and good reason to sit down together tonight. Now if dinner doesn't work for you, substitute another meal. Make breakfast your standing family meeting. Just plan and establish a mealtime, and make it a routine. Your family will thank you for the many benefits of this simple health strategy.

For more information about family dinners and about "Family Day" -- mark your calendars, it's on September 24 -- visit casafamilyday.org.

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If you're looking to improve your focus and train your brain to filter out passing distractions then meditation may be able to help you do that. Recent research from the University of Wisconsin Madison shows that intensive meditation training may help people pay better attention to tasks at hand -- even when they aren't actively meditating.

But I'm not sure it sounds like a realistic method to practice for many of us, as the participants went to a 3 month intensive meditation retreat and practiced Vipassana meditation for 10-12 hours per day. That's a lot of vacation time and a lot of meditating. I wonder if they considered that maybe just "getting away from it all" for that long was enough to refresh their minds?

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Keeping a work and home life balance when you work out of your home can be very difficult. By balance I mean finding ways to give proper attention to my family and household chores and not letting my work suffer and getting my work done without making my family feel neglected. Being a workaholic does not help when my office is the first door on the right coming out of my bedroom in the mornings. It is also tough to concentrate on work when family and pets find their way into the office and beg for attention.

Helpful hints on what has made it easier for me to work out of my home and still give family and pets the attention they need. I wake up at least one hour before everyone else except for the dog who follows me around everywhere. That gives me time to walk and feed the dog, and a little time to take care of myself or have a nice hot soak in the bath. Which leads me to my next hint, get cleaned up and dressed before starting to work. You never know when the doorbell is going to ring. Set a daily time with your spouse or partner. Determine when and how much time you are going to devote to your job and how much time you are going to spend with family or doing household chores and stick to that plan. Work less or not at all on the days your spouse or partner has off from their job. Come up with a daily menu plan so that you have at least one meal a day together. Come up with a daily work schedule at least one or two days in advance and try to stay as focused on finishing those task before starting new ones. And last but not least, know when to walk out of the office door and stay out.