When you get immersed into FASD issues you certainly learn a lot of new words. Many parents of difficult, acting out children are either confused or frustrated or both when confronted by professionals who identify their children with terms describing behaviours but not recognizing root causes.

When you have more than one identifier of a child's behaviour (e.g. attention deficit disorder, attention deficit hyperactive disorder, radical attachment disorder, seasonal affective disorder, oppositional defiant disorder, and so on), that does not necessarily mean that a fetal alcohol spectrum disorder is excluded. These comorbidities, as they are called, only recognize that there is more than one behavioural anomaly occurring coincidentally and there should be no assumption that these diagnoses are the definitive answer to the reasons behind your child's behaviour.

A diagnosis of any one of these comorbidities, occurring alone or simultaneously with any others, should be a signal to investigate further into the reasons behind the behaviours that are delaying the healthy mental development of your child.

Let's acknowledge that fetal alcohol can cause virtually any kind of physical or mental damage to the developing fetus, up to and including death. Share your knowledge of the dangers of alcohol in pregnancy with every person you know. Every child deserves the best start possible in life and no alcohol during pregnancy and planning for pregnancy must be the rule. We are told by doctors that 50% of pregnancies are unplanned, so if a woman is sexually active and not using contraception, she is planning a pregnancy. As Dr. Christine Loock has said many times, "FASD is the most common, most expensive, yet most preventable of all mental disorders in the industrialized world."