Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD
Focus, starting, and ADHD
Most advice about focus is written for a brain that starts easily. This area is not. It covers what ADHD actually is, how to make a start when starting is the hard part, how to bring a future consequence close enough to feel, and how to stop paying for it in shame.
What works for this
Implementation intentions
Putting things off is mood repair rather than laziness: delay removes the bad feeling straight away and the cost lands later. So the move is not more willpower, it is a plan specific enough to run without a decision.
One move, today
Write one sentence: when it is [time] and I am at [place], I will [the first small action]. Naming when and where is the part the evidence supports.
What matches
6 practicesSupport does not have to stop at eighteen. Plan for it to thin out gradually through the twenties, at a level everyone has agreed rather than one that gets argued over every month.
A workable version names three things: what is still being helped with, how much, and when you will look at it again. Every six months is usually…
If someone is about to send off a saliva kit to fill in the family history they never had, have a conversation first. These tests hand back more than health information, and they hand it back with nobody in the room.
A father who is not the father, a sibling nobody mentioned, a donor conception no one planned to explain: these arrive by email on an ordinary…
Phonological awareness is not one skill. Telling sounds apart, rhyming, breaking a word into its sounds and blending them back are separate jobs, and a child can be fine at one and stuck at another.
Before agreeing that a child needs phonics, find out which piece is missing. Ask them to say the sounds in cat, then to join up sounds you give them,…
A display organised by sound rather than by alphabet gives a child more to hold on to. Let them feel where each sound is made, lips, tongue, teeth, and match that to the letters that spell it.
Reading is learned from speech towards print, so a border running A, B, C tells a child very little about what they are actually doing. Grouping by…
Ask two questions and then sit with the difference. How much time on this would you like? And how much do you think is actually good for you?
Almost nobody gives the same answer twice, and the gap between the numbers is more persuasive than anything you could have told them, because they…
Take the Friday deadline and walk it backwards onto the days. What happens Monday, what happens Tuesday, written down where both of you can see it.
Children with this difficulty rarely generate the sequence themselves, and asking them to is asking for the thing that is hard. So supply it, on…