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
5 practicesSome of what looks like muddle is the system's fault. Our tenth month is named for eight, because two months were added later and nobody renamed the rest.
Worth saying to anyone who feels stupid about dates and forms. A calendar whose numbers are out of step, a tax year starting in April, forms asking…
Ask for the old school reports every time. Some people arrive with a folder of every one they ever had, and you cannot tell in advance which people those are.
It is easy to assume that a parent who is disorganised will not have kept anything, and that assumption quietly costs you evidence. Teacher comments…
When you explain executive function to parents and teachers, four words will do: attention, reasoning, speed, memory. Each one can be worked on, and four is a number people can still repeat at the school gate a week later.
The academic models have a dozen headings and nobody outside the field retains them. A short list gives parents something to hang observations on, so…
Ask whether anyone kept the old school reports. The same lines turn up generation after generation: not working to potential, talks too much, never has the right books with him.
They were written by teachers who had never heard of ADHD, about children nobody was going to assess, and that is exactly what makes them worth…
For the child who flies off the handle at noise, labels and crowded rooms, with no autism diagnosis in the picture, a free parent completed sensitivity questionnaire will tell you more than another behaviour chart.
It gives you a structured way to describe the reactivity without reaching for a diagnosis the child may not have, and it points at what to change:…