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
7 practicesWhen someone has missed the deadline again, the talk about how they always do this changes nothing except how they feel. If you want a different Friday, the conversation belongs on Monday, and it is about the plan rather than the person.
This is a hard one, because the frustration is real and often fair. But the lecture lands on a system that was never the failure point, and it adds…
Instead of one warning, give several: half an hour, fifteen minutes, five, one. The child then has time to arrive at the ending rather than having it dropped on them.
A single warning asks a child to track the gap on their own, which is the thing they cannot do. A ladder of prompts turns a stretch of time into a…
If the test is on Friday and it is Monday, Friday is doing almost no work. Put something today on the end of today's revision, however small.
This is not spoiling a child. It is matching the reward to the timescale they can actually feel, which is roughly the one they are living in. Half an…
If the only real feedback a child gets arrives every ten weeks, it will not shape a single Tuesday. A report at the end of term is a record, not a motivator.
This is worth saying gently to teachers and to parents who feel that grades ought to be motivation enough. For this child they are not, and no amount…
For younger children, make the reward small, concrete and soon. Stickers, points, a smiley face, five minutes of something good, handed over the same hour rather than at the end of the week.
Points that build towards something bigger work well, as long as the point itself arrives immediately. Hourly is not too often for a young child, and…
Keep consequences for the sake of honesty, but let praise and reward do most of the work. Punishment can tell a child what to stop and it cannot tell them what to do instead.
Children with this difficulty collect an extraordinary amount of correction over a childhood, from teachers, from parents, from other children.…
Go looking for the moment the child does the thing you have been asking for, and say so while it is still happening. Most of us watch for the problem and only notice the good behaviour when we have run out of trouble.
It helps to decide in advance what you are hunting for, so that starting the homework without being asked, or waiting a turn, actually registers…