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
13 practicesParents with one affected child often ask what they might do differently before the next one. Answer honestly: there are lists of suggestions in circulation, the evidence behind most of them is thin, and the question underneath is usually about blame.
Take the question seriously and take the guilt seriously alongside it. Give what is genuinely known, say plainly where recommendations run ahead of…
When a child keeps failing at a task, try reducing what it demands of attention and memory before you increase the practice. Shorter steps, one instruction at a time, the working written down where they can see it.
Attention, holding things in mind and switching between steps all set a ceiling on how much of a lesson gets through. You cannot easily raise that…
Pouring more in does not help while the lid is still on. A child who is exhausted, wound up or not yet settled will keep very little of the lesson, however good the lesson is.
Do the settling first, even when it costs ten minutes of the hour. Sleep, food, movement and a calm start look like the soft part of the day and they…
The word one does several jobs at once: a digit, a number, a single object, a whole set. A child who has not sorted those out will put figures in the wrong columns and later read a third as a number instead of a part of something.
When digits land in the wrong place, check whether the child knows what is being counted before calling it carelessness. Say the unit out loud: one…
A child who talks well, listens well and seems bright will have their reading failure read as laziness. The strengths are exactly what makes the blame stick.
Strong spoken language, decent attention and an easy manner give an impression of capability that nobody can square with work coming back unfinished.…
Before drilling number facts, check whether the child has any feel for how much a number is. Which pile is bigger, is eight nearer to ten or to two, give me three of those.
A child with no sense of quantity can still learn to recite that seven and eight make fifteen, and it will be a string of sounds attached to nothing.…
Patterns sit underneath both reading and arithmetic. Blue, red, green, blue, red, green: making a sequence, copying it, then breaking it on purpose builds the ordering that words and numbers both run on.
Use blocks, beads, claps, a drum, anything with an order to it. Ask the child to make the same pattern, then to spoil it deliberately and tell you…
Find something the child already loves, a team, an orchestra, a game, and lay their results over it. These players are strong, these ones need coaching, and none of it means the team is no good.
Feedback lands very differently when the low scores are players who need training rather than facts about who someone is. Do it with their own…
Ask a struggling ten year old what division actually is and you will often get a blank, or a method with no meaning under it. Going back to what each operation does is usually worth more than another go at this term's work.
Division is sharing out, or taking the same amount away again and again until nothing is left. Multiplication is that same amount repeated. Children…
You are comparing how it feels inside your own head with what other people chose to show. Those two were never the same kind of thing.
Keep the sentence short enough to actually use, because you need it while your thumb is still moving, not an hour afterwards. Somebody's holiday…
Some of what circulates makes being unwell look good. Drugs filmed like a party, low mood styled into something delicate and photogenic, until the illness starts to feel like a personality.
This is worth spotting because of what it does to recovery. If sadness has become part of how someone is known, getting better means losing something…
The quietest damage comes from a young person deciding that feeling like this is simply how it is, because everyone around them feels it too.
Once distress counts as ordinary it stops being reported. Nobody mentions it at home, nobody brings it to an appointment, and years can pass with…
One client took two years of steady work to get a single app off her phone. If you are three weeks in and it is still there, you are not doing this wrong.
Change here is slower than nearly everyone expects, including the people helping. Saying so early protects both sides: you do not read a slow month…