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
3 practicesIf a child is behind in reading, the gap rarely closes on its own with another year of the same. Asking for a proper assessment now is kinder than hoping that maturity will do the work.
National figures show reading proficiency barely shifting between primary school and the end of secondary, which tells you that catching up later is…
Build numbers and break them up again. Seven is five and two, and also six and one, and a child who can see that has the thing mental arithmetic is made of.
Blocks, buttons, coins, anything you can push into two piles and back together. Ask which numbers fit inside other numbers and let the child show you…
In practice, you sometimes have to stop a child using the trick that has kept them afloat, so the weaker skill finally gets used. Expect them to hate it for a while.
If memorising is doing the work, the part that should be doing it never gets a turn. So build short pieces of practice where the workaround is simply…