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Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Getting assessed and diagnosed
Teaching a strategy will not make a slow processor quick, and telling a child to hurry up only makes the work more unpleasant. Graded practice with the tempo nudged up over weeks is the honest approach here. Meanwhile, adjust what actually hurts: extra time, shorter written tasks, instructions given once and slowly.
'God willing, you will find me patient' (Quran 18:69). Moses commits to patience for a process whose point he cannot yet see, which is what slow training asks of a child and a family.
الكهف
قَالَ سَتَجِدُنِيٓ إِن شَآءَ ٱللَّهُ صَابِرࣰ ا وَلَآ أَعۡصِي لَكَ أَمۡرࣰ ا
Moses said, ‘God willing, you will find me patient. I will not disobey you in any way.’
Qur’an 18:69read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
Realistic expectations are the safest thing to promise. A randomised trial adding mindfulness based cognitive therapy to usual care for adults with ADHD found modest reductions in core symptoms, an option to sit alongside standard treatment rather than to replace it. That trial was not about processing speed in children, and the shape of the finding is what carries over: real gains in this territory tend to be small, and saying so protects the work.
Janssen L, Kan CC, Carpentier PJ, Sizoo B, Hepark S, Schellekens MPJ, Donders ART, Buitelaar JK, Speckens AEM. (2019). Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy v. treatment as usual in adults with ADHD: a multicentre, single-blind, randomised controlled trial.. Psychological medicine doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Speed changes with repetition rather than with understanding, so it moves slowly and it moves through practice.
The checklists were built around the loud version of this, and girls are more often the quiet version. If she is struggling and nobody has ever suggested an assessment, that is worth pressing on.
Both people will tell you they were up for three nights. The useful question is what they did with those hours: driven and busy points one way, wired and wrecked points another.
Alongside diagnoses, ask how relatives died. Falls from roofs, crashes, deaths with the safety gear left on the ground: these recur in some family lines and they say something a list of diagnoses cannot.