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Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Your sense of time
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 hour of something they like, after the twenty minutes of work, tonight. As they get older the gap can stretch, but stretch it from what works rather than from what you think ought to work.
He made the night as a cover and the day for your livelihood (Quran 78:11). What the day's effort is for belongs to the day itself, near enough to be felt.
النبأ
وَجَعَلۡنَا ٱلنَّهَارَ مَعَاشࣰ ا
and the day for your livelihood
Qur’an 78:11read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
A review of the cognitive and neural work on delay identifies three features of a task that most drive putting it off: how unpleasant it is, how big the eventual reward is, and how far away that reward sits. Distance is doing a lot of the work in the Monday to Friday case. The review describes mechanisms across the general literature rather than testing a reward schedule for children.
Zhang S, Liu P, Feng T. (2019). To do it now or later: The cognitive mechanisms and neural substrates underlying procrastination.. Wiley interdisciplinary reviews. Cognitive science doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
A consequence that arrives days later has almost no pull at the moment the child decides what to do.
Look back over your own history for the times you were knocked down and started something anyway. That pattern is common with ADHD, and it is easy to miss while you are busy counting the failures.
One more episode tonight is obviously worth it, and by eleven the next morning it obviously was not. Nothing changed except where you were standing in time.
Take the Friday deadline and walk it backwards onto the days. What happens Monday, what happens Tuesday, written down where both of you can see it.