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Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Feelings and focus
It takes them out of whatever was rewarding about the behaviour without leaving them with nothing to do and an audience to play to. Keep the work genuinely easy, since the point is not extra difficulty and a correction should not double as a lesson they cannot manage. Finishing is what brings them back, so nobody has to negotiate about when they are allowed to rejoin.
'and ease my task for me' (Quran 20:26). The ease of the task is the whole point of it here, not the difficulty.
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
In the MTA cohort, childhood clinical, demographic and family factors were used to predict how adults with and without childhood ADHD were functioning later on. It is a reminder that the conditions around a child's day are worth taking seriously over the long run. It tests nothing about classroom technique, so this particular one rests on the practice it comes from.
Roy A, Hechtman L, Arnold LE, Swanson JM, Molina BSG, Sibley MH, Howard AL, MTA Cooperative Group. (2017). Childhood Predictors of Adult Functional Outcomes in the Multimodal Treatment Study of Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (MTA).. Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
A child who is occupied has no dead time in which to escalate, and finishing gives them a way back in that nobody has to grant.
Fear tends to make its case as caution. Try not to let it quietly shrink what you are willing to attempt, because the shrinking rarely stops on its own.
When someone has gone flat, the question is not what they ought to be doing. It is what still has any life in it for them, however small or unimpressive, and then how to get more of that.
The change mostly happens between the sessions rather than in them. Catching a thought where it actually turns up, at the kitchen table or in the car park, is what makes a new one stick.