Practices

Every practice in the library, in one list. Narrow it by how long you have, who it is written for, and where you are right now.

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111 practices

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Plenty of children read the equals sign as put the answer here. Write it the other way round sometimes, eight equals three plus five, so they meet the idea that both sides are simply the same amount.

Move the sign about. Leave the gap in the middle, four plus something equals two plus five, and watch what the child does with it. If they add…

Five minutesReading, numbers and learning differencesCoreQur’an 2:32One line of research

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…

Five minutesReading, numbers and learning differencesCoreQur’an 24:61One line of research

Ask someone to repeat a made up word and memory cannot rescue them. That is exactly why this small task keeps finding difficulties a clever, well practised person hides everywhere else.

Real words can be recalled, and a strong memory will lift a score without the skill underneath being there at all. A word that has never existed…

Five minutesReading, numbers and learning differencesCoreQur’an 43:52One line of research

Put something in before you take something out. Removing the only way a person has of coping leaves them with nothing, which is not safer.

In practice this looks like smaller steps than a promise to stop: cutting the frequency, changing what is used, agreeing to wait ten minutes and do…

Five minutesWhen everything feels flat

Looking for a whole subject rather than a single practice? Start from the nine areas.

The moment before you snap

Being seen and judged

Use your strengths

When everything feels flat

Grounding and settling

Parts work

Qur’an 65:7

One line of research

Pill swallowing can be taught in a few short sessions with sweets. Start with the tiniest ones, give two to eat for every one swallowed whole, and work up in size across a week.

Keep each session short and cheerful and stop before anyone is upset, since one frightening attempt can set the whole thing back weeks. For capsules,…

Five minutesMedication and how it worksMedical and treatmentQur’an 2:185One line of research

Being given a medicine that holds no licence for your condition can feel like being experimented on. Usually it means the evidence is decent but thinner than a licence demands.

Bupropion is the common case. It helps some people with attention difficulties, often alongside a stimulant, and it never gained the indication, so…

Five minutesMedication and how it worksMedical and treatmentQur’an 17:36One line of research

Debt, impulsive spending, an account that never quite recovers: this belongs in the conversation about attention rather than in a separate drawer marked shame.

People hide this part longer than anything else, which means it is usually the last thing to get any help. If you are the one struggling, saying it…

Five minutesMedication and how it worksMedical and treatmentQur’an 33:5One line of research

Before you explain anything about medication, ask what the person already believes about it. You cannot correct a worry that has never been said out loud.

Most people arrive carrying something: a cousin who could not sleep, a headline, a parent with a strong view. Lead with your own information and you…

Five minutesMedication and how it worksMedical and treatmentQur’an 42:38One line of research

Stimulants are not the only licensed route. Atomoxetine, guanfacine and clonidine all hold approval for attention difficulties, and they matter when a stimulant cannot be used.

They usually sit after stimulants rather than beside them, because the comparative evidence still favours stimulants overall. They come into their…

Five minutesMedication and how it worksMedical and treatmentQur’an 73:20One line of research

In practice the non-stimulants turn up more often as an addition than on their own. A stimulant in the morning with guanfacine alongside it is a common shape.

The two act at different points of the same circuit, so they tend to complement rather than repeat each other, and the blood pressure effect of one…

Five minutesMedication and how it worksMedical and treatmentQur’an 42:38One line of research

Where anxiety sits alongside the attention difficulty, a non-stimulant is sometimes the better first choice. Stimulants sharpen anxiety in some people, and that is a hard trade to live with.

The same holds when blood pressure rises on a stimulant that is otherwise working, since adding an alpha-2 agent can make it possible to keep the…

Five minutesMedication and how it worksMedical and treatmentQur’an 21:83One line of research

A heart tracing before starting a stimulant is not routinely needed. Some practices still ask for one anyway, and it can hold a child up for months.

What the guidance asks for is a careful history and an examination, with a tracing kept for children whose own or family history warrants it. An…

Five minutesMedication and how it worksMedical and treatmentQur’an 17:36One line of research

A small short-acting dose in the afternoon, on top of the long-acting one, is ordinary practice rather than a special case. Homework and the evening drive often fall outside what the morning dose still reaches.

The hours when you most need to hold back are frequently the hours the medicine has stopped covering. Raising the morning dose to solve an early…

Five minutesMedication and how it worksMedical and treatmentQur’an 73:20One line of research

Skipping weekends, holidays and summers is a common suggestion and mostly it is the wrong call. The difficulty does not take a holiday when school does.

Unstructured time asks more of planning and self-regulation rather than less: whole days to fill, everyone at home, no timetable holding the shape of…

Five minutesMedication and how it worksMedical and treatmentQur’an 13:28One line of research

Licences start at six years old, and that number comes from how trials have to be run rather than from a safety finding. Younger children do get treated where the case is strong.

Trials need the child's own assent alongside a parent's consent, and assent means a form the child can read and understand, so studies stop where…

Five minutesMedication and how it worksMedical and treatmentQur’an 10:59One line of research

These are among the best studied medicines in psychiatry, in use for decades. Most of the hesitancy around them traces back to how they get covered in the press rather than to the safety record.

Saying that is not the same as saying there is nothing to watch. Heart rate and blood pressure shift a little, appetite and sleep often need…

Five minutesMedication and how it worksMedical and treatmentQur’an 49:6One line of research

For a family stuck on whether to medicate at all, the comparison with diabetes often unlocks something. Nobody manages diabetes on diet alone, and nobody calls insulin a moral failure.

Offered gently it moves the question from what kind of parent am I towards what does this condition need. Played as a trump card it makes people…

Five minutesMedication and how it worksMedical and treatmentQur’an 16:69One line of research

There are three families of medicine here: the stimulants, the agents that work on noradrenaline alone, and the alpha-2 drugs that began as blood pressure treatments. Three routes rather than three brands of one thing.

That matters when one of them does not work or cannot be used. A poor response inside one family says little about the others, so a sequence has…

Five minutesMedication and how it worksMedical and treatmentQur’an 5:6One line of research

Methylphenidate and amphetamine are not two names for the same thing. One mainly blocks dopamine from being taken back up, and the other does that and pushes more of it out as well.

That extra step is why the amphetamines tend to produce somewhat larger average effects, and why somebody who got nothing from one can do well on the…

Five minutesMedication and how it worksMedical and treatmentQur’an 16:43One line of research

The potential for misuse belongs to one of the three families rather than to ADHD medicines generally. The stimulants reach the reward circuitry and the others do not.

That gives a clear answer where there is a substance history in the house, or a worry about tablets going missing at school. Say plainly that a…

Five minutesMedication and how it worksMedical and treatmentQur’an 17:35One line of research