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.
Narrowed down
5 practicesTheme · Treatment and medication
How long you have · Longer
Approach · ADHD skills
This explains how treatments work. Never start, stop or change a medication because of something you read here.
Think of it the way you would think about diabetes. Something to manage with several things at once, most days, for as long as it is there.
That frame does a lot of quiet work. It says the treatment is ongoing rather than a course you finish, it explains why things slide back when…
There is no single treatment that covers all of this. What works looks more like five things running alongside each other, and understanding the condition comes first.
Each piece reaches a different part of the day. Medication does something the environment cannot, changing what a room asks of someone does something…
The stack goes: understand it, medicate where that is right, change what the adults do, change what the day asks, and keep arguing the child's corner. Each layer does a job the others cannot.
None of them stands in for another, which is why swapping one out leaves a gap rather than a smaller plan. Medication does not reorganise a…
Behaviour work for ADHD is mostly about changing what the adults do. The child's behaviour shifts afterwards, as a consequence.
Consequences live in other people's responses, and a child who cannot yet hold a reward in mind across three days cannot supply them for themselves.…
The trouble now is not that nothing works. It is that the things which work are spread unevenly, and whether a family gets any of them depends heavily on where they happen to live.
Medication travels reasonably well, since a prescriber can be found in most places. The psychological and behavioural work travels badly, because it…