Focus, starting, and ADHD

The point of treatment is not a tidier score on a questionnaire. It is fewer accidents, a finished course, work that holds, relationships that survive, a longer and better life.

Symptoms are worth reducing because of what they do downstream, and that is where the goal should be set. It changes what you review, too. Instead of…

After a working lifetime in this field, Barkley names the change in how a family sees the child as the most important step of all. Not the medication, not the charts.

The reason is practical rather than sentimental. Every other part of treatment asks parents to keep going for weeks with very little to show for it,…

The point of explaining ADHD to a parent is to produce a particular kind of parent: one who is kind about it, quick to forgive the day's failures, and willing to make a nuisance of themselves at school.

Those three are results, not manners. Harsh days breed pushing back, pushing back breeds harsher days, and that loop is the main road from ADHD to a…

Being told ADHD is largely inherited can sound like being told nothing can be done. It does not follow, and the two questions are separate ones.

How much of something a person shows, day to day, moves a good deal with what is around them, even when the underlying trait is strongly heritable.…

A child can be almost trouble free with a grandparent who has all afternoon for them, and impossible in a class of twenty five. Same child, same condition, very different demand.

What a setting asks for is the ratio between the self control a person has to supply and the structure being supplied for them. One adult, close…

Two of the three big advances in ADHD over recent decades were not new treatments at all. They were clearer thinking about what the difficulty actually is, and honest accounting of what psychological treatment can and cannot deliver.

Understanding ADHD as a problem of self regulation rather than a shortage of attention changed what help gets aimed at. Knowing which psychosocial…