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
4 practicesTheme · Treatment and medication
How long you have · Twenty minutes
Approach · ADHD skills
This explains how treatments work. Never start, stop or change a medication because of something you read here.
Before anything else, the people around the child need to understand what ADHD actually is. Everything else works better once that has happened.
The chain is quite direct. Understanding changes how behaviour gets read, how it is read sets what a parent expects, and expectations shape the tone…
Move the family's picture from a child who will not do as they are asked to a child whose capacity for holding themselves in place is genuinely limited. It is a change of category, not a softening.
The moral version has a quiet arrogance in it, the assumption that the child could manage if only they cared enough, and everyone in the house can…
Changing how the family understands the child comes before the medication, before the charts, before the meeting at school. It is step one, not a friendly introduction to the real work.
Skip it and the behaviour plan still gets written, but it gets delivered with an edge, applied on the good days and abandoned on the bad ones. When…
A ramp does nothing for someone's legs, and it gets them into the building. Timers, visible clocks, a shorter task list and a calendar somebody else keeps do the same job here.
Accommodations are not treatment and they are not pretending to be. What they do is take the parts of the work that live inside a person's head,…