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 practicesHow long you have · A minute
Approach · Core
You can screen for a processing difficulty with no test at all. Just notice, in ordinary conversation, whether the child is answering what you actually said.
A child who drifts off topic, answers a slightly different question, or needs things said twice may not be avoiding you or daydreaming. The words may…
Behaviour is usually the visible end of a skill that has not been built. What you are watching in a classroom is the shape of the difficulty rather than the shape of the child.
It is a single sentence you can say in a meeting, and it tends to move the conversation away from what to do about the behaviour towards what the…
You are comparing how it feels inside your own head with what other people chose to show. Those two were never the same kind of thing.
Keep the sentence short enough to actually use, because you need it while your thumb is still moving, not an hour afterwards. Somebody's holiday…
One gentle way to name it: those are being used as words to play with, and they were never really words for playing with. Said kindly, it lands without anyone being told off.
The young person in front of you almost certainly says it too, so any version that sounds like a reprimand will close the conversation down. Naming…
Most children with ADHD can tell you exactly what they should have done. The knowing was never the missing piece, which is why a course teaching the knowing changes so little.
Watch closely and you see the skill appear in quiet moments and vanish in loud ones, when another child has already grabbed the ball and there is…