Focus, starting, and ADHD

When someone says they did not really mean it, that it was not really them, the temptation is to hear an excuse. It is usually better information than that.

Take the disowning seriously and ask what state it came out of. What time was it, how long had they been online, what had happened that day, had they…

Things posted in ten seconds have got young people excluded from school, and worse. It is worth asking about online conduct in the same routine way you would ask about anything else that could go badly.

Ask what has been posted, what has been sent, what someone would not want read out. Not as an inspection and not as a lecture about permanence, but…

A whole evening can go into recording an evening. It is worth asking, with no scolding in it, whether you were there for the thing you now have a photograph of.

This lands better than a rule about hours, because it is about something you would miss rather than something you are doing wrong. Try leaving the…

Among teenagers, saying they want to die has become something you say when the bus is late. You can no longer read intent off the phrase, in either direction.

So the words neither prove there is danger nor prove there is not. What tells you is everything the words leave out: whether there is a plan, whether…

When a death is filmed and passed around, some of the people who watch it are not all right afterwards, and a few are put in real danger by it. Ask what has been going round.

The question is simple enough. Has anything about someone dying gone round your school or your feed lately, and did you see it. Then ask how it left…

Nobody gets far taking the drink away without asking what the drinking was for. It is the same here. Find out what the scrolling is doing for someone before you start subtracting hours.

It is doing something, or it would not have lasted this long. Company at one in the morning. A way to stop thinking. Somewhere they are good at…

If the phone was giving you company, an evening class in something practical will not cover it. Match what you put in its place to what it was actually providing.

Subtracting an hour and leaving the hour empty is the version that collapses by Thursday. If it was company, the replacement has people in it. If it…

Write down three to five things you actually enjoy, small ones, and do one of them a day. That is the whole instruction.

They have to be yours rather than the ones that sound impressive. Sitting in the garden with tea counts. Ten minutes on the guitar counts. Keep the…

An alarm that marks the end of a session rather than the start. A written list of what these apps give you and what they cost. The phone's own usage figures. An agreement that an hour of scrolling gets matched with an hour of something else. Pick whichever you would actually do.

The choosing is part of why any of it works. A limit handed down gets tested and beaten, while one somebody picked themselves tends to survive a bad…

Most parents setting rules about an app have never scrolled it for ten minutes. The rules are usually reasonable and the picture underneath them is missing.

This is not really about being permissive. If you do not know that the feed is chosen for you, that one worried search brings a fortnight of similar…

Ask your child to show you their feed and explain it to you. You are asking to be taught rather than to inspect, and from the other side those feel nothing like each other.

Something shifts when the young person is the one who knows more. They slow down, they explain who these people are, they tell you which bits are…

If you want a way back in with a teenager who has gone quiet, ask them to show you the game. Not to assess it. Just to be shown something they are good at.

It works because it asks almost nothing of them. No eye contact, no explaining how they feel, no returning to whatever the last argument was about.…

Ask two questions and then sit with the difference. How much time on this would you like? And how much do you think is actually good for you?

Almost nobody gives the same answer twice, and the gap between the numbers is more persuasive than anything you could have told them, because they…

For a week, jot down what was going on just before you picked up the phone, what you were thinking while you scrolled, and how you felt when you put it down. Nothing cleverer than that.

What usually surfaces is not that screens are bad but that two or three specific things are: one account, one time of day, one mood you always reach…

Part of what keeps the late start going is that it has genuinely worked. You have produced something good in one long night before, and you remember it clearly.

So telling you that leaving it late is a bad plan tends to fail, because you have evidence and the other person does not. The honest version is…

The dreaming is not the problem. It is that bills, forms and renewal dates are dull enough to stop registering at all, and those are the things that actually damage a life.

People who are managing well in every visible way still get brought down by a lapsed policy or an unopened letter from the council. Trying to care…

If reading has always been slow and effortful, that is worth looking at in its own right. Dyslexia and ADHD turn up together far more often than chance would give, and they need different help.

Someone can do very well in a subject built on reading and still read slowly, and that is often the difficulty left over once everything else has…

When someone reminds you often enough, things do get done. But the sense of time doing the work is theirs, which is why it all collapses the moment they stop.

Worth naming out loud in a household, because the reminding costs the relationship something and never builds the missing part. A better arrangement…

Bad with time covers at least five different things: arriving late, missing deadlines, never planning ahead, always guessing the best case, and losing hours inside something absorbing. Each one has a different fix.

Write your own list and mark which ones actually apply to you. Someone who is never late but always guesses the best case needs a record of real…

A clock only counts if you can see it without doing anything. Behind you, in a pocket, behind a lock screen: that is not a clock, that is an errand.

Walk through the places where time actually disappears for you and put something visible in each one. The bathroom, the kitchen, the desk, the room…