Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Treatment and medication
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 half a second to decide. Help that lands in that half second is worth more than an hour in a room on a Thursday. Usually that means an adult nearby in the playground or the party, giving one small prompt as it happens.
This explains how treatments work. Never start, stop or change a medication because of something you read here.
Qur’an and Sunnah
Take action! God will see your actions (Quran 9:105). What is weighed is what gets done, which is fair reason to put your help where the doing happens.
وَقُلِ ٱعۡمَلُواْ فَسَيَرَى ٱللَّهُ عَمَلَكُمۡ وَرَسُولُهُۥ وَٱلۡمُؤۡمِنُونَۖ وَسَتُرَدُّونَ إِلَىٰ عَٰلِمِ ٱلۡغَيۡبِ وَٱلشَّهَٰدَةِ فَيُنَبِّئُكُم بِمَا كُنتُمۡ تَعۡمَلُونَ
Say [Prophet], ‘Take action! God will see your actions- as will His Messenger and the believers- and then you will be returned to Him who knows what is seen and unseen, and He will tell you what you have been doing
Qur’an 9:105read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A meta-analysis of randomised trials of cognitive training in ADHD found improvements on some neuropsychological measures, while the effects on symptoms largely disappeared once the raters were blind to who had been trained. That is the same shape as the problem here, where something improves inside the training and much less improves outside it. It tested a different kind of training, so it is a warning about transfer rather than a direct test of social skills teaching.
Cortese S, Ferrin M, Brandeis D, Buitelaar J, Daley D, Dittmann RW, Holtmann M, Santosh P, Stevenson J, Stringaris A, Zuddas A, Sonuga-Barke EJ, European ADHD Guidelines Group (EAGG). (2015). Cognitive training for attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder: meta-analysis of clinical and neuropsychological outcomes from randomized controlled trials.. Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
The gap is between knowing and doing in the moment, and only help given in the moment reaches it.
This one is still a draft. It is waiting on a scholar and a clinician to read it before it is published.
Near this one
Before anything else, the people around the child need to understand what ADHD actually is. Everything else works better once that has happened.
Better usually means smaller, rarer, or shorter. Pick something you can count, like losing your keys twice a week instead of every day.
Managing the ADHD is not the goal. Being happy together is the goal, and the ADHD work is only worth doing to the extent that it gets you there.