Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Treatment and medication
Gathering disruptive children into one room to learn social skills leaves about a quarter of them worse than before. They pick things up from each other far faster than from the adult at the front.
This is not a reason to give up on helping a child socially. It is a reason to look hard at who else is in the group before you accept a place in it. Ask what the group is for and which children it is drawing together, and be readier than feels polite to turn down a well meant referral.
This explains how treatments work. Never start, stop or change a medication because of something you read here.
Qur’an and Sunnah
Do not contribute to your destruction with your own hands, but do good (Quran 2:195). Good intentions do not settle the question of what an intervention is actually doing.
وَأَنفِقُواْ فِي سَبِيلِ ٱللَّهِ وَلَا تُلۡقُواْ بِأَيۡدِيكُمۡ إِلَى ٱلتَّهۡلُكَةِ وَأَحۡسِنُوٓاْۚ إِنَّ ٱللَّهَ يُحِبُّ ٱلۡمُحۡسِنِينَ
Spend in God’s cause: do not contribute to your destruction with your own hands, but do good, for God loves those who do good
Qur’an 2:195read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
The nearest study in this bank is a systematic review of bupropion for ADHD, taken up partly because stimulants can worsen sleep, mood and anxiety problems in children who also have them, and because up to 20 percent of patients do not respond. What it carries here is the general point that treatments have a direction, and for a subgroup the direction is downwards. It is about medication rather than peer groups, so it supports the habit of asking about harm and not this particular figure.
Ng QX. (2017). A Systematic Review of the Use of Bupropion for Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder in Children and Adolescents.. Journal of child and adolescent psychopharmacology doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Children copy the peers sitting next to them more readily than the adult teaching the lesson.
When not to
A child who is isolated or bullied still needs something, so turning down a group means finding the alternative rather than leaving it there.
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
Coaching for adult ADHD comes down mostly to one thing: a standing appointment with somebody who will ask how it went. That sounds thin until you have tried keeping a plan alive entirely on your own.
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.
Hear this before you start rather than after: change here is gradual. Habits built over twenty years do not come apart in three weeks.