Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Systems for daily life
If you have been the one holding someone's schedule, meals and reminders together, do not put all of it down on the day they leave. Pass it over a piece at a time, each with a date on it.
Write out what you are actually doing for them: waking, appointments, repeat prescriptions, food, deadlines, forms. Most families are surprised by the length of the list. Then hand one item across every few weeks while the person is still within reach, and let them make a mess of it while the stakes are small. The person taking it on needs to see the list too, or they cannot know what is coming.
Qur’an and Sunnah
You will sow for seven consecutive years as usual. Store all that you reap (Quran 12:47). The work of preparing is done in the settled years, before the harder stretch arrives.
قَالَ تَزۡرَعُونَ سَبۡعَ سِنِينَ دَأَبࣰ ا فَمَا حَصَدتُّمۡ فَذَرُوهُ فِي سُنۢبُلِهِۦٓ إِلَّا قَلِيلࣰ ا مِّمَّا تَأۡكُلُونَ
then I can return to the people to inform them.’ Joseph said, ‘You will sow for seven consecutive years as usual. Store all that you reap, left in the ear, apart from the little you eat
Qur’an 12:47read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
The foundational review of treatments for ADHD put behavioural parent training among the best established, meaning a good deal of the work is done through the adults around the young person rather than only with the young person. That literature concerns children, so stretching it to someone leaving home is an extension you should make knowingly. The part that carries is the principle: the surrounding adults are part of the arrangement, not spectators to it.
William E. Pelham; Gregory A. Fabiano (2008). Evidence-Based Psychosocial Treatments for Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder. Journal of Clinical Child & Adolescent Psychology doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Handing over one thing at a time gives each new job somewhere safe to go wrong before it has to be done alone.
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
Make handed-in homework one of the tracked targets. It is the thing that goes wrong most and the thing worth most when it goes right.
If a year out is coming, call it a bridge rather than a gap. A gap is a hole in a record. A bridge is going somewhere.
A school to home report works daily for younger children and weekly for older ones. The point is to close the gap between what happened at school and anything that follows at home.