Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Systems for daily life
Support does not have to stop at eighteen. Plan for it to thin out gradually through the twenties, at a level everyone has agreed rather than one that gets argued over every month.
A workable version names three things: what is still being helped with, how much, and when you will look at it again. Every six months is usually often enough. That keeps the help from becoming either a permanent arrangement nobody has reviewed or a running negotiation nobody enjoys. Most families find the list shrinks on its own once it is written down, because everyone can finally see how much has already been handed over.
Qur’an and Sunnah
If the debtor is in difficulty, then delay things until matters become easier for him (Quran 2:280). Grace and a longer timescale are written into the arrangement rather than granted as a favour when it fails.
وَإِن كَانَ ذُو عُسۡرَةࣲ فَنَظِرَةٌ إِلَىٰ مَيۡسَرَةࣲۚ وَأَن تَصَدَّقُواْ خَيۡرࣱ لَّكُمۡ إِن كُنتُمۡ تَعۡلَمُونَ
If the debtor is in difficulty, then delay things until matters become easier for him; still, if you were to write it off as an act of charity, that would be better for you, if only you knew
Qur’an 2:280read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A randomised trial tested a deliberate strategy for keeping families with high needs engaged in group behavioural parent training, since the long standing problem is that the families who most need these programmes stop turning up. It is about attendance at a programme rather than about family support through the twenties. The lesson that carries over is that staying in an arrangement is itself something to plan for, not something to assume.
Chacko A, Wymbs BT, Chimiklis A, Wymbs FA, Pelham WE. (2012). Evaluating a comprehensive strategy to improve engagement to group-based behavioral parent training for high-risk families of children with ADHD.. Journal of abnormal child psychology doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
An agreed level of help that gets reviewed avoids both the cliff edge and the drift, and lets everyone see the progress.
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
If a course has no fixed time, give it one. Write down which day and which hour you will watch it, put that in the calendar as though somebody else set it, and tell one person.
When something has sat undone for weeks, ask what next month's version of you would say about it. Relieved it is finished, or honestly indifferent?
If most of the difficulty is happening at home, most of the work needs to happen with the household in the room. Otherwise the hour of good conversation gets quietly undone by Tuesday.