Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Systems for daily life
A young person hears the fear in a house even when nobody says anything. If the adults are frightened about their future, they usually take that fear as a verdict on themselves.
If you are the worried parent, you do not have to perform calm. It works better to say the true version out loud: I am anxious about this, the anxiety is mine to deal with, and it is not a judgement on you. Then find somewhere else to put it, a friend, a partner, your own therapy, so it is not being processed at the kitchen table every evening. Where a young person has gone flat and withdrawn, lowering the pressure in the house is part of the treatment rather than a pleasant extra.
Qur’an and Sunnah
God wishes to lighten your burden; man was created weak (Quran 4:28). Taking weight off someone is treated as the kind thing to do, and adding to it in the hope of motivating them is not.
يُرِيدُ ٱللَّهُ أَن يُخَفِّفَ عَنكُمۡۚ وَخُلِقَ ٱلۡإِنسَٰنُ ضَعِيفࣰ ا
God wishes to lighten your burden; man was created weak
Qur’an 4:28read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A randomised trial of a family focused programme for teenage drivers with ADHD tested whether improving how the family functioned showed up in safer driving, in an area where very little else is available. The outcome was driving rather than mood, so it proves nothing about depression. What it supports is the underlying move: when the young person is the one struggling, the family is often the part you can actually change.
Fabiano GA, Schatz NK, Morris KL, Willoughby MT, Vujnovic RK, Hulme KF, Riordan J, Howard M, Hennessy D, Lewis K, Hawk L, Wylie A, Pelham WE. (2016). Efficacy of a family-focused intervention for young drivers with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder.. Journal of consulting and clinical psychology doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Worry with nowhere to go leaks into the room, and the person it is about will nearly always hear it as being about who they are.
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 a task you have been circling for days, give five minutes to moving your body. A brisk walk or a couple of flights of stairs is often enough to make starting feel less like pushing at a door that will not open.
When something has become impossible, start far below it. Sitting in the parked car with the engine off is a real first step, and it is the one that gets somewhere.
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.