Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Systems for daily life
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.
In a settled stretch, seeing the young person on their own with occasional family time is fine. In a crisis, turn it round: everyone together, weekly, until the temperature comes down. This is not a verdict on the parents, it is just where the moving parts are. Families can ask for this themselves, and it is a fair thing to bring to whoever you are seeing.
Qur’an and Sunnah
They conduct their affairs by mutual consultation (Quran 42:38). Matters that affect a household are settled with the household present, which is a fair description of what family work is.
وَٱلَّذِينَ ٱسۡتَجَابُواْ لِرَبِّهِمۡ وَأَقَامُواْ ٱلصَّلَوٰةَ وَأَمۡرُهُمۡ شُورَىٰ بَيۡنَهُمۡ وَمِمَّا رَزَقۡنَٰهُمۡ يُنفِقُونَ
respond to their Lord; keep up the prayer; conduct their affairs by mutual consultation; give to others out of what We have provided for them
Qur’an 42:38read 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 psychosocial treatments for ADHD established behavioural parent training and classroom management as the best supported approaches, and both of them work through the adults around the young person rather than with the young person alone. That literature concerns children rather than families in crisis with an older teenager. The principle it supports is the one above: the setting is part of the treatment, not the backdrop 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
An hour a week does not survive the other hundred and sixty seven if those are where the trouble lives.
When not to
Where there is violence or fear in the home, joint sessions can be unsafe and the arrangement needs specialist advice first.
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
Every time your eye lands on the job you have never started, it takes a small toll. Ten of those on one list is a tax you pay all day without noticing.
If everything you do is both urgent and important, you are living in the emergency corner. It is exhausting, and the exhaustion is real even though the week looks thin from outside.
Start at the moment you have to be there and work backwards, writing each step and how long it takes, until you reach the hour you have to get up.