Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Getting assessed and diagnosed
When you explain executive function to parents and teachers, four words will do: attention, reasoning, speed, memory. Each one can be worked on, and four is a number people can still repeat at the school gate a week later.
The academic models have a dozen headings and nobody outside the field retains them. A short list gives parents something to hang observations on, so that 'he is so lazy' turns into 'his memory for instructions is poor, and he is quick once he has understood'. Say plainly that these are rough groupings rather than four separate organs.
Qur’an and Sunnah
'He taught Adam all the names' (Quran 2:31). Giving people the names for what they are seeing is the beginning of their being able to work with it.
وَعَلَّمَ ءَادَمَ ٱلۡأَسۡمَآءَ كُلَّهَا ثُمَّ عَرَضَهُمۡ عَلَى ٱلۡمَلَٰٓئِكَةِ فَقَالَ أَنۢبِـُٔونِي بِأَسۡمَآءِ هَٰٓؤُلَآءِ إِن كُنتُمۡ صَٰدِقِينَ
He taught Adam all the names [of things], then He showed them to the angels and said, ‘Tell me the names of these if you truly [think you can].’
Qur’an 2:31read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
Helping people understand what they are dealing with has some support behind it. A systematic review of adolescents found that the young people who most need mental health attention are the least likely to seek it, and that interventions improving mental health literacy show some promise for shifting that. It was about help seeking rather than about explaining executive function to parents, and the promise it reports is modest, so treat it as encouragement to explain clearly rather than proof that explaining fixes much.
Aguirre Velasco A, Cruz ISS, Billings J, Jimenez M, Rowe S. (2020). What are the barriers, facilitators and interventions targeting help-seeking behaviours for common mental health problems in adolescents? A systematic review.. BMC psychiatry doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
A model people can hold in their heads is the only one that gets used between appointments.
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
When you read that some proportion of people with ADHD have a particular problem, the number tells you nothing until you know the figure for everybody else.
A distracted person can be brought back with a nudge. Someone who has gone elsewhere cannot, and the difference shows itself in a couple of seconds.
Ask for the most frightening moment of their life, then the next one down, then the next, until there is a scale running from one to a hundred. You get the ladder you needed, and they get something they did not expect: fear comes in sizes.