Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Getting assessed and diagnosed
Assess, make a plan, do the work, and then keep measuring while you do it. Without that last part you have no way of knowing whether to push harder, change direction or stop.
Use more than one stream: your own measures, what parents notice at home, what school reports, and what the child says about it. Children will tell you a great deal about which activities feel useful if you ask them plainly and they believe the answer is safe. Fix the review points in advance, otherwise the work drifts into being a pleasant weekly hour that nobody ever evaluates.
Qur’an and Sunnah
The believers are those who 'conduct their affairs by mutual consultation' (Quran 42:38). Asking the child what is helping is consultation too, and they are the ones with the best view of it.
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
Careful individual follow through counts for more than people assume. In a large randomised trial of adults with ADHD, structured group psychotherapy was not clearly superior to individual clinical management, while medication outperformed placebo. It was a treatment comparison in adults rather than a study of progress monitoring, and it is a reminder that attentive, individually adjusted care is not the poor relation of an impressive programme.
Philipsen A, Jans T, Graf E, Matthies S, Borel P, Colla M, Gentschow L, Langner D, Jacob C, Groß-Lesch S, Sobanski E, Alm B, Schumacher-Stien M, Roesler M, Retz W, Retz-Junginger P, Kis B, Abdel-Hamid M, Heinrich V, Huss M, Kornmann C, Bürger A, Perlov E, Ihorst G, Schlander M, Berger M, Tebartz van Elst L, Comparison of Methylphenidate and Psychotherapy in Adult ADHD Study (COMPAS) Consortium. (2015). Effects of Group Psychotherapy, Individual Counseling, Methylphenidate, and Placebo in the Treatment of Adult Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder: A Randomized Clinical Trial.. JAMA psychiatry doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Measuring as you go is the only thing that tells you whether what you are doing is working while there is still time to change it.
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
Run the assessment yourself and watch while they work. Under real effort you will see the small movements, the tics and the overflow that never appear in ordinary conversation, and none of it reaches you if a technician or an app does the testing.
There is no box you type 'always late' into and get the answer out of. When a sensible strategy is not landing, the work is finding out what is blocking it rather than producing another strategy.
When a child truly does not mind losing the privilege, taking more away will not get you anywhere. That is the moment to change approach rather than raise the stakes, usually to a structured parent programme that works on the pattern between parent and child.