Areas › Worry and anxiety › The cost of avoiding
A plan followed on some days and not others can be worse than no plan at all. Choose the smallest version you are sure you can keep to, and keep to that.
When staying home works on one morning in four, that occasional success makes the pleading more determined rather than less. Cut the plan back until it is something two tired adults can manage on a Wednesday: one rule, one reward, one person checking. Add to it later if it holds, and tell whoever is helping you early when it slips, so it can be simplified instead of abandoned.
Qur’an and Sunnah
do not say of anything, 'I will do that tomorrow,' without adding, 'God willing,' and, whenever you forget, remember your Lord (Quran 18:23, 18:24). Promises about tomorrow are held lightly here, and forgetting is met with returning rather than with shame.
وَلَا تَقُولَنَّ لِشَاْيۡءٍ إِنِّي فَاعِلࣱ ذَٰلِكَ غَدًا
do not say of anything, ‘I will do that tomorrow,’
Qur’an 18:23read it in the library
إِلَّآ أَن يَشَآءَ ٱللَّهُۚ وَٱذۡكُر رَّبَّكَ إِذَا نَسِيتَ وَقُلۡ عَسَىٰٓ أَن يَهۡدِيَنِ رَبِّي لِأَقۡرَبَ مِنۡ هَٰذَا رَشَدࣰ ا
without adding, ‘God willing,’ and, whenever you forget, remember your Lord and say, ‘May my Lord guide me closer to what is right.’
Qur’an 18:24read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
An updated meta-analysis of 60 randomised trials with 4,234 participants found the average effect of acceptance and commitment therapy was small, around 0.42, more modest than its supporters tend to suggest. That is a broad average across many different problems and says little about any one family. Set beside this, it argues for a simple plan that actually gets done over an elaborate one followed half the time.
Ost LG. (2014). The efficacy of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: an updated systematic review and meta-analysis.. Behaviour research and therapy doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Something that pays off now and then is much harder to give up than something that never pays off.
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
Whoever is standing in the hall at half past seven needs to understand the trap as well as the child does. A plan agreed on a Tuesday afternoon will not survive a Wednesday morning otherwise.
When someone with attention difficulties loses the structure around them, the difficulty shows in full. Nothing has got worse in them; the scaffolding that carried part of it has gone.
Parents keeping a pattern going are almost never doing it knowingly. Say so out loud, before you explain any of the rest.