Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Systems for daily life
Help lands best at the moment and in the place the behaviour is actually needed. A skill taught in a quiet room on Tuesday rarely turns up in a noisy classroom on Thursday.
Which means the teacher standing there at the time is in the strongest position of anyone, and the parent at the kitchen table is next. Someone working with the child once a week is doing something useful, but they are furthest from the moment. The question worth asking of any plan is who will be present when the difficulty actually happens.
Qur’an and Sunnah
with two receptors set to record, one on his right side and one on his left (Quran 50:17). What is described there is presence right at the moment of action, not a review of it afterwards.
إِذۡ يَتَلَقَّى ٱلۡمُتَلَقِّيَانِ عَنِ ٱلۡيَمِينِ وَعَنِ ٱلشِّمَالِ قَعِيدࣱ
with two receptors set to record, one on his right side and one on his left
Qur’an 50:17read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A twelve-week collaborative school and home programme delivered by school-based mental health professionals combined parent training, teacher consultation and work directly with the child, and measured outcomes that mattered educationally. The design says something in itself: the help was built into the places where the child actually has to perform. It was an open trial without a control group, so read it as a worked example rather than as proof.
Pfiffner LJ, Villodas M, Kaiser N, Rooney M, McBurnett K. (2013). Educational outcomes of a collaborative school-home behavioral intervention for ADHD.. School psychology quarterly : the official journal of the Division of School Psychology, American Psychological Association doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
The trouble is not knowing what to do, it is getting to it in the moment, so the help has to be there in the moment.
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
Some days fill up entirely with things that were urgent for somebody else. Practise saying not now to other people, and to the version of you that opens one more tab.
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.
Distraction and disorder feed each other. Every hunt for the missing keys is a perfect opening for your attention to wander off somewhere more interesting.