Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Systems for daily life
Often the most useful thing a clinician does is not delivered by the clinician. It is delivered by the teacher, or the parent, after a conversation you had with them.
Taking that seriously changes how the hour gets spent, towards talking with the school, coaching the parents and designing the arrangement, and away from teaching the child strategies on their own. It is a genuine loss of the satisfying part of the work. The alternative is a child who can describe four excellent strategies and uses none of them.
Qur’an and Sunnah
a strong, trustworthy man is the best to hire (Quran 28:26). Fitness for the task is the criterion, and sometimes the person best placed is not the one who was asked.
قَالَتۡ إِحۡدَىٰهُمَا يَٰٓأَبَتِ ٱسۡتَـٔۡجِرۡهُۖ إِنَّ خَيۡرَ مَنِ ٱسۡتَـٔۡجَرۡتَ ٱلۡقَوِيُّ ٱلۡأَمِينُ
One of the women said, ‘Father, hire him: a strong, trustworthy man is the best to hire.’
Qur’an 28:26read 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 treatment for ADHD established behavioural parent training and behavioural classroom management as the well-supported approaches, and both of those are delivered by adults in the child's daily world rather than by a clinician with the child. Where the evidence sits says something about where the effort should sit. It is a review of the child literature and does not settle how adult work should be arranged.
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
The person who is there when it matters is the one who can help, whether or not that person is you.
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
Teach the school's online system properly, once, and then treat it as something known. I do not know how to use it cannot stay true forever.
Where there is a choice, take the class that meets at a fixed hour with other people in the room. Watch it whenever you like turns into never watched more often than anyone admits.
A task needs smoothing at both ends. If it looks big and horrible you will not begin it, and if the middle is full of snags you will not see it through.