Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Your sense of time
Keep consequences for the sake of honesty, but let praise and reward do most of the work. Punishment can tell a child what to stop and it cannot tell them what to do instead.
Children with this difficulty collect an extraordinary amount of correction over a childhood, from teachers, from parents, from other children. Adding to the pile costs you the relationship that every other support depends on. Aim for far more noticing of the good than of the bad, and be specific about what you noticed, because vague praise slides off.
Qur’an and Sunnah
Celebrate God's glory in the evening, in the morning (Quran 30:17). Regular praise, given at set moments, is treated as the habit worth building.
فَسُبۡحَٰنَ ٱللَّهِ حِينَ تُمۡسُونَ وَحِينَ تُصۡبِحُونَ
So celebrate God’s glory in the evening, in the morning
Qur’an 30:17read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A meta-analysis of perfectionism in learning found that striving for high standards and anxious concern about mistakes relate quite differently to achievement, burnout and stress, so more pressure is not reliably better. A household running mostly on correction sits on the anxious side of that. The analysis is about learners rather than about behaviour plans, so it is a caution rather than a rule.
Osenk I, Williamson P, Wade TD. (2020). Does perfectionism or pursuit of excellence contribute to successful learning? A meta-analytic review.. Psychological assessment doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Stopping a behaviour leaves a gap, and only showing and rewarding the alternative fills it.
When not to
If a child's behaviour is frightening you or putting anyone at risk, that needs proper assessment rather than a better reward chart.
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
For younger children, make the reward small, concrete and soon. Stickers, points, a smiley face, five minutes of something good, handed over the same hour rather than at the end of the week.
Almost everyone has an alarm to get up and almost nobody has one to go to bed, which is odd, because bedtime is the one with nothing else pushing on it.
Fasten a time you keep missing to another person. Go up when your partner goes up. Ask a colleague to knock for you on the way to the meeting.