Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Systems for daily life
A school to home report works daily for younger children and weekly for older ones. The point is to close the gap between what happened at school and anything that follows at home.
A young child cannot hold a week of behaviour in mind, so a week later means nothing to them. A teenager can, and daily can feel like surveillance. Either way the parent gets something better than how was school, fine, and the child gets a response that arrives close enough to the day to make sense.
Qur’an and Sunnah
God has set a due measure for everything (Quran 65:3). Getting the interval right is part of getting the thing right, and the measure differs with the child.
وَيَرۡزُقۡهُ مِنۡ حَيۡثُ لَا يَحۡتَسِبُۚ وَمَن يَتَوَكَّلۡ عَلَى ٱللَّهِ فَهُوَ حَسۡبُهُۥٓۚ إِنَّ ٱللَّهَ بَٰلِغُ أَمۡرِهِۦۚ قَدۡ جَعَلَ ٱللَّهُ لِكُلِّ شَيۡءࣲ قَدۡرࣰ ا
and will provide for them from an unexpected source; God will be enough for those who put their trust in Him. God achieves His purpose; God has set a due measure for everything
Qur’an 65:3read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
An updated systematic review classified behavioural parent training, behavioural classroom management and behavioural peer interventions as the best-supported psychosocial treatments for children and adolescents with ADHD. A school to home report is the joint between the first two, which is why it turns up so often in practice. The review classifies whole approaches and does not compare daily against weekly reporting.
Steven W. Evans; Julie Sarno Owens; Nóra Bunford (2013). Evidence-Based Psychosocial Treatments for Children and Adolescents with 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
A consequence that arrives soon after the thing it refers to is the only kind that connects to 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
Putting a task in the diary is not the same as doing it. The slot holds the time. The starting is still yours.
But what if I need it one day? The honest answer is that keeping it has a daily price. A list you cannot find anything in has stopped being a list.
Read down a long to-do list and you will find things belonging to a person you were three years ago. Some of them were never good ideas. They got written down anyway.