Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Systems for daily life
Early on, reward the work being finished even when it is rough. Accuracy tends to follow once things are getting done at all.
If the reward only arrives for good work, a child who never finishes anything earns nothing, and a plan that pays out nothing stops being a plan. Set the bar at completion first. Neatness and accuracy come back into the picture later, once finishing has become the ordinary thing rather than the rare one.
Qur’an and Sunnah
If the debtor is in difficulty, then delay things until matters become easier for him (Quran 2:280). What is owed is not cancelled, it waits for a moment when it can actually be paid.
وَإِن كَانَ ذُو عُسۡرَةࣲ فَنَظِرَةٌ إِلَىٰ مَيۡسَرَةࣲۚ وَأَن تَصَدَّقُواْ خَيۡرࣱ لَّكُمۡ إِن كُنتُمۡ تَعۡلَمُونَ
If the debtor is in difficulty, then delay things until matters become easier for him; still, if you were to write it off as an act of charity, that would be better for you, if only you knew
Qur’an 2:280read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A cognitive behavioural account of adult ADHD argues that the accumulated negative experiences and the sense of falling short, sitting on top of the attention and regulation difficulties, are a large part of what treatment has to work with. Bars set where they cannot be reached are how that pile gets built in childhood. It is a clinical argument rather than a tested prediction, and it comes from work with adults.
Newark PE, Stieglitz RD. (2010). Therapy-relevant factors in adult ADHD from a cognitive behavioural perspective.. Attention deficit and hyperactivity disorders doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Nothing can improve until it is happening, so the first thing to encourage is that it happens at all.
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.
Support does not have to stop at eighteen. Plan for it to thin out gradually through the twenties, at a level everyone has agreed rather than one that gets argued over every month.
Put behaviours on the report, not grades. Finished the class work, followed the rules, got on with the others, handed the homework in.