Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Systems for daily life
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.
Homework has four separate places to fail: writing down what it is, bringing the right things home, actually doing it, and getting it back the next day. No adult is watching across the whole of that. Putting it on the report puts a small light on every step of the chain rather than only on the finished piece of work.
Qur’an and Sunnah
After that will come seven years of hardship which will consume all but a little of what you stored up (Quran 12:48). A system is built around the stretch you can see coming, and with homework you can usually see it coming.
ثُمَّ يَأۡتِي مِنۢ بَعۡدِ ذَٰلِكَ سَبۡعࣱ شِدَادࣱ يَأۡكُلۡنَ مَا قَدَّمۡتُمۡ لَهُنَّ إِلَّا قَلِيلࣰ ا مِّمَّا تُحۡصِنُونَ
After that will come seven years of hardship which will consume all but a little of what you stored up for them
Qur’an 12:48read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A clinical trial of a family-focused programme for teenage drivers with ADHD asked whether working on family functioning showed up in something real and specific, in this case safer driving, in an area with almost no available treatments. Choosing a concrete everyday behaviour to track is the same instinct as choosing handed-in homework. That trial is about driving, not homework, so the parallel is in the approach only.
Fabiano GA, Schatz NK, Morris KL, Willoughby MT, Vujnovic RK, Hulme KF, Riordan J, Howard M, Hennessy D, Lewis K, Hawk L, Wylie A, Pelham WE. (2016). Efficacy of a family-focused intervention for young drivers with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder.. Journal of consulting and clinical psychology doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
A task that crosses two places with nobody watching in between needs something that follows it across.
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
There is a corner of the week that is neither urgent nor important, and it is where avoiding lives. The real cost is rarely the lost hours. It is what you end up saying to yourself afterwards.
The cheapest place to deal with a task is before it ever reaches your list. Some things are better declined in the moment they are offered.
Difficult things come out more easily when your hands are occupied and you are not looking straight at the other person. Walk side by side, drive somewhere, wash up together, keep the sewing going.