Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Systems for daily life
Print the agreement out and stick it up where the child will see it. In a drawer it may as well not exist.
The moment that matters is the one where the console is right there and the maths is not started, and nothing you agreed a fortnight ago is in the room at that moment unless you put it there. A page on the fridge or above the desk is present when the temptation is. It also stops the terms drifting quietly in either person's memory.
Qur’an and Sunnah
By the pen! By all they write (Quran 68:1). Writing is worth swearing by, and a thing written and left in view goes on working long after the conversation ended.
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A randomised exploratory trial gave people a written help sheet pairing each likely obstacle with a response prepared in advance, and physical activity increased in a group with low socioeconomic status. The sheet being a physical thing you keep is part of what it is. It was a small exploratory trial in adults about exercise, so treat the posted agreement as the same idea rather than as the tested one.
Armitage CJ, Arden MA. (2010). A volitional help sheet to increase physical activity in people with low socioeconomic status: A randomised exploratory trial.. Psychology & health doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
An agreement you can see at the moment of choosing is the only one that is there when you choose.
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.
Praise the sitting down at the desk, not only the finished piece. If recognition only shows up when something is completed, most weeks it never shows up at all.
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.