Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Systems for daily life
Work the deal out with the child instead of handing it to them. Much the same rules, an entirely different feeling.
Let them argue for a bit longer on the console, or for Friday off, and give ground where you honestly can. The terms tend to land in roughly the same place, and now they belong to both of you. This counts double with teenagers, and more again where there is a stubborn or oppositional streak, because every moment of holding to the deal afterwards is either something shared or a fight.
Qur’an and Sunnah
conduct their affairs by mutual consultation (Quran 42:38). Deciding together is set out as the ordinary way to run things, not as a concession made when you have to.
وَٱلَّذِينَ ٱسۡتَجَابُواْ لِرَبِّهِمۡ وَأَقَامُواْ ٱلصَّلَوٰةَ وَأَمۡرُهُمۡ شُورَىٰ بَيۡنَهُمۡ وَمِمَّا رَزَقۡنَٰهُمۡ يُنفِقُونَ
respond to their Lord; keep up the prayer; conduct their affairs by mutual consultation; give to others out of what We have provided for them
Qur’an 42:38read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A Cochrane review of personalised care planning covers arrangements where the person and the professional jointly identify the problems and agree concrete goals and actions, rather than one side prescribing to the other. The whole approach rests on a plan you helped make being one you will actually follow. Those trials were with adults managing long-term physical conditions, so applying it to a family agreement is a reasonable step rather than a tested one.
Coulter A, Entwistle VA, Eccles A, Ryan S, Shepperd S, Perera R. (2015). Personalised care planning for adults with chronic or long-term health conditions.. The Cochrane database of systematic reviews doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
People keep to terms they helped write and push back against terms handed to them.
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
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.
When a young person is struggling to launch into adult life, it is usually two things at once: the practical scaffolding, and the social side. Work on one only and the other tends to pull it down.
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.