Practices

Start with less work than they can manage, not more, and add back slowly. Break the long jobs into pieces small enough that each one can be finished and noticed.

Setting the first week deliberately below capacity feels like giving in. What it actually does is produce a run of finished things, and a child who…

Teach the school's online system properly, once, and then treat it as something known. I do not know how to use it cannot stay true forever.

Sit down together and go through it: where assignments appear, how to see what is due, what to do when it will not load. Until that has happened,…

Sort the room out before you sort the willpower out. One agreed place to work, television off, phone in another room for the duration.

Attention here is pulled by whatever is brightest, and a phone face down on the table still wins. Taking the competition out of the room is far more…

Guard sleep first, especially through any long stretch away from the usual routine. Once the nights slide, everything else you have set up starts giving way.

Holidays, illness and school closures are when bedtimes drift, and a fortnight of late nights undoes more than any homework plan can fix. Keep the…

Put the schoolwork early in the day and let the screens come after it. For a teenager early means later than you would like, but the order stays the same.

Effort is a thing that runs down through a day, so the demanding job goes where there is most of it left. Teenagers really do wake up later, and…

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.

Calendars, laundry and deadlines are the visible half. The harder half is friendship, saying no, asking for something, being alone in a room full of…

If you have been the one holding someone's schedule, meals and reminders together, do not put all of it down on the day they leave. Pass it over a piece at a time, each with a date on it.

Write out what you are actually doing for them: waking, appointments, repeat prescriptions, food, deadlines, forms. Most families are surprised by…

The next step has to be theirs. A job that looks like nothing to you might be the first thing in two years they chose without being pushed, and that is exactly why it holds.

Parents tend to want the step that recovers the lost ground. The young person needs the step they can actually take on Monday. Shifts in a shop, one…

When someone has shut down, pressure to get moving usually pushes them further in. Safety first and activity afterwards, even when the whole household is desperate for a sign of life.

Safety here is ordinary and physical. Food that turns up without being asked for. A room nobody is inspecting. Conversation that is not a progress…

Often the most useful thing a clinician does is not delivered by the clinician. It is delivered by the teacher, or the parent, after a conversation you had with them.

Taking that seriously changes how the hour gets spent, towards talking with the school, coaching the parents and designing the arrangement, and away…

The classroom is the strongest place to help and most clinicians cannot get into one. That is a reason to work well in the next best place, not a reason to give up.

ADHD sits in how a brain is built, and the work is on the executive skills themselves rather than on attitude or effort. Where the moment of…

Here is a question that costs nothing: has anyone in your family been told their vitamin D was low? It runs in families through genes, skin tone, where you live and how much time anyone spends outside.

The clinician telling this story found out only afterwards that his mother, father and brother had all been low. Nobody had mentioned it, because it…

Around seven in ten people who use herbal products never mention it to their doctor. Not out of secrecy, mostly because a tea or a gummy does not feel like it belongs on a list of medications.

The useful move is to answer a wider question than the one you were asked. When someone asks what medication you take, tell them what else you take…

A real food allergy shows itself on the body: a rash, a swollen or inflamed throat, something you can see. Behaviour on its own does not identify one, although behaviour often improves once a genuine allergy is dealt with.

One child's attention and mood went back to her usual level once berries came out of her diet, and what made that findable was the rash and the sore…

Most eating advice quietly assumes a budget. Fresh food is expensive and does not keep, so a household relying on food assistance ends up buying what lasts, and what lasts comes in tins and packets.

If money is the constraint, say it out loud rather than nodding along and then failing quietly at home. The advice can be rebuilt around what is…

Health advice usually assumes a kitchen, a fridge and money for the week. If you are working with less than that, the answer is not to try harder at the advice. It is to shrink the plan until it fits what you actually have.

A plan you cannot keep does more than fail. It quietly adds to the pile of evidence that nothing you do makes any difference, and that pile is heavy…

A child struggling with attention, anxiety and daily reflux at once may be dealing with one problem wearing three coats. Undiagnosed coeliac disease and other food reactions can produce all of it, and the gut symptom is the clue worth following.

Symptoms that arrive together are worth asking about together. If reading, mood and stomach all went wrong over the same period, that pattern is…

If you are testing whether a food affects you or your child, the test has to be complete. Among children with suspected sensitivity to artificial colouring, most reacted to as little as 100 mg, so a bit left in is enough to blur the answer.

What usually happens is that a family removes the obvious sources, misses the ones hidden in medicines, sauces and cereals, sees no change, and…

Cutting artificial preservatives out can genuinely help a child who reacts to them, because a child who feels unwell behaves worse. What it does not do is treat the ADHD underneath, which will still be there once they feel better.

Worth being clear with yourself about what you are hoping for, because these diets are expensive and hard to keep up. If your child does have…

Gluten free and dairy free eating is essential in coeliac disease and in a genuine milk allergy. Neither one treats ADHD, and putting a child on them without a reason carries costs of its own.

The cost is not only money and nutrition. It is the birthday party where they cannot have the cake and the lunch table where their food is different…