Practices

Most children with ADHD can tell you exactly what they should have done. The knowing was never the missing piece, which is why a course teaching the knowing changes so little.

Watch closely and you see the skill appear in quiet moments and vanish in loud ones, when another child has already grabbed the ball and there is…

What a person expects from a treatment genuinely changes what they get from it. That is not a trick to be exploited, and it is not nothing either.

In some trials the dummy treatment helps around half the people who receive it, and there is work showing benefit even when people were told outright…

People who use several kinds of help tend to report more benefit than people relying on one. Medication, therapy, coaching, reading, sleep and movement all seem to add something rather than compete.

That turns a hard conversation into an easier one. Instead of pressing a reluctant partner towards the single thing they least want, you can offer a…

Two ideas will let you judge most claims for yourself. In a good trial nobody involved knows who got the real treatment, and a study of five people can be swung by one of them having a good month.

Researchers want their treatment to work, and that hope leaks into how they rate what they see, which is why the person handing out the pill and the…

One social approach does have a real evidence base behind it, and what makes it different is who delivers it. Parents do the coaching, in the middle of actual play with actual friends.

In practice it looks small and ordinary. You set up a play date, you stay within earshot, you give a nudge before things tip over, and afterwards you…

Behaviour work for ADHD is mostly about changing what the adults do. The child's behaviour shifts afterwards, as a consequence.

Consequences live in other people's responses, and a child who cannot yet hold a reward in mind across three days cannot supply them for themselves.…

A child's reputation is made in the classroom, mostly out of adult earshot, and it follows them from one year to the next. Teachers who work on how the class treats the child, and not only on the child, can move it.

The version that has been trialled has the teacher doing small deliberate things: pairing children with some thought, noticing this child out loud…

The most convincing programme for teenagers does the obvious thing. It runs at school, twice a week, so nobody has to be driven anywhere: homework systems, organisation, some social practice and sport, in the place where the trouble actually happens.

By the teenage years the leverage parents had is thinning, and a clinic appointment is the first thing to fall off the week. Putting the help inside…