Practices

Changing how the family understands the child comes before the medication, before the charts, before the meeting at school. It is step one, not a friendly introduction to the real work.

Skip it and the behaviour plan still gets written, but it gets delivered with an edge, applied on the good days and abandoned on the bad ones. When…

Paediatric and psychiatric bodies have moved towards treating earlier than used to be usual. The reasoning is that the damage builds on itself.

A year of falling behind makes the next year harder, a reputation among classmates is quick to form and slow to shift, and a household that has been…

There is no single treatment that covers all of this. What works looks more like five things running alongside each other, and understanding the condition comes first.

Each piece reaches a different part of the day. Medication does something the environment cannot, changing what a room asks of someone does something…

Some situations genuinely run on how you are seen. A job interview, a court hearing, a first meeting with in-laws: the image matters there, and it is honest to say so.

The claim is only that most of life is not one of those, and that the fear of disrespect is far larger than its actual cost. Keeping the exceptions…

Before you go towards the thing you are afraid of, it helps to have two things to hand: a way to settle your body, and a fairer account of what is likely to happen.

Neither of them is meant to take the fear away. They are there so you can stay in the situation long enough for it to teach you something, and that…

A child at the nursery door who charms you, then rages, then crumples is running through the whole repertoire in ninety seconds. Nothing has gone wrong yet.

The sequence is ordinary: try connection first, then protest, then collapse when neither works. What decides how the morning lands is what happens…