Practices

Sorting goes better fast than carefully. If every item stalls you, ask someone to sit in the room while you work, not to help but to keep the pace up.

A person nearby changes what the hour feels like, and they can be reading their own book the whole time. What they supply is momentum, which 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…

If you are going to test whether a food matters, work out in advance where the plan will leak. School lunch swaps, a grandparent's biscuit tin, your own memory on a hard week: all of it decides whether the answer means anything.

Change one thing at a time and keep everything else steady, otherwise you cannot tell which change did what. Then be honest about who is running the…

This kind of change is slow, and saying so at the start is a kindness. A goal you can actually reach beats a promise that turns the first bad week into proof of failure.

If you are helping someone, name the timescale honestly and say out loud that lapses come with it. If it is your own work, write down what a…

Nobody arrives with restraint already fitted. If holding your tongue feels like unnatural work, that is what it is for everyone, and it says nothing about what you are underneath.

This matters because the story you tell about a flare decides what you do next. Broken means give up quietly. Unbuilt means pick one situation, the…

The old reaction does not get erased. You lay a new one over the top of it, and on a tired or unfamiliar day the old one can still come through.

So a flare after months of doing well is not everything undone. That is what relearning looks like, and it tends to turn up alongside broken sleep,…

This is not a milestone you pass. The two year old's version goes, then a version comes back at twenty two, and again at fifty two, wearing whatever clothes that stage of life provides.

So think maintenance rather than course completion. When conditions change, a new baby, a new manager, an illness in the family, expect the old…

Nobody puts a child who cannot swim into the shallow end and calls it teaching. Before anyone goes near the thing they dread, they need something to do with their body and their head when the fear arrives.

It takes only one overwhelming attempt to teach the opposite of what was intended: that it really was too much, and that the adults will push anyway.…

Connection does not have to be human. A dog will not judge how your week went, and it will get you out of the door twice a day whether you feel like it or not.

If people currently feel exhausting or risky, an animal is often the easiest place to begin. Part of the good is the company and part of it is the…

If you are permanently behind, short of sleep and scrambling, that is not the backdrop to your short fuse. A good deal of the time it is the cause of it.

This is what makes the dull organisational work worth doing, because it buys you something you actually want. A morning that is not a panic leaves…

If reminders, other people's deadlines and a bit of chivvying are what keep you moving, you are allowed to keep them. Inner drive arrives later for some of us, and taking the scaffolding away early does not hurry it along.

Families often pull the supports back on a birthday, as though a certain age should switch on self-direction. What tends to happen is that the only…

When a child with attention difficulties is also at war with every instruction, that pairing is worth taking to someone early rather than waiting to see whether it settles.

The two travel together often, and a minority of children follow a path from constant defiance into more serious trouble later. Every stage of that…

When a child truly does not mind losing the privilege, taking more away will not get you anywhere. That is the moment to change approach rather than raise the stakes, usually to a structured parent programme that works on the pattern between parent and child.

Star charts fail with these children because the reward was never the point of the behaviour. What helps is a proper course of parent management…

If you are going to try a mindfulness course, give it the full eight weeks before deciding. Expect a real but moderate change rather than a different life.

Courses of this length help a good number of people and do very little for others, which is worth knowing at the start so that being in the second…

Attention problems often travel with anxiety or low mood, and those two eat working memory as well. Settling that layer can make everything else look quite different.

If you are anxious most of the day you will lose track of things, forget what you came into the room for and struggle to hold a plan, whether or not…

It does get better, but not by waiting for time to pass. The improvement comes from the walking, and the walking is small and unremarkable.

Every rep you did today changes almost nothing you can feel, which is the honest and irritating truth of it. Progress here shows up over months and…

You do not need to become a reading specialist to be useful in a school meeting. A few hours with the current material on how reading is learned will put you ahead of most of the room, and you can carry it in kindly rather than as a challenge.

Pick two or three good sources and actually read them: an introduction written for teachers, and one clear book on how reading develops. What you…

Ask a struggling ten year old what division actually is and you will often get a blank, or a method with no meaning under it. Going back to what each operation does is usually worth more than another go at this term's work.

Division is sharing out, or taking the same amount away again and again until nothing is left. Multiplication is that same amount repeated. Children…