Practices

It runs the other way as well. Among children referred for dyslexia, a sizeable minority also have ADHD and many have coordination difficulties too. Whatever is written on the referral, treat it as one part of the picture.

Where the reading difficulty is severe, motor involvement is more likely to be there alongside it, which is why the first look should be wider than…

Dyspraxia and developmental coordination disorder are the same thing carrying different passports. Search only the American term and you will miss a large European literature on assessing and helping these children.

Search both, and try the older names while you are there. It matters most when you are looking for what actually helps, since much of the…

When a bright, talkative autistic child arrives looking mainly behavioural, look underneath for a coordination or reading difficulty. Once the first label is in place, whatever comes after tends to get filed under it and never assessed on its own.

Watch for the child who does well in conversation and badly on paper, or who is fine in class and miserable at PE. Those gaps are usually a second…

Expect more anxiety, low mood, drinking and drug use in the young people coming through now. And expect the boys to say less about it, so go looking for irritability, trouble and substances instead of waiting to be told.

Ask parents what they are seeing rather than only what they have been told, and ask the young person directly and privately. Screening that rests on…

Keep the tasks short, a couple of minutes each, with results back the same day. A long test given to a child who cannot sustain attention measures how long they can last, not the thing you were trying to measure.

Brevity is not a convenience you are allowing yourself. It is what keeps the data honest, and it keeps the child willing for whatever you ask next.…

Choose the subtests that answer the question you were actually asked, and read whatever reports the family already has before adding anything of your own. Children arrive with thick folders, and they also arrive with nothing at all.

Where occupational therapy, speech and language or neuropsychology have already covered ground, do not cover it again for the sake of a complete…

When you explain executive function to parents and teachers, four words will do: attention, reasoning, speed, memory. Each one can be worked on, and four is a number people can still repeat at the school gate a week later.

The academic models have a dozen headings and nobody outside the field retains them. A short list gives parents something to hang observations on, so…

Two referrals turn up again and again. A young child being asked to leave a school for behaviour, with no developmental or cognitive information anywhere in the file. And a parent saying something is wrong while the school says everything is fine. Both are describing adult frustration rather than a formulation.

In each case the first job is the same: get some data. Not another opinion, not another meeting, but something measured about how this child thinks…

Practise with the noise on, at least some of the time. The quiet room is not where you are going to need the skill.

A calm that only exists in a silent house is not much use in an open plan office or a kitchen at teatime. Once you can settle in the quiet, do a…

Once a day, go from head to feet and notice what is there. A good deal of what you find will be plain need: thirsty, hungry, needing the loo, needing to stand up.

When you get absorbed in something these signals go unheard for hours, and then you wonder why you feel dreadful by four o'clock. The scan is dull,…

Brain imaging does show that practice changes something. Be careful with anyone who tells you a great deal more than that.

It genuinely helps to know that sitting and breathing is not nothing, particularly if you have been told your whole life to just try harder. It also…

In muscle relaxation you are usually told to let go slowly. If slow leaves you fidgeting, let go all at once. The version you will keep doing is the better version.

The standard sequence is to tense a muscle group, hold it, then release gradually, and for some people that long release is unbearable to sit…

Your eyes are an input too. A photo of someone who loves you and a plain soft coloured wall will settle you; a busy bright screen will lift you.

Hardly anyone thinks to arrange what is in front of them, and it is one of the easier things to change. Put a picture where you actually sit. Turn…

Once a day, run through five things in order: how your mind is, what your body feels, how the breathing is going, what the emotional weather is, and how much energy you have. Curious, not marking yourself.

The order matters more than the answers do. Without a set path, checking in with yourself slides easily into chewing over the same worry, and you…

The same check-in can take two minutes or fifteen. Match the length to the day you are actually having, not to the version you were taught.

A long deep look inward is not always the better one. On a day when you are already far from yourself, going deeper can take you further out rather…

Finish a check-in by asking what actually brought you here. Not the task in front of you, the thing underneath it that you want.

Noticing how you are can leave you sitting in it. One more question turns it outward: what am I hoping for, what am I moving towards. It might be…

Take the spine through all six of its movements: forward, back, bending to each side, turning to each side. Standing or sitting, it takes under five minutes.

Doing the whole set matters more than doing any one of them beautifully. Left to ourselves we skip the direction that feels stiff or guarded, and…

Posture does not only show what you feel, it decides what you can feel. Anger is very hard to reach with a collapsed chest, and grief is hard to reach when you are held rigidly upright.

If a feeling seems to be nowhere at all, look at the shape you are sitting in before deciding it is absent. Let the chest open a little, or let a…

Once a movement is familiar, drop the pattern. Let it curve and wander towards wherever your body seems to want it, rather than doing it correctly.

Following instructions well is a skill many people learned early, sometimes because it was not safe to do anything else. A practice made entirely of…

Instead of breathing deeply in general, pick the place that feels tight, the front of the ribs, the chest, one shoulder, and send the breath there.

You are not really moving air into your shoulder, but putting your attention there while you breathe does two things: you start to feel that area in…