Practices

For younger children, make the reward small, concrete and soon. Stickers, points, a smiley face, five minutes of something good, handed over the same hour rather than at the end of the week.

Points that build towards something bigger work well, as long as the point itself arrives immediately. Hourly is not too often for a young child, and…

Keep consequences for the sake of honesty, but let praise and reward do most of the work. Punishment can tell a child what to stop and it cannot tell them what to do instead.

Children with this difficulty collect an extraordinary amount of correction over a childhood, from teachers, from parents, from other children.…

Go looking for the moment the child does the thing you have been asking for, and say so while it is still happening. Most of us watch for the problem and only notice the good behaviour when we have run out of trouble.

It helps to decide in advance what you are hunting for, so that starting the homework without being asked, or waiting a turn, actually registers…

Part of what keeps the late start going is that it has genuinely worked. You have produced something good in one long night before, and you remember it clearly.

So telling you that leaving it late is a bad plan tends to fail, because you have evidence and the other person does not. The honest version is…

The dreaming is not the problem. It is that bills, forms and renewal dates are dull enough to stop registering at all, and those are the things that actually damage a life.

People who are managing well in every visible way still get brought down by a lapsed policy or an unopened letter from the council. Trying to care…

When someone reminds you often enough, things do get done. But the sense of time doing the work is theirs, which is why it all collapses the moment they stop.

Worth naming out loud in a household, because the reminding costs the relationship something and never builds the missing part. A better arrangement…

When someone tells you they have failed, the most useful thing you can do is nothing clever. Let your face stay soft and keep looking at them.

Shame is braced for disgust, so it reads your face before it hears your words. A quick reassurance can even land as a rush to move on. Slower is…

When someone's shame fills the room, check your own state before you say anything. If you start to shrink, or to worry that you are handling this badly, they will feel it.

Shame is catching. The particular risk is a quiet spiral of your own, along the lines of I am no good at this, which pulls you out of the room at the…

You did not choose which things hurt you. Where you are tender was set long before you had any say in it, and the only live question is what you do with it now.

This is worth saying out loud between two people, because each usually thinks their own soft spot is embarrassing and the other's is obvious. Try…

ADD and ADHD are not two different things. ADD is the older public word for what is now called ADHD, inattentive type, and the quieter presentation is not a lighter version of it.

The mix up matters more than it sounds. Parents sometimes hear ADD and take it to mean something mild that will not need treatment, and school or…

Manuals rename things. Paediatric bipolar became disruptive mood dysregulation disorder, whole categories were reshuffled to line up with the international classification, and none of it changed who anybody was.

If you have old paperwork carrying a label nobody uses now, that is bookkeeping rather than a hidden verdict on you. What is worth your attention is…

Some people will not believe this exists whatever you show them. You are allowed to give a short honest answer and then let the conversation go.

Keep one or two plain facts ready for people who are genuinely curious, because that conversation is often worth having. It is a different…

Talking a lot is on the diagnostic list. It sits with the impulsive symptoms, which makes it part of the condition rather than proof that you are self absorbed.

That reframe is worth having, because most people who do this have been told off for it for years and have drawn an unkind conclusion about…

ADHD now sits with the neurodevelopmental conditions in the diagnostic manual rather than under disorders that begin in childhood. That move carries a claim worth hearing: this is about how a brain is built, and it does not stop at eighteen.

The older category quietly implied something you would grow out of, and plenty of adults were told exactly that. Shifting it means the evidence for a…

If your version of this is fog, slowness and drifting off rather than restlessness, you are not a half case. Researchers are still arguing about whether that pattern is a subtype or something of its own.

The quiet presentation gets noticed late, because it disturbs nobody. It seems to sit alongside a different set of difficulties too, more inward than…

The feeling that everyone else was handed a manual on how to be with people has a plain explanation. Most social rules are picked up by watching, and watching steadily is the hard part for you.

So the gaps are real rather than imagined, and they are gaps in information, not in worth. That is oddly good news, because information can be taught…

By the time somebody comes for an assessment, the poor opinion of themselves is usually decades old. Assume it is there even when the person in front of you is visibly doing well.

It rarely arrives as a complaint. It shows up as apologising for taking up your time, as brushing off achievements, as a joke about being useless…

The famous ADHD success stories are real and they are also the exception. The commoner story, for someone whose difficulty was never identified, is quietly dropping out of things and disappearing.

Both halves need saying. Strengths talk that only features the founder who made millions can turn an ordinary struggling week into a personal failure…

Everyone is late sometimes and everyone gets forgiven for it. The catch is that the ordinary allowance runs on how often rather than how badly, and yours tends to be spent early in the month.

This is why behaviour people shrugged at last year gets a sharp response now, without anything about you having changed. Worth knowing, because the…

With children, acting a situation out teaches far more than talking about it. Play the scene, swap roles, get it wrong, do it again.

Explaining social rules to a child who missed them leans on the same steady attention that let them slip past in the first place. Rehearsal skips…