Practices

Sort the room out before you sort the willpower out. One agreed place to work, television off, phone in another room for the duration.

Attention here is pulled by whatever is brightest, and a phone face down on the table still wins. Taking the competition out of the room is far more…

A behaviour agreement needs six things in it: the goal, exactly what the child does, what they earn, what happens if they do not, signatures from everyone, and an adult who sticks to it.

Most of these fall apart over what was meant rather than over what was done, so write the specifics down to the level of what counts as finished. The…

Guard sleep first, especially through any long stretch away from the usual routine. Once the nights slide, everything else you have set up starts giving way.

Holidays, illness and school closures are when bedtimes drift, and a fortnight of late nights undoes more than any homework plan can fix. Keep the…

Put the schoolwork early in the day and let the screens come after it. For a teenager early means later than you would like, but the order stays the same.

Effort is a thing that runs down through a day, so the demanding job goes where there is most of it left. Teenagers really do wake up later, and…

Work the deal out with the child instead of handing it to them. Much the same rules, an entirely different feeling.

Let them argue for a bit longer on the console, or for Friday off, and give ground where you honestly can. The terms tend to land in roughly the same…

If you are pulled towards risk, you will do better giving that pull somewhere with a floor under it than trying to switch it off. Fast, high, cold, loud: choose the planned version rather than the one that turns up at two in the morning.

Work out what the appeal actually is. Speed, height, cold water, a crowd, the edge of fear. Then find the form of it that has brakes: a climbing wall…

Some of what feels like a flaw in your character is really a job that can be handed to something outside your head: a calendar, a list on the wall, a person who helps you lay out the week.

Coaching for attention difficulties is mostly this, and nothing more mysterious. Someone sits with you, builds the week, works out what comes first,…

Medication can make the learning possible. It does not do the learning. If no tools get built while things are steadier, there is nothing standing there when the dose wears off.

A common disappointment runs like this: the medication helps, then it seems not to be enough, then it gets stopped. Often what happened is that…

Often the most useful thing a clinician does is not delivered by the clinician. It is delivered by the teacher, or the parent, after a conversation you had with them.

Taking that seriously changes how the hour gets spent, towards talking with the school, coaching the parents and designing the arrangement, and away…

The classroom is the strongest place to help and most clinicians cannot get into one. That is a reason to work well in the next best place, not a reason to give up.

ADHD sits in how a brain is built, and the work is on the executive skills themselves rather than on attitude or effort. Where the moment of…