Don’t make any significant changes in the plan until your child has maintained improvements over one and preferably two marking terms (3 to 4 months). It’s not unusual for this plan to work initially, making parents and teachers overconfident that the problem has been solved permanently. But if you drop the plan altogether or become a lot less vigilant, your child’s performance is likely to return, even if only gradually, to preplan levels.
In some of these children, such differences represent a “developmental lag,” and over an extended period of time the child (and brain) mature, albeit 2 to 3 years later than in peers. For other children with ADHD, however, this maturation does not take place, and the weaknesses persist until adulthood. It’s important to know that children can and do vary in the development of these and other executive skills without qualifying for a diagnosis of ADHD or any other “clinical” diagnosis. As is the case with almost any set of skills, children (and adults) have strengths and weaknesses that fall along a continuum.
“You have priorities, whether you name them or not,” he says. “If you want to grow, you’d better name them, and you’d better name the behaviors that support the priorities.”
To deal successfully with transition, you need to determine precisely what changes in their existing behavior and attitudes people will have to make. It isn’t enough to tell them that they have to work as a team. They need to know how teamwork differs behaviorally and attitudinally from the way they are working now. What must they stop doing? And what are they going to have to start doing? Be specific. Until these changes are spelled out, people won’t be able to understand what you tell them.
Analyze who stands to lose something under the new system. This step follows the previous one. Remember, transition starts with an ending. You can’t grasp the new thing until you’ve let go of the old thing. It’s this process of letting go that people resist, not the change itself. Their resistance can take the form of foot-dragging or sabotage, and you have to understand the pattern of loss to be ready to deal with the resistance and keep it from getting out of hand.
When you stress access to a desired activity rather than lack of access to a desired activity, you’re keeping your child’s eyes on the prize and not the work that has to be done to get it. The behavioral data we’ve collected show that this shift really is effective: we’ve seen increases in direction following and decreases in task refusal and power struggles when adults use positive statements with kids rather than negative ones.
“Sell” the problem that is the reason for the change. Most managers and leaders put 10 percent of their energy into selling the problem and 90 percent into selling the solution to the problem. People aren’t in the market for solutions to problems they don’t see, acknowledge, and understand. They might even come up with a better solution than yours, and then you won’t have to sell it—it will be theirs.
Use a self-monitoring audiotape, available at A.D.D. Warehouse (see the Resources), to help your child stay on task. This tape sounds electronic tones at random intervals. When the tone sounds, the child is to ask herself, “Was I paying attention?”
Make increasing attention a gradual process. Take a baseline by clocking how long your child can stick with a chore, homework, or other assigned task before needing a break. Once you establish the “base rate,” set a kitchen timer for 2–3 minutes longer than the base rate and challenge your child to keep working until the timer rings.
Keep a reduced but still present level of monitoring in place for the whole year. It may be hard to stick with it when things seem to be going so well, but it’s only with this duration of reinforcement that many kids maintain long-term improvements in sustained attention.
Make sure your child has the same assigned location in the classroom every day so the teacher knows that if she is not there, she’s probably off-task. We’ve used this system in public school classrooms for a number of years and found that success depends in good part on the teacher (or paraprofessional if there is one in class) maintaining the cueing and check-in system. The only way for this to be practical is for the student to be in a consistent location in the room.
Ellen never seems to get her second-grade work done. The problem began last year in first grade once students were expected to complete seatwork independently. Her teacher made some accommodations, such as reducing the workload, because Ellen was clearly a bright student who seemed to be able to master the lessons even though she couldn’t always get her work done. This year’s teacher is not so inclined, though, and work completion is becoming a bigger issue. Mrs. Barker, her teacher, first raised the issue at the parent–teacher conference that accompanied the end of the first marking period. “Ellen is such a social child,” she said. “She seems to be able to keep track of everything else going on in the class and wants to help other students when they get stuck, but somehow can’t find her way to getting through her own work.” Shortly afterward, Mrs. Barker started sending home with Ellen the work that she hadn’t finished in school with the instructions to get it done for homework. Her mother finds herself spending long homework sessions with Ellen trying to get her through the work.
Giving children developmentally appropriate chores to do is one of the best ways to begin teaching task initiation. Starting in preschool or kindergarten, this helps teach children that there are times when they have to set aside what they want to do in favor of something that needs to get done even though it may not be fun.
Don’t hesitate to reinstitute use of the cues and the timer for a few weeks if your child stops initiating assigned chores or other tasks over a period of a month or more. Sometimes kids need a refresher course.
Involve your child as much as possible in the planning process once you’ve been providing models for a while. Ask, “What do you need to do first? And then what?” and so on and write down each step as the child dictates it to you.
Create plans for your child when young. Use the expression “Let’s make a plan” and then write it out as a series of steps. Better yet, make it a checklist, so the child can check off each step as it’s completed.
Once you and your daughter set up the desk as desired, make clearing off the desk part of the bedtime routine—initially, with on-site monitoring and supervision and eventually with reminders to start and check-ins when she’s finished. You may find it helpful to take a photograph of the space when you first set it up, so your child has a model to compare her work to. The last step in the process might be for your daughter to look at the photo and see how closely her desk matches it.
