Attention and self-regulation

The problem is rarely that your child isn't trying.

By the time most families reach us, their child has been told to focus, sit still and try harder for years. What usually has not happened is a serious look at the demands themselves — how long the tasks are, how instructions are given, what the classroom expects between the instruction and the work.

We do not diagnose ADHD, and we do not prescribe or manage medication. Both belong with independent clinicians. Where medication is part of your child's care, we work alongside it and report what we see.

Where this sits in the five stages

Understand Plan Build Transfer Step Back
What brings families to us

You may recognise some of this.

None of these is a diagnosis and none of them means something is wrong. They are the patterns that tend to be described on the first call.

  • Work that gets started and never finished, across every subject
  • A gap between what your child clearly knows and what appears on paper
  • Homework taking three times as long as the school thinks it should
  • Behaviour that spikes at unstructured times — transitions, breaks, the end of the day
  • A school that has run out of strategies and is now describing the problem as motivation
What support looks like

ADHD, through the five stages.

The pathway is the same for every child. What changes is what each stage contains.

01

Understand

A functional needs assessment across home and school.

What that looks like hereWe watch where attention actually breaks — which subjects, which times of day, which kinds of instruction — rather than accepting a general description of distractibility.
02

Plan

The Independence Plan, in plain English.

What that looks like hereGoals about starting, sustaining and finishing work independently, with the classroom changes that make each one possible written next to it.
03

Build

Intervention and parent coaching.

What that looks like hereSelf-management strategies taught explicitly, practised in real tasks, with the home routine coached alongside so the two agree.
05

Step Back

Support reduces on purpose.

What that looks like herePrompts fade first, then adult proximity, then session frequency. Each fade is a milestone in the plan, not an improvisation.

What we do

  • Look at the task and the environment before looking at the child's effort
  • Break goals down to something reviewable weekly, not termly
  • Give the class teacher a small number of changes they can actually sustain
  • Coach you on the home routines where most of the friction lives
  • Measure whether support hours are coming down, and report it either way

What we don't do

  • Diagnose, prescribe, or advise on medication
  • Recommend a full-time assistant where a change of task design would do
  • Confuse compliance with learning
  • Bill for hours nobody can point to a goal for

If any of these is what you are looking for, we are the wrong provider and we would rather say so now than three months in.

We do not diagnose our own clients. Formal diagnosis stays with independent clinicians we neither own nor pay. Our assessment is functional — what your child can do, what gets in the way, what a school can realistically deliver. It is a different question, and we are careful not to blur the two.

Questions

Straight answers.

Can you diagnose ADHD?

No, and that is deliberate. Diagnosis stays with independent clinicians we neither own nor pay, so the people deciding what your child needs are never the people who profit from the answer. We will name clinicians and you go to them directly.

My child is on medication. Does that change what you do?

It changes what we watch. We record what we observe across the day and share it with you and, with your consent, with the prescribing clinician. We do not advise on doses and we never suggest changing medication.

Does my child need a diagnosis before you can help?

No. Our assessment is functional — it looks at what your child does and what gets in the way, which does not require a label. If a formal diagnosis would open doors at school or with insurance, we will say so.

Where this starts

Tell us what you've noticed.

Twenty minutes on the phone with someone who does this every day. No assessment, no cost, and no obligation to become a client at the end of it.

If we're not the right people, we'll tell you who is. That includes naming providers we don't own, and it costs you nothing either way.