Most parents write to me in the evening. The homework that should have taken fifteen minutes has taken two hours, somebody has cried, and the house is already braced for tomorrow when the same thing happens again over a different worksheet.
So, before anything else. ADHD coaching for a child is a weekly 45 minute conversation, online, between me and them. We find the exact place where things give way for that particular child, and they leave with one small thing to try before we next speak. I work with children from the age of nine. You are in it from the start, with your own session before your child and I ever meet, and you do not need a diagnosis to begin.
I came to this by two routes. I spent years living abroad working in hospitality and childcare, around other people’s children most days, and what that teaches you is that a pattern is visible long before the child inside it has any word for it. The second route is that I have ADHD and did not find out until I was an adult, after years of deciding that the problem was me. Both of those sit behind every session I run with a nine-year-old.
Why does homework end in a fight?
Because by the time your child sits down at that table, the hardest work of their day is already behind them, and none of it was maths.
A school day asks a child with ADHD to sit still, hold instructions they heard once, wait their turn in a queue of their own thoughts, and look fine while doing it. Most of them manage. That is the part parents are rarely told, and it is why so many reports come home saying no concerns. Managing costs something, and the bill gets paid at home, where it is safe enough to fall apart.
Underneath that there is starting, which is a skill in its own right and the one ADHD takes first. A child can want to do the sheet, know it is twelve sums long, know it will take ten minutes, and still be unable to make their hand pick up the pencil. Ask them why and they will tell you they do not know, because they do not. Nobody has given them language for it, so they reach for the word somebody else handed them, and that word is usually lazy. I have written before about what that word does to a person who has carried it since childhood. Children carry it exactly the same way, with less ability to argue back.
Time belongs in here too. Fifteen minutes is a measurable quantity to you. To a lot of the children I work with it is a shapeless word meaning either no time at all or the rest of their life, with nothing in between, which is why “it will only take fifteen minutes” has never once calmed anybody down.
A sticker chart does not touch any of this. It rewards the result of a skill nobody has taught yet.
What happens in a session with a child?
Forty-five minutes, once a week, online, with you out of the room.
I talk to the child rather than over their head to you, and I do not use clinical language with them. We use theirs. What colour they are today. How much is left in them by the time maths comes round on a Thursday. Where the homework stops, which children can tell you with startling precision when the question is specific and nobody in the room is cross.
A good deal of it happens on paper. A child who will not say a thing out loud will draw it, then explain the drawing, and in explaining it tell you the whole story.
They leave with one experiment. One, small enough that it sounds like it could not possibly matter. The pencil case open on the table before dinner. The first sum done standing up. A timer set for four minutes instead of twenty. Small is the point, because a plan built by an adult who does not live inside that child’s head gets followed for two days and then resented.
What changes first is almost never the homework. It is the recovery. A bad Tuesday stops taking Wednesday and Thursday down with it, and the distance between the meltdown and the apology gets shorter. The homework shifts later, once your child has any evidence at all that they are not the problem.
From what age can a child start ADHD coaching?
Nine. Not because something switches on at nine, but because coaching asks a child to notice their own thinking and describe it, and below roughly that age most of them are not there yet. For younger children the useful work sits with the parents, and I will tell you that rather than take your money.
From nine through to young adults the shape of the work stays the same and the language changes.
Teenagers are their own case. A fourteen-year-old who has been taken to three professionals already will spend the first session or two working out whether I am another adult sent to fix them, and whether what they say comes straight back to you. That time is well spent. The ones who decide the hour belongs to them are the ones who use it.
Does my child need an ADHD diagnosis first?
No. Plenty of the children I work with are on a waiting list that will not give anybody a date, some are at the very start of the conversation with a GP, and some will never be assessed at all.
If you want the assessment, go after the assessment. Coaching going well is never a reason to give up an appointment you have waited two years for, and I will say so if it comes up.
What I am not is a clinician. I do not diagnose and I do not treat, and if something in the room belongs with a psychologist or a doctor I will tell you plainly and help you find the right person. If you are weighing up which of the two your child needs, I have written about where the line between coaching and therapy sits.
Is ADHD coaching the same as tutoring?
No, and the difference decides where your money is best spent. A tutor teaches the subject. If your child does not understand fractions, book the tutor.
Coaching works on the distance between understanding fractions and being able to start the fraction homework. That distance is the gap between knowing and doing, and it is the most misread thing about ADHD in a child. From the outside it looks like choice.
Where do I fit in as a parent?
Heavily, at the start. We begin with a session that is just you and me, before I meet your child, because an hour of your account of the last three years saves months of guessing.
After that you get general progress and whatever we have agreed to try that week, and your child keeps the detail. That line matters more than it sounds. A child who suspects the session is a report card will hand you a performance and nothing else. The exception is safety. If anything came up that worried me about your child’s wellbeing you would hear it from me, and your child knows that from the first session.
You get one job between sessions. One, not a programme, because you are already running eleven of them.
Something I see often enough to say out loud: somewhere around the third or fourth parent session, a mother describing her son’s forgetfulness hears herself. The unopened post. The diary she keeps in her head and gets wrong. The form that has travelled from the table to the counter and back for a month. Her son is nine and she has had thirty more years of being told she is disorganised. That is most of the difference between them, and it is useful to say in a house where everyone has decided the problem belongs to the child.
What ADHD coaching for a child costs
Four 45 minute sessions a month, CHF 520, rolling monthly, cancel whenever you like. There is no twelve week block for children, because children do not develop to a schedule and a fixed programme would have me finishing on a date chosen before I met them.
The parent session and the updates are part of it, not an extra. Your child gets their own private space online for the work we do together, and you get your own login showing progress and session notes without opening the room itself. It is the same work as the Aligned Approach to ADHD that I run with adults, done in their language and at their pace.
Your child was never the problem
If you take one thing from this, let it be that. Your child is not giving you a hard time at that table. They are at the end of a day that took everything they had, and nobody has shown them what to do about it yet. That part can be taught, and it is far easier to teach at nine than at thirty-nine.
Where to start
If you recognised your evenings anywhere in this, the next step is a free 30 minute call. Bring the last bad evening in detail. I will tell you honestly whether coaching is the thing that helps, and if it is not, I will tell you what is.
If you would rather not talk to anyone yet, the alignment quiz takes about eight minutes and has a route for parents answering about a child. You come out of it with a clearer picture and one next step. No labels, no pressure, and nothing you have to decide tonight.
FAQ
At what age can a child start ADHD coaching?
From nine, through to young adults. Below nine the work is more useful with the parents, and I would tell you so rather than start too early. Sessions are 45 minutes, which is roughly what a child has left in them at the end of a school day.
Does my child need an ADHD diagnosis to start coaching?
No. Many of the children I work with are on a waiting list or have never been assessed. If you want an assessment, pursue it. Coaching neither replaces it nor depends on it, and I will say so if a diagnosis is the thing that would help most.
Will I know what my child talks about in their sessions?
You get general progress and whatever we agreed to try that week. The detail stays with your child, which is exactly what makes them use the hour honestly. The one exception is safety, and your child knows that from the first session.
