If Your Adolescent Has ADHD: An Essential Resource for Parents (Adolescent Mental Health Initiative)

by Thomas J. Power

These are some strategies that can help with the fine-tuning: •Self-monitoring. To determine whether your teen is meeting a stated goal, it’s necessary to keep track of the target behavior. Teens can do much of this monitoring themselves. For example, let’s say the target behavior is staying focused while doing homework. Your teen might set an alarm to beep every two minutes. Each time it beeps, your teen would then check “yes” or “no” on a checklist to indicate whether he or she is paying attention. Other behaviors might be tracked with a journal or on a chart. The information gleaned this way helps your teen see how much progress he or she has made over time, which can often be encouraging. If progress is lacking, that’s a sign that you and your teen might need to adjust your plan. •Problem-solving. Once your teen has made good progress toward changing a target behavior, it’s time to start setting your sights on the next target. First, you and your teen identify another behavior that needs to be changed. Then, you consider alternative strategies that could be used. Finally, you start the process all over again, from setting goals and making plans to delivering consequences and monitoring progress.