When school began, James struggled mightily: he couldn't follow the rhythms of the school day, couldn't sit still for long stretches, couldn’t manage transitions, and couldn't handle conflicts with his classmates. His teacher wondered if it was ADHD.

At the same time, she also noticed James was young for his grade, smaller than his classmates, and just exhausted all the time. When she thought about his relative age along with his recent move, she considered that maybe it wasn't ADHD at all. Maybe he was just developmentally behind his classmates, or maybe he was reacting to a big life transition. But, unfortunately, if it wasn't ADHD, her ability to get James real support at school would be limited. A late birthday and a new apartment don't get you an IEP.

Cases like James’s are what come to mind when I think about the recent headline-making Channel 4 documentary, The Great ADHD Myth. The central question the documentary seeks to answer is whether ADHD is a "real" neurodevelopmental disorder or a social construct. Admittedly, I haven’t watched it, but it sounds like a pretty boring premise. Not only is this an old, worn out question, but also, it's not actually answerable when framed as an either/or. ADHD is both a neurodevelopmental disorder and a social construct at the same time, just like basically every other diagnosis in the DSM.

A mental health disorder is defined by impairment in functioning, and since humans are social creatures, that functioning invariably is in social contexts. By definition, when you have psychopathology, there's a mismatch between how someone feels, thinks, or behaves and what their environment expects or allows. That mismatch is the social construct part. Why the mismatch happens in the first place might be biological or not. But how much of the problem is biologically-based has nothing to do with how real the problem is.

With ADHD specifically, someone has impairments in attention and executive functioning severe enough that they can't function well in their daily lives. The source of those impairments could be inherent to the person or to the environment. Most likely, though, it's both.

In reality, plenty of kids are young for their grade, or dealing with something hard at home, and still hold it together fine. Something about James's particular combination of factors meant he couldn't function in his environment in a way that a lot of other kids can. Maybe there was a brain-based issue. Maybe there was a life issue. Maybe, probably, it was a combination of the two. But it’s the fact that he had impaired functioning, not the specific cause of it, that qualifies him for a diagnosis like ADHD in the first place. And it seems crazy to assume that, since there were social factors contributing to James’s attention and executive functioning deficits, those deficits were not real or worthy of support. Of course they were.

A kid struggling because of overactivation in the default mode network is struggling just as much as a kid struggling because of reduced volume in the prefrontal cortex, who is struggling just as much as a kid in a classroom with expectations designed for kids who are more mature than him, who is struggling just as much as a kid trying to function while his stressed-out parents find a more affordable home. The fact that a disorder has a social dimension doesn't make it any less of a disorder. 

So, I’m begging, can we stop asking these tired, either/or questions? ADHD, like basically all psychopathology, is multifactorial. All the factors are real, and all of them deserve our attention and care.

Enjoy!

I hate to be the one to break up the party, but healthy sleep habits need to start now. (Not the week before school. Now!) I have so many teenagers in my practice who push back, arguing that they need these last few weeks to sleep a lot, as if sleep is money in the bank that they can withdraw later when they're running short. It isn't, and that's not how this works.

It’s a common misconception that a kid can sleep from 2 to 10 am for the rest of August and then just shift everything earlier after Labor Day. But, unfortunately, that’s not how it goes. Sure, the total hours matter, but the consistency matters almost as much. Eight hours a night is a great target for most teenagers, but it needs to be roughly the same eight hours, night after night, for many of the benefits to kick in. So kids need to start moving their sleep well in advance, easing toward something closer to the 11-to-7-ish schedule they'll actually be on in the fall.

Look, I get it. The last few weeks of summer are a hard time to be regimented about anything. Camp is over. Kids are enjoying some downtime, hanging around, and maybe fall sports tryouts are coming up, or maybe there's a family trip shoehorned in, but for the most part, a lot of us don't have much going on. Still, it helps to keep some kind of rhythm to the day. Set aside some time for physical activity, do something with friends outside of the house, and maybe even get to that summer homework you’ve been avoiding since June. And, while we’re at it, this is also a perfect moment to get screens out of bedrooms! 

I'm not saying we flip a switch tomorrow and suddenly it's lights-out at 10 and up at 6. There's some wiggle room. But sleep hygiene doesn't happen overnight. You can't manufacture it the night before school starts. So start easing into the fall schedule now. It'll be a much smaller shock to the system in September.

Great opportunity to see Hadestown if you haven’t already!

For the record, Eleanor is doing fine in math. Her report cards look good, and her Acadience screeners look even better. She’s happy to play math games at home. She’s eager to get ahead on learning her times tables. Her teacher isn’t remotely concerned.

She also has a jam-packed after-school schedule complete with piano, religious school, chorus, tennis, run club, and ice skating. She doesn’t want to add anything, but she’s not willing to drop anything either. One could reasonably argue that she’s over-scheduled already.

So while there’s no actual problem, I have spent actual time and energy wondering whether I should go solve one.

I call this a borrowed problem. Borrowed problems are issues that have very little to do with our own kids and experiences, and instead, we pick them up from the people around us. Someone else’s kid is doing more math, so maybe mine isn’t doing enough. Someone else’s kid is comfortable being put to bed by a babysitter, so maybe mine should be too. Someone else’s kid reads chapter books, or goes to sleepaway camp, or eats sushi, or whatever, and suddenly something that wasn’t bothering us at all starts to make us feel like we’re screwing up.

In fairness, other parents generally make perfectly good decisions. I bet RSM is great, and plenty of kids love it. But it’s a mistake to assume that if something is right for someone else’s kid, it must be right for ours, too.

So before I take action or make a change, I’ve been going back to the four questions I wrote about earlier. (1) Is this actually a problem? (2) Whose problem is it? And then only if the answer to both of those is yes, (3) Who has the power to fix it? And (4) What's the smallest possible intervention that might help?

With RSM, I didn’t get past question two. Eleanor is, thankfully, perfectly good at math, and she is happy with her after-school schedule. So what am I actually solving here? Fine, some kids go to RSM, but that’s not Eleanor’s problem; it’s a borrowed one.

Parenting is full of this garbage. We know way too much about how everyone else is raising their kids: what enrichment they’re doing, what reading level they’re on, which camps, which sports, which therapies. It’s too easy to interpret “different” as “wrong.”

But, honestly, there’s no such thing as the correct way to raise a child. There’s no correct way to make them independent, or athletic, or social, or academic, or adventurous, or organized, or whatever.

Of course some differences need attention if and when they really do get in the way of a kid’s life. But before we start fixing and optimizing and intervening, ask yourself whether what you’re looking at would even register as a problem if you had no idea what was going on with anyone else.

If the answer is no, there’s no reason to borrow the problem.

Omg

I’m not a betting woman, but if I were, I’d wager that you don’t really need either of those. (At least not yet!) Here’s why:

Most mental health struggles in kids are part of typical development. Not pathology. We’ve talked about this before: sleep problems, sibling fights, disorganization at school, picky eating, oppositionality... you name it. These are all unsavory, challenging, normal, and expected parts of childhood. It’s a mistake to medicalize these things and to reach for a clinical intervention every time something feels hard.

First of all, there’s an opportunity cost to everything. A full neuropsych and months of therapy require a lot of time and money, and these resources are often better spent on something else, like playdates and after-school activities.

But beyond the cost, clinical interventions can be stigmatizing. They can shape how a kid sees themselves. Despite our best intentions, kids may implicitly pick up the message that they are broken, something is wrong with them, and they need to be fixed.

So instead of jumping to the full eval or the weekly treatment model, I want a third option. Something closer to mental health primary care.

What I’m envisioning is the smallest possible intervention. Usually this would look like short-term troubleshooting with a licensed clinician who has specific training and can look at the situation from a distance, with some objectivity, and think creatively about how to solve it. I’m talking five sessions or fewer, on an as-needed basis, with solutions-focused work. Check in, see how it’s going, and stop when it’s no longer needed. In terms of how psychology is organized, this would fall under counseling rather than clinical services.

And this kind of work should usually involve the caregivers, not the kid. Kids don’t have full agency over their environments. They can’t enact change the way adults can. If I go see my own therapist and she tells me to adjust something in my life, I’m a fully grown adult, so I can try to do what she says. Kids can’t in the same way, for reasons that are both logistical and developmental. Their lives are run by the adults around them—namely parents and teachers—so those are the people who need to be doing the problem-solving.

Let me give you an example of what this could look like.

Adam was starting kindergarten, and the beginning of the year was rough. He was oppositional at school: arguing with teachers and refusing to participate in classroom activities. The school tried a behavior plan, but it didn’t work. His parents kept getting phone calls from teachers, and nobody seemed to know how to help.

Adam’s mom called me asking if I’d consider seeing Adam for therapy. Instead, I told her to connect me with the teacher and the school psychologist, and together, we set up a meeting. I asked them to show me the behavior plan. It needed real work: the behaviors it meant to address weren’t described objectively, so there was a lot of room for interpretation, which almost certainly meant that implementation was inconsistent and ineffective.

I reworked the plan and sent it back to the school, and suggested a few ways home and school could communicate better. I checked in a couple more times with the parents and the school over the next few weeks, and by Christmas, things had settled.

That’s it. That was the whole intervention. Leaner than a typical therapy model; more consultation than treatment. Plus, we avoided the neuropsych entirely. And it worked.

This is not to say that a full neuropsych and weekly therapy are never appropriate. Of course they are, in some cases. For instance, had Adam’s behavior continued to limit his participation in school, perhaps a neuropsych would have elucidated a cognitive impairment that was getting in the way of his academic success. Maybe a more regular, formal CBT approach would have been necessary to get the level of improvement everyone was hoping for. Who knows?

These just shouldn’t be our first-line treatment options. In the situations where you feel like you need to do something—you don’t feel comfortable with a wait-and-see approach—but a full eval and months of weekly therapy seem like overkill, see if you can find a mental health professional who is able to start with a relatively short-term, light-touch intervention, and up the intensity only when necessary.

There are already well-established models for this sort of approach in other fields. In medicine, we see a primary care doctor before going to a specialist. In education, we try informal interventions before special education services. It’s time the mental health fields caught up and embraced a multi-tiered model of our own.

For more like this, pre-order my book!

I made Eleanor watch this the other night and she thought it was boring.

Dara wanted to know if something was wrong with Jack. Anxiety? A sleep disorder? And once she knew what was causing the problem, she wanted to fix it.

I asked what they’d already tried. Nothing, she said; they’d just been making late plans.

Then I asked what would happen if they left while Jack was still awake. Dara said that they didn’t know. Jack got so upset even talking about doing something different that they’d stopped bringing it up. And besides, he fell asleep easily this way. He seemed happy. And, if she was being completely honest, she and Brett liked this part of the day with him, too.

So I asked, “What’s the problem, then? If he’s sleeping well, and he’s happy, and you’re happy, why are you trying to change something? Is putting Jack to bed stopping you from doing things you want to do?”

“No,” Dara said. Their friends teased them a little about eating dinner so late, but mostly people didn’t mind.

“Is there something coming up?” I asked. “A wedding, a work event, anything in particular that will actually require you to leave before bedtime?” No. Nothing they could think of.

I told them what they were describing sounded pretty normal. Plenty of little kids want to be tucked in by a parent. Plenty of parents like being the one to do it. It wasn’t getting in anyone’s way. Yes, Dara and Brett got teased sometimes. And yes, they stood in contrast to their friends who were able to leave their houses earlier with kids wide awake. But not every family runs the same way, and kids want different things from different people at different times. What works in one house doesn’t necessarily work in another. This isn’t pathological. Jack didn’t meet criteria for anything. He didn’t need a treatment plan. He needed his mom to tuck him in. It sounded like they’d all talked themselves into a problem that didn’t need solving.

I see this all the time. Somewhere along the way we stopped letting childhood wackiness just be childhood wackiness. Big feelings. Fighting with a sibling. Shyness. Picky eating. Not wanting to sleep away from home. Wanting a parent at bedtime. None of this is fun, but all of it is common. Normal, even.

So before calling a professional asking how to fix something, I want parents first to ask themselves four questions:

1. Is this actually a problem?

2. If it is a problem, whose problem is it?

3. Who has the power to change it?

4. What’s the smallest intervention that might help?

When Dara and I walked through these questions, she realized she didn’t have a problem. Maybe her friends did, and they were teasing her about something that Jack was “supposed” to do. But her family was okay. The smallest intervention was to just leave it alone, and Dara and Brett would reframe the situation in their minds.

Ultimately, nothing really changed. Dara and Brett still put Jack to bed. They still hand him off to Jill fast asleep and rush to their 8:30 dinners. The only thing that shifted was how they thought about it.

That’s sometimes the most powerful thing I can offer. Not a strategy. Not a diagnosis. Just permission to stop solving a problem that was never really a problem in the first place.

For more like this, pre-order my book, Actually, You’re Fine, wherever you get books!

Every movie should feature an Andrew Rannells music number

You’re confused, understandably. The tests confirmed attention and executive functioning problems, so doesn’t that mean she has ADHD?

I explain that’s not how the diagnosis works.

Our paper-and-pencil tests of attention and executive functioning aren’t diagnostic; they are descriptive. They attempt–albeit imperfectly–to isolate a single cognitive skill, and then they tell us how well a kid demonstrated that skill compared to others their age on one particular day in a quiet room with an adult giving them their full attention. It’s useful. Since executive functioning is multifactorial, it helps to pinpoint which specific aspect is giving a kid trouble, and we can tell if what we’re seeing is a real deficit or just normal kid challenges.

But as a predictor of diagnosis, our tests are weak. Attention and executive functioning problems aren’t specific to ADHD. Not even close! They show up in nearly every diagnosis we test for–anxiety, depression, learning disorders, autism, you name it. Trouble focusing and regulating are among the most common symptoms in all of psychology since so many different things can cause them.

That’s why ADHD gets diagnosed off a checklist instead. (I realize it seems unscientific and arbitrary, but I don’t make the rules!) To meet criteria for a diagnosis, you need six or more symptoms of inattention, six or more of hyperactivity, or both, showing up before age 12 and causing impairment in more than one setting. That impairment doesn’t have to show up in grades, though it often does: the classic image is one of a disorganized backpack, misplaced homework, misread directions, and ‘careless’ errors. But a kid can be getting straight A’s and still be impaired in school if the impairment is social, emotional, or behavioral in nature. Picture the kid who drives everyone crazy by blurting out answers. Or the kid who can’t lose a game without flipping over the entire board. Or the kid who can’t sit still at circle time.

But when we see nothing like that, which is what’s going on with your daughter, the ADHD label seems like a real stretch.

So you ask: Maybe she’s just good at masking? Or maybe the ADHD is just really mild? Both fair questions. As I’ve said before, kids with real ADHD generally can’t hide it so well that it’s completely imperceptible at school. And mild isn’t a vibe, it’s an actual clinical term–it means that the kid has few, if any, symptoms beyond the minimum required. Your daughter doesn’t have even the minimum required, so it’s not mild ADHD. It’s not ADHD.

But I want to be really clear: I believe you. Your daughter has genuine attention and executive functioning vulnerabilities, and what you’re seeing at home and what we’re detecting on testing is real. It’s just not ADHD. The good news, though, is that a full neuropsych doesn’t stop at attention and executive functioning. We look at those results alongside everything else–mood, learning, language, academics, and more–and, in that context, we can usually find our answers.

holy moly!

Since it’s a family device, the rules surrounding the iPad are up to my husband and me. (Mostly me!) In our house, we don’t really have strict or explicit “screen time” limits, but Eleanor generally understands that if there’s anything better to do—hang out with her brother, go to the playground, call her grandparents, even watch a movie on TV—I’m not letting her use the iPad, so she doesn’t bother asking.

The apps are ours to choose, too. I don’t think iPads are great teaching tools, but every so often I add an “educational” drawing or math game to the home screen, figuring that, while there are certainly better ways for Eleanor to practice drawing and math, at least these apps won’t be harmful, and Eleanor seems to be entertained for now. For a while she was watching YouTube videos of a girl and her mom unboxing toys, and one day Evan and I decided the videos were a little creepy and weird, but we were too lazy to monitor what she was watching, so we just deleted the app, no negotiation. And if Eleanor doesn’t like our decisions about the iPad, she is free to choose not to use it. That’s it!

Eleanor is seven. We’re at the very beginning of all this. But I think the general framework we have implemented is working and setting the stage for easier conversations later. The device—whatever it is, iPad, phone, laptop—will always belong to our family, on terms we set and can change whenever we want. Her expectations for agency and independence and privacy will be minimal if the device is effectively mine. And there will be no negotiation to have because it doesn’t belong to her, and it won’t until she can pay for it herself.

I think the main reason this seems to be effective is because nothing about technology and child development is simple, and it’s impossible to set up an allow-versus-restrict binary. I don’t buy that there’s some magic age when social media just becomes fine, but at the same time, screens aren’t going anywhere, and kids will find their way to them one way or another. Technology comes with real upsides and real downsides, and our job is to teach our kids how to use it well.

I want to be clear that I’m not sharing all this to tell anyone what to do. This is uncharted territory for all of us. It’s hard, and it’s personal, and what’s effective in one house might be a disaster in another. Plus, everything is constantly changing, so what works today might not tomorrow. So while this approach seems to be good right now for my family, I’m not claiming it’s the answer for everyone all the time. The best we can do is stay flexible and keep adjusting as we go, and I’ll share what’s held up so far in my house in case some version of it is useful in yours, too.

The only good part of the last season of Hacks

This post was one of a million I’ve seen recently. Neuromyths are everywhere in education right now: We constantly talk about “brain breaks,” “nervous system regulation,” and “learning styles” that supposedly map onto brain types. Educators try to frame teaching as a science rather than an art.

This tendency speaks volumes about what kinds of knowledge and expertise we’ve decided to trust. We rank explanations: Social explanations feel softer than biological ones, and harder explanations seem to carry more authority. When a finding from education has a brain image attached to it, it feels more proven and more real.

This is little more than philosophical prejudice. Explanations at the social or behavioral level are complete on their own terms, and they shouldn’t require biological confirmation to be considered valid. If we observe that children learn better when they feel safe and calm—and of course we have observed this repeatedly across decades with plenty of behavior data to back it up—that observation doesn’t become more true when we identify its neural correlates. Yet the brain scan is what’s being funded and published. And then it gets misinterpreted on Instagram by a well-meaning teacher who wants to prove that her work is important. Her many years of experience in the classroom and the careful social science research informing her teaching exist and are rigorous, but they don’t feel as hard as neuronal growth.

I think it’s worth asking why.

Education and child development more broadly have long been treated as intuitive rather than empirical. The knowledge these fields produce is frequently dismissed as simply anecdotal or common sense or just plain wrong. This is not incidental. These are fields that are majority-female in practice, and they deal with concerns that have traditionally been coded as feminine. Their primary methods do not look like hard science in the way that scanning a brain does, and so they are not treated as valid or legitimate.

This fits with a well-documented historical pattern: When women enter a professional field, its prestige tends to decline, and when men enter, or when the field adopts methods associated with traditionally masculine disciplines, prestige rises. Neuroscience, which remains dominated by men, follows this logic when it enters education. It doesn’t change what teachers do; it just changes who takes the work seriously. A finding about how children learn becomes more credible when paired with a picture of the prefrontal cortex, even if the teaching technique remains the same.

Notice, too, that the demand for harder scientific legitimization is not applied uniformly across fields. We don’t ask economists and engineers to justify their models. We only do this for women-dominated fields that we don’t really take seriously.

To be clear: this is not an argument that neuroscientists are sexist, or that neuroscience itself is the problem. Many neuroscientists are doing valuable work. But the relational and observational knowledge that teachers accumulate also gives them a genuine form of expertise that we should trust. Education has historically been women’s work, and thus, it has been undervalued and underpaid. Requiring biological confirmation before believing that teachers know what they are doing simply perpetuates this problem.

It is also worth noting, separately, that neuroscience often doesn’t deliver what we hope it will. I have already written extensively about methodological limitations in neuroimaging and the field’s replication crisis. But even when the neuroscience is solid, the pipeline from a lab to a classroom is long if it’s ever completed at all. Neuroimaging research typically does not change what teachers actually do. We already can figure out, from observation and experience and rigorous behavioral research, how children learn best. Neuroscience tends to do little more than confirm what we already can see with our own eyes.

And when biological explanations become the standard for what counts as real knowledge, other frameworks get crowded out. This is important because frameworks aren’t neutral. A brain-level explanation of a child’s academic struggles locates the problem inside the child. A social explanation locates the problem outside, in the broader environment where the child is required to learn. These framings point to different interventions, different responsibilities, and different politics. Neuroscientific framings tend to individualize or internalize structural problems. And the populations most affected by internal framings of their difficulties are often the populations whose social conditions and external environments most urgently need attention.

The demand for neuroscientific legitimacy is not a neutral scientific instinct. It reflects a judgment that runs along gendered lines about which kinds of knowledge are real, which methods count as evidence, and which people we trust to tell us the truth about our children.

<3

Here’s what the researchers actually did: Using brain imaging data from over a thousand children, they identified structural differences in brain networks that were associated with different clinical profiles and trajectories of ADHD. One of the networks they identified was associated with a profile characterized by emotion dysregulation, and people who fit that profile tended to have the worst outcomes over time.

That is a meaningful neuroimaging contribution. But they didn’t identify a brand new “subtype” of ADHD that includes emotion dysregulation. We have known for decades—clinically and empirically—that a substantial proportion of people with ADHD struggle with managing their emotions. Ask any parent of a child with ADHD or any professional who works with these kids. Emotion dysregulation is an extremely common and impairing feature of the disorder.

The fact that emotion dysregulation is commonly identified in people with ADHD makes a lot of sense. Emotion regulation is a core component of executive functioning, and ADHD, at its heart, is a disorder of executive functioning.

Let me back up a little bit and explain what I mean.

Executive functioning is the set of higher-order cognitive processes that allows for self-regulation. Self-regulation has three distinct components:

1. Cognitive regulation involves managing attention and thinking: things like shifting focus when something changes, holding information in mind, and filtering out irrelevant distractions. This is the domain most people associate with ADHD since it encompasses inattention, poor focus, and mind wandering.

2. Behavior regulation is the ability to manage and modulate your actions: things like stopping yourself from blurting something out, waiting your turn, and not slamming a door when you’re frustrated. Kids who struggle here often look impulsive or oppositional.

3. Emotion regulation is the ability to modulate emotional responses so they are proportional to the situation. People who struggle with emotion regulation have trouble tolerating frustration without falling apart, recovering from disappointment, and not letting a bad mood derail an entire afternoon. They tend to have explosive reactions, experience prolonged distress over seemingly small things, and struggle to soothe themselves after getting upset.

All three parts of EF are compromised to varying degrees in people with ADHD. The neuroimaging study confirms this at the level of brain structure, which is valuable. And it confirms that emotion dysregulation puts people with ADHD at elevated risk for persistent problems over time, as well as for higher rates of comorbidities with other psychopathologies, which should raise red flags for everyone involved in treatment.

So I think the takeaway about this study is: Emotion dysregulation is a core, neurobiologically distinct feature of ADHD for a great many kids, and therefore, emotion dysregulation must be a main treatment target.

Therapists must work with kids with ADHD to help them recognize when an emotion is escalating, to tolerate frustration, to understand why they react the way they do, and to repair relationships after an outburst. These are all learnable skills, and therapy should build them with deliberate, supported practice.

Also, we should consider reframing how we discuss ADHD more generally. When we talk about it primarily as an attention disorder, we implicitly signal that the emotional dimensions of the diagnosis are secondary. They’re not. For many kids, they’re the part that does the most damage to friendships, family relationships, and self-concept over time.

So, ultimately, I’m glad this study is getting some press. But the moral of the story isn’t “there’s a new subtype”; it’s that the emotional dimension of ADHD is real. Research keeps pointing us toward a more comprehensive model of treatment, so it seems about time that we act on it.

I still haven’t seen Ragtime, but I loved Caissie Levy in this! So excited about her Tony!

Why these sorts of policies exist at independent schools is really beyond me. Independent schools are allowed to do more or less whatever they want when it comes to supporting their students, so why are they requiring families to get private evaluations? Teachers are with these kids every day. They can see who’s struggling, and presumably they can fairly judge when and how to help.

Also, anecdotally, it seems that the overwhelming majority of neuropsych reports recommend extra time on tests, regardless of whether the kid in question demonstrates a functional impairment in school. So, by making the neuropsych recommendation the sole criteria, disability accommodations are being granted to many, many kids in independent schools who don’t have disabilities.

Ultimately, my impression is that outsourcing the decision making to a private evaluator, who the family selected and is paying, isn’t making the accommodations process more rigorous. It’s just making it more shady and expensive. And this matters, for reasons that go well beyond any individual student or school.

Public schools—which educate the vast majority of students in this country, including a disproportionate share of students with disabilities and limited financial resources—operate under an entirely different framework. Under Section 504 and IDEA, getting an accommodation like extended time requires meeting a legal definition of disability and demonstrating actual functional impairment in the school setting. You can’t get it just because a clinician your parents hired put it in a report.

And a downstream consequence of these misaligned systems is unequal access to accommodations on tests like the SAT and ACT. Many standardized testing companies grant accommodations at least in part based on whether a kid has gotten them at school. If a student has a documented history of receiving extended time, they have a track record to support the accommodation, and it’s basically rubber stamped. If they have no such history, they have a much harder time getting it.

So what we end up with is a world where students from independent schools—who, on average, arrive at college admissions with significant advantages in terms of resources, tutoring, and preparation—are also disproportionately taking standardized tests with extended time. Meanwhile, public school students, who had to clear a much higher bar to receive any accommodation at all, are not.

We are not measuring the same thing. We are not looking at a level playing field. We are looking at a system in which the conditions of a high-stakes test vary based on family wealth and school type, and we pretend like it’s fair.

Independent schools have fewer legal obligations to students with disabilities than public schools do. That’s true, and there are good reasons for it. But fewer legal obligations doesn’t mean no ethical ones. In this particular instance, independent schools should be playing by the same rules as everyone else, not because the law requires it, but because the alternative is using disability rights infrastructure to give already-advantaged kids another leg up.

Accommodations are not a commodity. They’re a civil rights protection. So when they’re available for purchase, something has gone seriously wrong.

Love!!!

Lucy is a 10th grader at a competitive independent school. She’s doing okay: this year, she got mostly As and Bs and a C+ in advanced chemistry that she’s not happy about. She and her parents came to me because Lucy has been struggling with anxiety and noticed that she tends to run out of time on tests. She tried extended time on a few exams through informal arrangements with teachers, and she felt like she was finally able to show what she knew. The Joneses wanted me to do an evaluation to support a formal accommodation for time-and-a-half.

Testing showed average abilities across the board. Behavior rating scales and clinical interviews indicated significant anxiety, but even so, Lucy’s academic skills appeared appropriately developed even under timed conditions. Her academic fluency scores—like her grades—were solid. So while the data did support an anxiety diagnosis, they did not support functional impairment in academics. And, in the absence of a functional impairment, I didn’t think the extended time recommendation was appropriate.

I’ve seen cases like this almost every week for the past several years. The details change–sometimes it’s attention, sometimes it’s anxiety, sometimes it’s both–but the shape of my conversation with the family is pretty similar. And I want to walk you through it, because I think it gets at something important that we need to discuss honestly and openly.

At our feedback session, I deliver the news that, despite her anxiety, Lucy's academic skills look good and she doesn't need testing accommodations. Lucy and her parents push back hard, imploring me to change my mind; the school won't grant extra time unless I recommend it.1

So I ask Lucy to review, in her own words, what’s going on. She’s articulate about it. Time pressure stresses her out. She second-guesses herself. She knows the material but feels rushed, and that anxiety compounds. With more time, she feels calmer and performs better. She believes–and her parents believe–that standard time limits are getting in the way of her reaching her full potential.

Honestly, she’s probably right.

Research suggests that most students perform better when given more time on tests. This isn’t a Lucy problem. It’s an everyone problem. When kids sit down to take a test, they are being asked to demonstrate mastery of skills they have just recently learned. At that point, most of those skills aren’t yet automatic, and working through problems takes effort and time. Plus, time pressure introduces stress, and stress interferes with performance. When you remove the clock, kids tend to do better. So Lucy tried extended time and it helped. That is real. I’m not going to tell her she imagined it or that it doesn’t matter.

So I tell her I hear and trust what she is saying. But then I say something that tends to meaningfully shift the direction of the conversation.

“Even though I agree with everything you’ve told me, I don’t think you’re disabled.”

She looks at me like I’ve said something strange. No, of course I’m not.

“Let’s talk about that,” I say. “Because what you’re asking for is a disability accommodation.”

Families seeking testing accommodations must understand that academic accommodations like extended time aren’t a school support or a wellness intervention. They fall under disability rights legislation–specifically Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act and IDEA–and exist to protect people with disabilities from discrimination and to ensure equal access to major life activities, including education.

Lucy is getting As and Bs. She’s completing her coursework. Her academic skills are nicely developed. She’s accessing school. According to my clinical judgement–and, in my understanding, the law–she does not have a disability. She has anxiety that is unpleasant and real and worth treating. She has a preference for modified testing conditions that is completely understandable, and a demonstrated experience of doing better under those conditions. But, since she is not disabled, she’s not entitled to extra time.

The Joneses push back hard. Of course they’re not arguing that Lucy is disabled. But she does better with more time, the accommodation helps her, and the school should want to support her. Plus, lots of kids without disabilities are already getting extra time, so if she doesn’t have it, she’s actually at a disadvantage.

At this point, I have to hold the line. Those things are all true—and I especially agree with their assessment of systems-level problems at Lucy’s school—but I still cannot recommend that she needs testing accommodations. The word “need,” in this context, means something specific: that without it, she cannot access her education. But the overwhelming evidence in front of us says she can.

I hope I don’t sound too judgey and unsympathetic, because the truth is, I genuinely believe Lucy is stressed, and she needs real treatment for her anxiety. I think she is attending a school where accommodations are abused. And I am a firm believer that the fairest solution for all kids would be for schools to rethink how they administer assessments. If a test isn’t measuring speed, why impose a time limit for anyone at all? But that’s a different conversation than the one about Lucy’s specific need for disability accommodations. And the last thing I want to do is to further damage the integrity of a system designed to protect people who genuinely cannot access school without support.

In the end, I referred the Joneses to a therapist who specializes in adolescent anxiety. I told Lucy that what she was experiencing was real and worth addressing. She left disappointed. Her parents left frustrated. It was as if I was refusing to give them the thing they had paid for.

That’s okay. Because, in my office, disability accommodations aren’t for sale.

So excited for this theater kid’s new album!

That said, she acknowledged that his presentation at school was very different. His teacher saw a totally different kid. There, he was reportedly cooperative and engaged. But, she said, Ethan was good at masking. He worked so hard all day to hold it together, and then he got home and totally lost it.

Unsurprisingly, on behavior rating scales, Maya’s ratings were significantly elevated across almost every domain: inattention, hyperactivity, emotional regulation, flexibility, working memory. But Ethan’s teacher, Ms. Reyes, rated him squarely within normal limits on every scale.

This kind of discrepancy isn’t uncommon. Parents and teachers see kids in very different environments with different demands. Even though they describe very different behaviors, both reporters may very well be right.

So I went to observe Ethan in his classroom.

He wasn’t particularly easy to find; nothing about him stood out. He was seated with a small group during a math activity, engaged, taking turns, raising his hand. When the class transitioned to reading, he moved with them without incident. He chatted appropriately with a classmate during a brief break. Ms. Reyes redirected him once, gently, when he got a little silly, and he pulled it back. Nothing I saw was outside the range of a typical third grader.

Direct testing told the same story. Ethan’s cognitive profile was unremarkable. His processing speed was fine. His working memory was fine. His attention was fine. Qualitatively, he looked good, and his social skills during our sessions seemed age-appropriate.

So he didn’t meet criteria for either of Maya’s suggested diagnoses. ADHD and ASD both require that symptoms be present and impairing in multiple settings. They weren’t, so the diagnostic thresholds simply weren’t met. And lowering the bar to accommodate a single-setting presentation would mean the diagnosis explained nothing, because it would apply to almost any child who struggles at home.

What the evaluation did reveal was a child who did well in high-structure environments. School, with its predictable schedule, clear expectations, consistent adult presence, and built-in transitions, was working for Ethan. Home, with its more open-ended rhythms and fewer external organizers, was asking him to provide his own structure, and that was difficult for him.

This is not how a kid with ADHD or ASD would present. They don’t get to leave their difficulties at the classroom door. Sure, structure helps these kids, but they continue to show signs of their disorders when provided typical school supports. Ethan, on the other hand, was indistinguishable from his peers.

When I shared this with Maya, I was careful. I didn’t tell her the behaviors at home weren’t real. They were. I didn’t tell her there was nothing to address. There was. But I asked her to reframe: not “Ethan is masking a disorder at school,” but “Ethan is responding to supports and structure at school, and home he needs more of both.”

That reframe opened the door to solutions. It stopped the search for a diagnosis that didn’t fit and started a conversation about what this particular kid actually needed, which, in this case, was a more predictable after-school routine, an earlier and more consistent bedtime, and a lot less unstructured time between school pickup and dinner.

It wasn’t what Maya came in expecting to hear, but it was the more honest answer, and the one that actually pointed somewhere useful.

Thanks to my mom for sending me this one!

Charlie had created the study guide after her teacher encouraged the class to color-code their notes as an organizational strategy: a way of sorting information visually to make it stick. Charlie had taken this directive very seriously.

“Can you quiz me?” she asked, uncapping a teal pen. “I want to make sure I know everything.”

We began. And within minutes it was clear that something had gone wrong. She could barely recall isolated facts, and she certainly could not connect them; she seemed to have no idea how to explain why something led to something else or how specific ideas related.

Charlie was deflated. She’d put real time and care into the study guide and had expected, reasonably, to be rewarded for it. But she’d spent so much time making the information look beautiful that she never actually thought deeply about it.

I see this sort of thing all the time. A student spends an hour preparing to study–organizing, highlighting, color-coding, whatever–and then fails to actually study, having conflated the preparation with the task itself.

This isn’t totally irrational. Organizing feels like learning. It’s active, it involves the material, and it produces something tangible at the end. And, of course, visual organization of information is helpful: notes should be legible, and related material should be grouped.

But, while creating a study guide can be a solid first step in studying, it is never the whole process. Study guides make learning possible; they don’t make learning happen. You need a tidy workspace before you can cook, but cleaning the kitchen doesn’t make dinner!

When kids study, the organizational strategies that most effectively support memory are cognitive rather than physical. They target how we consolidate and store information, not how the page looks. Chunking and mnemonics are good examples. And the most effective organizational systems are the ones you barely notice: the ones that keep focus on the content rather than drawing attention to themselves. A student’s system for managing information should never be so elaborate that it consumes the cognitive energy that should be going toward the content.

But remember that no single organizational strategy is ever a substitute for repetition, rehearsal, and retrieval practice. Once you feel like you have the information organized, test yourself. Close the book. Try to explain the concept out loud, write it from memory, or teach it to someone else. If you can do that, you’re ready.

So Charlie and I spent the rest of our time together doing something not-so-beautiful: I’d ask a question, she’d try to answer it without looking at the study guide, and then we’d check, rinse, and repeat. She got things wrong. We talked through why. The connections that hadn’t formed on paper started forming in conversation. By the end she knew considerably more because she finally stopped working on the study guide and started working with the ideas that it contained.

She didn’t use a single jelly pen the whole time.

Did you know she’s on Substack?

The most common sleep disorder in childhood is behavioral insomnia of childhood, affecting an estimated 10–30% of children. Decades of research consistently show that behavioral interventions—whether implemented by caregivers or directly with the child—are the most effective, evidence-based treatment for these sleep difficulties. That said, I’m frequently asked about faster, easier solutions. Parents and caregivers understandably want something that works now. Traditionally, those questions center around medications or supplements, but more recently, I’ve been hearing a new one: could dental or orthodontic treatment be the missing piece to better sleep? Is this an overlooked, insurance-covered solution, or just another “quick fix” that doesn’t live up to the hype?

Before we even answer that question, it’s important to note that when we work with children on sleep behaviorally, we always begin by screening for underlying medical concerns, including sleep-disordered breathing and obstructive sleep apnea. Some of the most common red flags we look for are snoring, pauses in breathing during sleep, and night sweats. If those symptoms are present, further medical evaluation is absolutely warranted.

So where do dental and orthodontic interventions fit in? The answer is that they can be very helpful, but only for the right group of children. There is solid evidence supporting the use of oral appliances—such as palate expanders, Twin Blocks, and mandibular advancement “mouthguards”—in reducing snoring and obstructive sleep apnea. However, research also tells us that sleep apnea and related breathing disorders affect only about 1–4% of children. When you step back and look at those numbers, it becomes clear that the vast majority of children presenting to me with sleep concerns are not experiencing apnea—they are experiencing behavioral insomnia.

So, will a retainer fix Bobby’s sleep? Probably not. But what will are consistency, predictability, clear routines, and thoughtful parental responses. These are the interventions that are most strongly supported by research and most likely to lead to meaningful, lasting change. And yes, those approaches take time, effort, and follow-through. I say this not just as a clinician, but as a parent: life is busy, and the appeal of a quick fix is very real. But when it comes to children’s sleep, the evidence is clear—lasting improvement comes from putting in the work, not bypassing it.

lol

That said, given what I know about Gaynor, I am fairly confident that what I read in The Free Press does not accurately represent why Dr. Levkoff lost her job there.

In the piece, Dr. Levkoff frames her departure as ideological persecution, arguing that she lost her job because she gave voice to perspectives outside progressive orthodoxy. Though it’s a compelling narrative, I don’t think it’s completely accurate; instead, I imagine Dr. Levkoff was let go after she reposted content on social media that denied the identity of nonbinary people, and families of nonbinary students at the school reasonably found it offensive.

Now, I think the more interesting question is whether what someone posts on their personal social media should factor into their professional employment at all. A reasonable person might argue that it shouldn’t, and employment shouldn’t limit free speech. I understand that argument, but I think it fails to consider the specific nature of Dr. Levkoff’s work.

Dr. Levkoff is a sex educator, not an accountant or a software developer. She claims to have built her career on the premise that young people deserve honest, affirming, expert guidance about sex and identity. Therefore, she should be aware of her position, her platform, and the effect of that platform on her students.

At Gaynor, she was working with children and adolescents who are, by definition, in the middle of one of the most vulnerable periods of identity development. That vulnerability is especially acute for young people who belong to sexual and gender minority groups. So, as a sex educator, she, of all people, should understand that a teenager who identifies as nonbinary might suffer real harm if they are forced to attend a class on gender and sexuality that is facilitated by someone who has publicly broadcast skepticism about whether their specific identity is real. When Dr. Levkoff’s personal speech started to materially undermine her ability to serve the families at Gaynor, it became a legitimate professional problem.

Truthfully, the main point I want to make here extends way beyond Logan Levkoff. I think anyone who works with kids takes on a responsibility that doesn’t simply end at close of business. We all have a duty to be thoughtful about how our public and private communications might affect the kids in our care.

Of course I need to acknowledge that there are real conversations to be had about the limits of employer reach into private life and about ideological conformity in schools. But this story is about a sex educator who denigrated students she was charged with supporting. The school made a call, and based on what I know about Gaynor—and what I know about the obligations that come with this kind of work—I think it was the right one.

speaking of sex ed…

But I want to be clear: what they did isn’t research, and it isn’t a substitute for expertise.

The main problem is confirmation bias. It’s remarkably easy to find a study that confirms what you already hope or believe is true. But science is an argument, not a chorus. For every study pointing in one direction, there is another pointing in the opposite. The truth accumulates slowly through consensus across a large body of work. That means you have to read broadly enough to encounter the full landscape of a topic, beyond what appeared in your first search. And breadth alone isn’t sufficient. You have to read critically, weighing things like study design, author credentials, sample size, recency, and risk of bias. So–setting aside the difficulty of doing research–evaluating it is a genuine skill that takes time to develop.

So what should a non-expert actually do? My recommendation is to seek out a systematic review. Unlike a conventional literature summary, a systematic review follows rigorous, transparent methodology. Authors document precisely how studies were identified, what criteria governed their inclusion, and how they evaluated the quality of the evidence. Much of what makes independent research so difficult for a non-specialist is handled for you. And a well-conducted systematic review tells you what the literature says overall, helping make sense of the contradictions within it.

So if you want a simple starting point: open Google Scholar, search “systematic review” alongside whatever topic you’re investigating, and find the most recent one available. It won’t make you an expert, but it will give you a much more solid foundation than a headline.

Leaving you this week with "Body Electric" from Fame. Enjoy!

Before we talk about it, though, I want to be clear about one common misconception: dyslexia is not a visual disorder. It is a language-based learning disorder typically rooted in phonological processing deficits. Reversing letters and seeing words “move on the page” are myths. Still, though, making text physically larger tends to help enormously. Here’s why.

Even though dyslexia isn’t primarily visual, the visual environment on a page still matters. Visual crowding—the way tightly packed letters interfere with our ability to identify individual characters—is a real challenge for many struggling readers. When letters are small and crammed together, we have to work to isolate each one before we can begin the work of decoding. When students have baseline difficulty matching letter symbols to sounds, this can be one more demand stacked on top of an already taxing process. Increasing font size and letter spacing reduces the crowding effect so the reader can spend less effort on visual parsing and more on the actual task of reading.

The benefits don’t stop at reading. Writing big is equally powerful as a math intervention.

Math requires students to manage spatial relationships on the page: columns that must stay aligned, digits that carry from one place to the next, fractions that need clearly separated numerators and denominators, etc. When a student writes small and cramped, the spatial relationships collapse. When students write larger, the work becomes more organized. The spatial structure of the problem is preserved on the page so they can see and keep track of what they wrote down.

The reasons for these benefits are twofold. First, writing big reduces fine motor demands. Many students with learning disorders also have co-occurring difficulties with fine motor control, so writing small symbols requires a level of control and precision that can be exhausting. Larger writing allows looser, more fluid movements. The physical act of writing becomes less taxing, leaving more cognitive bandwidth for the content itself.

Also, writing big supports attention to detail. When numbers and letters are larger, a student can easily spot the difference between a plus sign and a multiplication sign and keep track of negatives. Errors that come from not quite seeing what you’ve written drop dramatically.

Ultimately, writing big may not be fancy, but it’s accessible. It costs nothing. It requires no special software or equipment. But the benefits touch nearly every academic challenge a student with a learning disorder faces.

So thankful that these are not my colleagues

As I wrap up writing, there is one major theme that I have been thinking a lot about which is: we’ve made a lot of progress reducing stigma around diagnoses, but we haven’t necessarily reduced stigma around the underlying struggles. As a result, diagnostic labels are often necessary to provide people cover, grace, and a framework for making sense of the things in life that are really hard. For example, it’s understandable to fail an English test if you’re dyslexic—it’s not your fault, and it doesn’t mean you’re a terrible student—but if you don’t have that diagnosis, then you don’t have an explanation when you struggle the same way. I don’t say this to sound patronizing or to cast doubt on the validity of the diagnoses; instead, I’m pointing this out as a meaningful aspect of diagnosis that many people find really helpful and that clinicians should take into account when using diagnostic labels (or not).

At the same time, I’ve been sitting with a worry that diagnosis can sometimes slip into something that forecloses growth. If dyslexia means something is wrong with your brain and you just can’t read, full stop, there’s a ceiling on what you can accomplish. If ADHD means something is wrong with your brain and you just can’t manage your time, same problem. I think we have to be really intentional, especially when we’re working with kids, about holding competing ideas at once: this is real, this is hard, this is not your fault AND you can learn to read, you can develop the executive function skills you need, you are not stuck. Even if we don’t frame this as assigning fault or personal responsibility, we should frame it as maintaining agency, and we should celebrate and validate the hard work inherent in treating these disorders.

Then I read this piece about Tourette’s Disorder. TLDR: At the BAFTAs, John Davidson, an activist with Tourette’s whose life inspired an award-winning film, involuntarily shouted a racial slur while two Black actors were on stage presenting an award. The audience had been warned in advance that this sort of thing might happen, but even so, Davidson left out of shame and embarrassment and later issued a public apology for what happened. The piece argues that shouting the slur wasn’t Davison’s fault, and he never should have been expected to apologize for something he didn’t choose to do and couldn’t control.

I’ll be upfront that I did not follow this story closely and I am not a TD expert. But I found myself agreeing with the author’s framing and feeling that an apology wasn’t owed. And then I caught myself because I don’t feel this way about other disorders. I think, for instance, a kid with dyslexia who avoided weeks of schoolwork should be required to make it up, and a kid with ADHD who impulsively punched someone on the playground should absolutely have to make amends. Of course I think both of these kids should be given grace, empathy, and support, but we should also maintain high expectations. All of it, together, simultaneously. Both/and, not either/or.

So why does this story about TD feel different to me? Why does this diagnosis specifically feel more like something external that happened to this person, something they’re not responsible for changing? It’s not that all these diagnoses are fundamentally different in kind. They are all neurodevelopmental disorders. They all have identifiable neural correlates. They all exist on a continuum from normal to abnormal (yes, even TD; transient tics, for instance, are common in the general population).

I’ve been turning this over and I think it might come down to treatment. With dyslexia and ADHD, we have solid, evidence-based interventions, and we routinely see kids with these diagnoses make real gains. With TD, maybe the general impression (even if that impression is not entirely accurate) is that the treatment picture is murkier, and maybe that’s quietly shaping my intuitions about agency and responsibility in ways I haven’t previously examined.

Maybe the difference is also familiarity. Dyslexia and ADHD are far more common than TD, so we encounter more people who have them, we have more personal experience with them, and that shapes our impressions of what these disorders look like and what people with them are capable of.

I don’t have answers here, just questions, and my mind is currently mush. But I think it’s worth examining the possibility that our intuitions about disability, agency, and responsibility are less principled than we’d like to believe, and more shaped by exposure, treatment optimism, and our own unexamined biases than anything else.

This is pure joy and worth the full 1:22.

“There’s going to be so much sugar,” she told me anxiously. “Cereal for breakfast, juice boxes everywhere, cookies after dinner. And when Eli eats too much sugar, he becomes a different kid.”

She explained that sugar made her nine-year-old son totally hyperactive. Sometimes, if he ate too much sugar, he even got agitated, snapping at other kids or complaining loudly. Even worse than the initial hyperactivity was the crash that followed, complete with intense moodiness, tears over minor frustrations, and exhaustion that somehow made him less likely to go to bed. How could she possibly get Eli to avoid sugar when every other child would be eating their bodyweight in it?

I didn’t doubt her observations. Rachel knew her son. But when I told her that these problems probably weren’t caused by sugar, she was surprised.

She’s not alone. At this point, it’s pretty much conventional wisdom that sugar causes behavior changes in kids. But science doesn’t support it.

To be clear, when it comes to sugar and behavior, we’re not lacking evidence. This isn’t some emerging area where scientists are still piecing together preliminary findings. On the contrary, we have decades of high-quality research, including meta-analyses that synthesize results across many studies, suggesting that sugar doesn’t cause behavior problems in children. So if the evidence is this compelling, why do so many of us remain convinced otherwise?

I think the issue dates back to 1975 when pediatric allergist Benjamin Feingold published the book Why Your Child Is Hyperactive. He proposed that certain things added to our food, including sugar, were responsible for hyperactivity and other developmental problems in children. Here was a doctor offering a villain and a solution, and his book resonated with parents struggling with their kids’ difficult behaviors.

Even after subsequent research failed to validate his claims, people remained attached to this idea. And now, decades later, the message is constantly amplified on social media where clickbaity misinformation spreads faster than peer-reviewed research ever can.

But the thing that really cements the sugar-behavior connection is that our own eyes seem to routinely confirm it. Think about where children typically consume a lot of sugar. Birthday parties. Holiday gatherings. School celebrations. Temple retreats! These environments are all stimulating and exciting. Kids are running around with their friends, staying up late, and energized by noise and activity. Of course they’re hyperactive! And many get agitated and crash afterward.

But we must remember that correlation is not causation! When we test sugar consumption in calm, controlled environments, the behavior effects disappear. It’s the party, not the cake, that’s causing them to act chaotic.

When we reconceptualize the problem as behavioral and environmental, there’s actually a lot we can do to help.

For instance, I thought Eli would do better if he knew what to expect, so I suggested that Rachel spend some time reviewing the schedule and the activities with him in advance. I also figured that Eli would probably need some quiet time in the midst of a very busy schedule, so I suggested that Rachel build in breaks throughout the day. Finally, Rachel and I discussed Eli’s early signs of agitation. Rachel told me that, typically, he’d be silly and loud before he had a full meltdown. So we agreed, if she saw things moving in that direction, they should leave the activity early and avoid a problem altogether, rather than trying to power through and dealing with it afterward. None of these strategies were as simple as dietary modifications, but they directly addressed what was going on.

Rachel left our conversation reassured about the retreat, but I continued to wonder how we solve the larger problem of misinformation. Individual correction helps, but it doesn’t scale. The forces perpetuating common parenting myths are powerful and self-reinforcing.

Unfortunately, scientists bear some responsibility. Research papers sit behind paywalls, written in technical language inaccessible to most. Scientists rarely engage directly with parents, and when they do, they sometimes come across as dismissive or condescending toward people’s lived experiences. So when parents hear conflicting messages—a viral TikTok versus a study—they often trust the source that seems to understand their actual life, even if that source is technically wrong.

We need scientists who are also skilled communicators, who can meet parents with empathy and evidence. They must not dismiss parents’ observations—Rachel really does see Eli struggle when he’s amped up on junk food—but instead reframe what those observations mean.

Loved seeing this surprise guest at halftime yesterday!

For example, she needed to photograph some furniture she wanted to sell and post it on Facebook Marketplace. It seemed simple, but it had been sitting undone for weeks, and as her new furniture began to arrive, her apartment became cluttered with duplicate dressers and chairs. I suggested she invite a friend over after work that evening, treat her to dinner, and tackle it together.

She looked at me confused. “Why would I ask someone to help with something so easy?”

“You can do it alone,” I said. “But you don’t. Your friend won’t let you put this off for another week.”

This is advice I find myself giving often. Need to return shoes at Bloomingdales? Schedule lunch and shopping with a friend. Want to work out more? Find a workout buddy, sign up for a class, or, if you can swing it, hire a trainer.

The benefits are threefold. First, this approach clears mental clutter. Once you know exactly when you’ll handle something, you can focus on what’s in front of you right now without that nagging feeling of everything else you could or should be doing. And you’re no longer staring down an endless to-do list wondering where to even begin.

Second, there’s accountability. There’s social pressure in showing up for someone else. And, with something like an exercise class or a trainer, there’s financial pressure, too; you’re not just skipping a workout, you’re wasting money. These external forces tend to be more motivating than sheer willpower alone.

Third, and perhaps most importantly, doing tasks with others makes them more fun. You’re not just doing chores if you’re also spending time with a friend. And you’re less likely to avoid tasks when you have a reason to look forward to doing them.

It’s a real bummer to feel paralyzed when you want to feel productive. An appointment in your calendar, especially one involving another person, is a commitment. And commitments, unlike intentions, have a way of actually happening.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

I’m so jealous of people who haven’t watched Schitt’s Creek yet because I’m in a real TV drought and wish I could start over and see it for the first time now.