Welcome — Read This Part First
Hi. Before you flip to the worksheets, take sixty seconds for this page. It changes how the rest of the book lands.
Most books about attention start with what is wrong with a kid. This one does not. This one starts with a simple, stubborn fact that took researchers decades to accept: attention and self-control are not things you either have or don't have. They sit on a long line. Everybody is somewhere on that line, for every skill, and everybody moves along it depending on sleep, stress, interest, hunger, and how much practice they've had.
That idea is the whole reason the SWAN exists. SWAN stands for Strengths and Weaknesses of ADHD symptoms and Normal behavior. It was designed by researchers who were tired of tools that only asked, "How bad is it?" A SWAN-style rating asks a better question: "Compared to most people your age, where are you on this skill — below average, average, or above average?" Same question, both directions. That small change matters enormously, because it means a young person can find out they are above average at generating ideas on the exact same page where they find out they are below average at finishing them. Both are true. Both are useful.
This is an educational and self-reflection workbook. It is not a diagnostic test, and finishing it does not mean anyone has or does not have ADHD. Only a qualified professional — a physician, psychologist, psychiatrist, or licensed clinician — can diagnose ADHD, and only after gathering information from several settings and ruling out other explanations. The rating pages in this book are adapted and simplified for reflection and conversation. Use what you learn here to ask better questions and to build skills. Bring it to a professional; don't use it instead of one.
Who this book is for
If you are 8 to 12, this book will feel like a set of challenges and experiments. Read the yellow boxes on the worksheets. Get a grown-up to do the activities with you at first — not standing over you, but next to you, doing their own version.
If you are 13 to 18, read the blue boxes on the worksheets. They ask harder, more honest questions, and they assume you have real responsibilities: assignments with real deadlines, a phone that is genuinely engineered to take your attention, friendships that get complicated, and maybe a job or a car. You may also be sick of adults telling you to "just focus." Fair. Nobody in this book will tell you that. The word "just" is doing dishonest work in that sentence, and we're going to take it out.
If you are a parent, caregiver, teacher, coach, or clinician, there is a purple Parent Coaching Corner in every chapter and a full guide for you starting on the Parent & Caregiver Guide chapter near the back. Please read that chapter before you hand this book to a child. It will save you several arguments.
A promise about the word "normal"
The N in SWAN stands for "normal behavior," and that word makes some people flinch. Here is exactly what it means in this book, and nothing more: the range of behavior you'd expect from most people of the same age. That is a statistical statement, not a compliment and not an insult. Being outside the usual range on a skill is not a character flaw, and being inside it is not an achievement. Nobody in this workbook is "normal" or "not normal." People are just people, doing skills, at different levels, on different days.
ADHD is not a shortage of attention — it is trouble steering attention. The brain systems that decide where the spotlight points, hold instructions in mind while you work, and put the brakes on a first impulse tend to develop more slowly and run less consistently. That is why a person with ADHD can play a game for four hours and still not start a ten-minute worksheet. It was never about caring.
How to Use This Workbook
You can read this book front to back, but you don't have to. Here is the design underneath it, so you can use it on purpose instead of by accident.
Each one explains an idea in plain language, then gives you five worksheets to actually do something with it. Thirty worksheets total.
Every worksheet has a yellow box for ages 8–12 and a blue box for ages 13–18. Do the one that fits. Older readers can do both.
Purple boxes speak directly to the adult. They include word-for-word scripts, because knowing what to say is half the job.
The four colored boxes and what they mean
Blue boxes explain what is happening inside the brain, in language you can repeat to someone else. Understanding the mechanism makes strategies stick.
Green boxes are small, specific experiments you can run in under ten minutes. No supplies, no permission needed.
Yellow boxes are real-sounding sentences from young people. If one of them sounds like your brain, you are not the only one. That matters more than most people admit.
Purple boxes are for the grown-up. Young readers are welcome to read them — in fact, reading them can be useful, because it shows you that the adults in your life are being asked to change too.
Five rules for making this workbook actually work
- Write in it. Circle, scribble, cross out. A clean workbook is a workbook nobody learned from. If it's a shared or printed copy, use a notebook alongside it.
- Do one worksheet at a sitting. Not five. Five is how a workbook becomes a chore, and chores get abandoned. Ten to twenty focused minutes beats an exhausted hour every single time.
- Be boringly honest. Nobody grades this. If you write the answer you think an adult wants, you get an accurate picture of an imaginary person and no help at all.
- Finish the reflection question. The activity is not the learning. The sentence you write about the activity is the learning. Doing a focus exercise teaches you almost nothing; noticing what helped teaches you everything.
- Come back to it. Redo Chapter 1's rating pages after six weeks. Skills move. You will want the receipts.
Right now, before you turn the page: pick a day and a time you'll work in this book — for example, "Tuesdays and Thursdays, right after snack, at the kitchen table." Write it on the cover. A plan with a when and a where attached is roughly two to three times more likely to happen than a plan that only has a what. Researchers call this an implementation intention. You can just call it deciding in advance.
Meet Your SWAN
Imagine two rulers. The first one measures how much of a problem you have. It starts at zero and goes up. There is nowhere on that ruler for "actually, I'm great at this." That's the ruler most checklists use, and it's why so many kids finish them feeling smaller than when they started.
The SWAN uses a different ruler. It runs from far below average, through average in the middle, to far above average. Same skill, both directions, one line.
Unpacking the four letters
S — Strengths
- Things you do better than most people your age.
- They count even if school never grades them.
- They are your repair kit, not a consolation prize.
W — Weaknesses
- Skills that are genuinely harder for you than for most people your age.
- A weakness is a skill, not an identity.
- Naming one out loud is the first move toward changing it.
A — ADHD Symptoms
- The specific behaviors clinicians look at: inattention, hyperactivity, impulsivity.
- Everyone shows some of them sometimes.
- What matters is how often, how many settings, and how much it costs you.
N — Normal Behavior
- The usual range for someone your age.
- It is a comparison point, not a target.
- Nobody is average at everything, and nobody should try to be.
“I thought a checklist about me would just be a list of everything I mess up. When I found out I could score above average on 'notices things other people miss,' I stopped hiding from it.” — age 13
The temptation with any rating scale is to hunt for the low scores. Resist it for one full sitting. When you review the scale with your child, read the three highest items out loud first, by name, and stop there for a minute. Then say: "Now let's find the three that cost you the most, because those are the ones we're going to build tools for." That order — strengths named, then challenges framed as build projects — is the difference between a child who engages with this book and a child who quietly decides it's another document about their failures.
My SWAN Reflection Scale
Fill in one bubble per row. Nobody is grading this, and honest beats impressive.
What the numbers say
For a parent, caregiver or teacher. Rate the same 18 skills for the young person, over the last month, compared to most people their age — and do it before you look at their page. Where you disagree is where the conversation is.
What the numbers say
Your profile map
Five skills, plotted together. Near the middle means harder for you right now; near the outside edge means this is a strength. Teal is your own rating, purple is the grown-up’s, and a dashed grey outline is your last saved re-rate. Almost nobody’s shape is a circle — that is the entire point.
1 = far below average for your age, 5 = far above.
Re-rate yourself in six weeks
Skills at these ages move — sometimes a lot, over months. Save a dated result now, put a reminder in a calendar, and do the scale again. Comparing two dated results is evidence nobody can argue you out of.
Low scores here are not a verdict, and this is not a diagnosis. They are a reason to talk to an adult you trust and, if the difficulties show up in more than one place and are getting in your way, to ask for a real evaluation. Asking is not admitting something is wrong with you. It is collecting better information about how your brain is built.
Adapted and simplified for reflection from the format of the Strengths and Weaknesses of ADHD-symptoms and Normal-behavior (SWAN) rating scale (Swanson and colleagues). Item wording has been rewritten for young readers, scoring is simplified, and no norms are applied. It is not the research instrument and must not be used for diagnosis, eligibility decisions, or research.
Understanding ADHD Symptoms
Before you can build a skill, you have to know what you're actually working with. This chapter gives you the real explanation — the one that makes the strategies in Chapter 3 finally make sense.
- What ADHD is (and the three things people wrongly think it is)
- The three symptom families: inattention, hyperactivity, impulsivity
- The genuine strengths that live inside each one
- Why symptoms hit focus and self-control specifically
What Is ADHD?
ADHD stands for Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder. It's a name that has annoyed researchers for thirty years, because it describes the outside of the thing instead of the inside of it.
Here's the inside of it. Your brain has a set of skills that scientists call executive functions. Think of them as the crew that runs the control room: one crew member decides where your attention points, one holds instructions in mind while you work, one keeps track of how much time has passed, one puts the brakes on your first impulse, and one gets you started on things that aren't fun. ADHD is what happens when that crew develops more slowly and shows up to work less consistently than it does for most people the same age.
Notice what that definition does not say. It doesn't say the crew is missing. It doesn't say the brain is broken, damaged, or less intelligent. Research consistently finds no relationship between ADHD and how smart a person is. What it says is that the control room is harder to staff — especially for tasks that are boring, long, or far away in the future.
The three things ADHD is not
You can care enormously about something and still be unable to start it. Caring lives in one part of the brain; starting lives in another.
Plenty of people with ADHD are quiet, still, and daydreamy. The hyperactivity can be entirely on the inside — a brain that will not stop broadcasting.
Symptoms change shape with age. Effort helps a lot. Effort alone, without tools, mostly produces exhausted people.
Your brain uses a chemical messenger called dopamine partly to answer one question: is this worth my attention right now? In ADHD, that signaling system tends to run differently. Tasks that are new, urgent, competitive, or genuinely interesting produce enough signal to lock attention in place — sometimes so completely that you forget to eat. Tasks that are repetitive, slow, or only rewarding later produce almost no signal at all, and the brain treats them roughly the way your hand treats a hot pan. This is why "I played that game for five hours but couldn't do twenty minutes of math" is not a contradiction. It's the single most predictable thing about ADHD.
The Three Symptom Families
Clinicians sort ADHD behaviors into three groups. Almost nobody has all of them, and the mix changes with age. Read these as descriptions, not as accusations.
Family 1 — Inattention
This one is badly named too. It isn't a lack of attention; it's trouble aiming attention and holding it there on purpose. It looks like:
- Reading a page four times and absorbing none of it, because your eyes were on the words and your mind was on a conversation from Tuesday.
- Losing the second half of a set of instructions the moment you start the first half.
- Careless mistakes on work you actually know how to do — wrong sign, skipped question, name left off the page.
- Starting five things and finishing zero, not because you got lazy but because each new thing was louder than the last.
- Losing your phone, your water bottle, your jacket, your homework, and occasionally the thing you are currently holding.
- Looking like you're listening while your brain quietly leaves the building.
Family 2 — Hyperactivity
Movement that doesn't match the room. In younger kids it's usually visible: climbing, bouncing, running, an engine that will not idle. In teens it often moves inward and becomes restlessness — a leg that won't stop, a need to stand up, a feeling of being trapped in a chair, or a mind that races at night when the room finally goes quiet.
- Fidgeting, tapping, spinning, rocking, chewing.
- Getting up when everyone else stays seated.
- Talking a lot, loudly, fast, and often over people.
- Feeling "driven by a motor" that you didn't turn on and can't turn off.
Family 3 — Impulsivity
Acting before the thinking part catches up. This is the family that gets people in the most trouble, because it's the most visible and the most easily mistaken for character.
- Blurting the answer, the joke, or the honest opinion nobody asked for.
- Interrupting — not to be rude, but because the thought will genuinely evaporate if you hold it.
- Hating to wait, physically. Waiting can feel like holding your breath.
- Big decisions made in two seconds: sending the text, buying the thing, taking the dare.
- Emotions arriving at full volume with no fade-in.
“People think I interrupt because I don't care what they're saying. I interrupt because if I wait, my thought is gone. Not forgotten — gone. Like it was never there.” — age 16
When you read the impulsivity list, you may recognize the exact behaviors you've been correcting for years. Here is the reframe that changes outcomes: impulsivity is a delay problem, not a values problem. Your child usually knows the rule. They can recite it back to you. What fails is the half-second gap between the urge and the action — and no amount of explaining the rule again will widen that gap. What widens it is practice with pausing (Chapter 3 and Worksheet 19), predictable cues, and enough sleep. If you find yourself saying "you know better than this," you're right, and that's precisely why repeating it won't work.
Two More Things Nobody Puts in the Official List
Time blindness
Many people with ADHD experience time in two settings: now and not now. A deadline three weeks away sits in "not now" and is emotionally invisible — and then it crosses some hidden line and becomes an emergency overnight. This isn't procrastination in the ordinary sense. The future genuinely does not feel real yet. That's why every strategy in this book that works involves making time visible: timers you can see, calendars on the wall, deadlines broken into today-sized pieces.
Big feelings, fast
Emotional intensity isn't in the formal diagnostic checklist, but ask any clinician and they'll tell you it's one of the most common experiences people describe. Frustration, excitement, embarrassment, and joy can all arrive at full strength in under a second and take much longer than average to come back down. Rejection and criticism can land unusually hard. None of this means you're dramatic or too sensitive. It means the same braking system that struggles with impulses also has to brake feelings, and it's working with the same limited grip.
Strengths and Weaknesses: The Same Trait, Two Directions
This is the heart of the SWAN idea, so read it slowly. Most ADHD traits are not simply bad. They are situationally costly and situationally valuable, and the situation decides which one you get.
| The trait | What it costs you | What it can buy you |
|---|---|---|
| Attention that roams | Missed instructions, unfinished work, careless errors on things you know | You notice what everyone else filtered out — the joke, the pattern, the mistake in the poster, the person sitting alone |
| Hyperfocus | You lose whole afternoons and don't hear anyone; hard to stop on demand | Extraordinary depth when the topic is right — the skill that builds real expertise faster than most people can |
| High energy | Trouble sitting, disrupted classes, exhausted adults | Endurance, drive, presence — you can carry a team, a practice, a shift, a crowd |
| Fast idea generation | You jump tracks mid-sentence and lose people | You produce more ideas, and more unusual ones, than the room. Original solutions come from here |
| Acting quickly | Regretted words, risky choices, apologies | Decisiveness in a crisis, courage to start, willingness to try the thing everyone else is still discussing |
| Emotional intensity | Meltdowns, conflict, feelings that flatten your day | Deep empathy, loyalty, and enthusiasm that other people can actually feel and follow |
| Hating routine | Chores, forms, and repetition go undone | You question the way things have always been done, and sometimes you're right |
Pick one row of that table that sounds like you. Now, for the next 24 hours, catch yourself using the right-hand column once and write down exactly what happened, where you were, and who was there. That's not positive thinking — it's evidence collection. You're going to need it in Chapter 4, when you use your strengths as tools.
How Symptoms Hit Focus and Self-Control
Let's connect it. Focus and self-control are downstream of five specific skills, and ADHD affects all five.
When starting is hard, work doesn't begin until panic supplies the missing signal — which is why "I do my best work at the last minute" is so common and so expensive. When holding is hard, you walk into the kitchen and forget why. When steering is hard, one notification costs you not four seconds but sometimes twenty minutes, because getting back is the expensive part. When braking is hard, the sentence is out of your mouth before your judgment arrives. When timing is hard, "I'll do it later" is a sincere promise made by someone with no functioning clock.
Every strategy in this workbook targets at least one of those five. That's why the strategies look so simple — a timer, a list, a pause, a checklist on the wall. They aren't simple because you need simple things. They're simple because they're external replacements for a crew member who's running late. A person who wears glasses is not failing at seeing. They found the external tool that works, and then they got on with their life.
The glasses comparison is worth saying out loud in your house, more than once. Kids with attention difficulties absorb a specific, corrosive story: everyone else can do this without help, so needing help means I'm less. Counter it concretely. Name the tools that adults in your family use without shame — your calendar alerts, your grocery list, your alarm, the reminder you set so you don't forget to call your mother. Then say the line plainly: "Tools aren't cheating. Tools are what capable people use. We're going to find yours."
Watch alongside this chapter
Free public video that covers the same ground from another angle. Links open in a new tab.
Identifying ADHD Symptoms
Part A — Sort the behaviors
Below is a word bank. Write each item into the column where it belongs. Some could arguably fit in two — if you think so, write it in both and put a question mark. Being able to argue about it means you understand it.
| INATTENTION aiming & holding attention |
HYPERACTIVITY movement & energy |
IMPULSIVITY acting before thinking |
|---|---|---|
Circle it, then act it. Go back to the word bank and circle every item that has happened to you in the last week. Then pick your favorite one and act it out for someone in your family without using words — make them guess which one it is. Laughing about a symptom takes some of its power away.
How many did you circle? That number is information, not a score. Nobody wins this.
Rank by cost, not by frequency. Of everything you circled, which three cost you the most — in grades, in money, in relationships, or in how you feel about yourself at 11pm?
| Behavior | What it actually costs me |
|---|---|
1. | |
2. | |
3. |
Part B — The honest reflection
Which family (inattention, hyperactivity, or impulsivity) shows up most in your life — and in which place: school, home, sports, online, with friends?
Remember: showing symptoms is not the same as having ADHD. Nearly everyone circles a few. Chapter 2 explains exactly what makes the difference.
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The Toolbox
Four instruments you can use anywhere in the workbook — or on their own, in the middle of a hard afternoon. Nothing here needs setting up.
Focus timer
Set a block you can actually finish, work until it ends, then take the break even if you are in flow. Stopping on purpose is what keeps you willing to start again tomorrow. Every finished block is logged, and the log feeds Worksheet 18.
Start at 5. Five real minutes beats forty pretend ones, and you can grow it. If the number goes down three days running, something else is going on — sleep, stress, illness, or a task that is genuinely too hard. Investigate that instead of pushing harder.
Box breathing
Follow the dot around the square. In for four, hold for four, out for four, hold for four. The slow out-breath is the part your nervous system actually responds to — so if you shorten anything, do not shorten that.
Where am I right now?
Self-control runs on a budget, and what is possible depends on where you are on this line. Move the slider. This one is worth showing to the adults in your house — most arguments happen because someone tried to teach at a 5.
Stop · Think · Go
The pause, in three moves. Tap each lamp. Practise it when nothing is at stake — skills rehearsed calm are the only ones available to you when you are not calm.
My Progress
Everything you have filled in, counted. This page is the argument against a bad afternoon: memory is unreliable and heavily weighted toward whatever happened most recently, so on a rough day you will sincerely believe nothing is working. This page is the receipt.
Chapter by chapter
Keeping a copy
Your answers save automatically in this browser, on this device, as you type. Nothing is sent anywhere. That also means they live in one place only — so if this matters to you, export it.
- Save my work as a file writes a
.jsonbackup you can load back in later, or move to another device. - Save my answers to read writes a readable
.mddocument of everything you have written — the one to email, print, or bring to a session. - Load a file replaces what is here with a saved backup.
Everything typed into this workbook stays in the browser it was typed in. It is not uploaded, not shared, and not visible to the author of this workbook or to anyone else. If a young person is using a shared device, remember that anyone else who opens this page on that device and browser will see the same answers — and that a diary which gets read uninvited stops being honest within a week.
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Resources & Where to Get Help
Everything below is a starting point, not an endorsement of any particular treatment or provider. Availability differs by country. When in doubt, start with your family doctor or your child's school.
If you need help right now
United States: Call or text 988 for the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline — free, confidential, 24/7. You can also chat at 988lifeline.org. The Crisis Text Line is reachable by texting HOME to 741741.
United Kingdom: Samaritans, 116 123. Canada: 988. Australia: Lifeline, 13 11 14. Elsewhere: search "crisis line" plus your country, or contact your local emergency number.
If someone is in immediate danger, use your local emergency number. You do not need to be certain it's serious enough. That's what these services are for.
Organizations worth knowing
| Organization | What it's good for |
|---|---|
| CHADD chadd.org | The largest US non-profit for people affected by ADHD. Parent toolkits, local chapters and support groups, a school toolkit, and the National Resource Center on ADHD. |
| ADDitude additudemag.com | Practical articles, webinars, and downloadable tools for parents, teens, and adults. Broad and readable; check dates on articles. |
| Understood understood.org | Excellent plain-language explanations of learning and attention differences, school rights, and classroom accommodations. |
| ADHD Foundation / ADDISS (UK) | UK-based information, training, and family support. |
| Your national ADHD association | Most countries have one. Search "[your country] ADHD association" — local guidance on evaluation pathways is usually far more useful than international advice. |
| Your school | Ask the counselor or special education coordinator directly what supports exist and how to request an evaluation. Put requests in writing. |
Books — for parents and caregivers
- Taking Charge of ADHD, Russell A. Barkley — the standard, comprehensive parent reference from one of the field's most cited researchers.
- The Explosive Child, Ross W. Greene — the source of "kids do well if they can," and a genuinely different approach to conflict and rigidity.
- Smart but Scattered and Smart but Scattered Teens, Peg Dawson & Richard Guare — the most practical books available on executive function skills, with assessments and step-by-step plans.
- Driven to Distraction and ADHD 2.0, Edward Hallowell & John Ratey — warm, strengths-oriented, written partly from the inside.
- What Your ADHD Child Wishes You Knew, Sharon Saline — built around what young people themselves report.
- How to Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk, Adele Faber & Elaine Mazlish — not ADHD-specific, and still one of the most useful communication books a parent can own.
Books — for young readers
- Learning to Slow Down and Pay Attention, Kathleen Nadeau & Ellen Dixon — written directly to younger kids.
- The Survival Guide for Kids with ADHD, John F. Taylor — friendly, practical, ages roughly 8–12.
- Thriving with ADHD Workbook for Kids and …for Teens, Kelli Miller — good companions to this one.
- Fidget: A Book About ADHD and similar picture-led titles — useful for explaining ADHD to younger siblings.
- Graphic novels and memoirs by people with ADHD — for many teens, seeing their own experience drawn does more than any explanation.
Tools and apps
| What you need | What to look for |
|---|---|
| Visible time | A visual countdown timer (physical ones are better than phone apps, because they don't come with a phone attached). A plain kitchen timer works. |
| Focus blocks | Any Pomodoro-style timer. Simplicity beats features; an app with settings is an app you'll spend twenty minutes configuring instead of working. |
| Reminders | The alarm and calendar app already on the phone, with alerts set for the moment of action, not the deadline. |
| Task capture | One list, in one place, that goes everywhere. Paper is fine. Two lists is the same as zero. |
| Body doubling | Study-with-me videos, a silent call with a friend, a parent working at the same table, a library. |
| Distraction blocking | Built-in screen time and focus modes on the phone itself — ideally set up once, by someone else, with the passcode elsewhere. |
Getting a real evaluation
- Write down what you're seeing — specific behaviors, how often, in which settings, since when, and what it's costing. The worksheets in this book are designed to produce exactly this.
- Start with your family doctor or pediatrician. Ask directly: "I'd like an assessment for attention and behavioral regulation. What's the pathway here?"
- Ask the school in writing what evaluation and supports they can provide. In the US, a written request typically starts a formal timeline.
- Expect a thorough process: history, rating scales from more than one person and setting, and a genuine look at alternative explanations — sleep, anxiety, mood, hearing and vision, learning disorders, and circumstances.
- Ask questions. What are the alternatives? What would we expect to see if this is working? What's the follow-up plan? A good clinician welcomes these.
Notes on the Approach
About the SWAN
The rating pages in this workbook are adapted and simplified from the format of the SWAN — the Strengths and Weaknesses of ADHD-symptoms and Normal-behavior rating scale, developed by James Swanson and colleagues. The original instrument reframes the standard diagnostic symptom list as bidirectional items rated against age peers, which produces a more normally distributed measure of the underlying traits and, importantly, allows a person to score above average as well as below.
The version in this book is not the research instrument. Item wording has been rewritten for young readers, scoring has been simplified for reflection rather than measurement, and no norms are applied. It should not be used for diagnosis, eligibility decisions, or research. Clinicians who want the validated instrument should seek out the published version and its scoring guidance.
Where the ideas come from
The strategies here draw on well-established lines of work that most practitioners will recognize: executive function and behavioral inhibition models of ADHD (Barkley); executive skills coaching and the assess-then-scaffold approach (Dawson & Guare); collaborative problem-solving and the "kids do well if they can" framing (Greene); developmental research on co-regulation preceding self-regulation; implementation intentions and if-then planning (Gollwitzer); behavioral parent training principles common to established programs; and mindfulness-based attention training, which reviews generally describe as producing modest but real benefits for attention and emotional regulation in young people with ADHD.
Where this book states something as a general finding, it reflects the broad direction of that literature rather than any single study. Specific numbers are given only where they are widely reported, and are framed as approximate. Readers wanting the primary sources should start with the organizations listed on the previous pages, which maintain current, referenced summaries — a better bet than any book's bibliography, which starts aging the day it's printed.
A note on language
This workbook uses both "person with ADHD" and "ADHD brain" deliberately, because young people themselves use both and strong feelings exist in both directions. Use whichever your family prefers, and let the young person choose — it's their brain and their word.
The word "normal" appears throughout because it's the N in SWAN. In every instance it means the usual statistical range for people of the same age — nothing about worth, effort, or character.
This workbook is an educational and self-reflection resource. It is not a diagnostic tool, a psychological assessment, or medical advice, and it is not a substitute for evaluation, diagnosis, or treatment by a qualified professional.
Completing the rating pages does not indicate whether any person has, or does not have, ADHD or any other condition. Only a licensed clinician can make that determination, and only after gathering information across settings and considering alternative explanations.
If you have concerns about a child's or teenager's attention, behavior, mood, development, or wellbeing, consult a physician, psychologist, psychiatrist, or other qualified health professional. If there is any concern about immediate safety, contact emergency services or a crisis line without delay.