Before I wanted them to have a phone, I got a second d phone. It was my phone, not my kids phone. I would let my child take it when they went for a ride, or stayed over with a friend, or whatever. But it was my phone. If I had to take it off them, I wasn’t taking their phone, I was taking my phone. The difference is important. It also gave them a chance to learn appropriate use, and normalised me being in control of it. By age 10-11 the phone was basically theirs, in their hands, but the control is still mine. So my advice is don’t give the phone to your child, especially it as a present. It’s more difficult to take something of theirs away, but if they borrow something of yours, it’s much easier.

I’m sort of in the same boat, except I’ve been diagnosed recently. I’m now on tablets, but am not sure that I want to be, and am trying to gauge whether they’re worth the side-effects. Too early to tell yet. My diagnosing doctor was pretty adamant that while non-pharmaceutical treatments exist, they’re an order of magnitude less effective than medication.

A lot of learned coping skills. Always put your wallet and keys in the same spot. Use timers, alarms, calendars and to-do lists. Write everything somewhere. Make this as simple as possible, otherwise I can’t find what I wrote when I need it. Make your environment as appropriate as possible to the task you’re doing. For me, this usually involves going somewhere else, because otherwise dealing with the chronic mess becomes the distraction by itself!

I always sit on one foot. It’s either that or the incessant jiggling starts.

In very small, discrete chunks. This question, that sentence, one piece at a time. Which is how I handle my own homework (I’m a teacher, so I have marking at home). If things go really well, we can get into the flow of it, and get a decent chunk done, but the deal has to be just this one little bit. Anything more is a bonus that you can heap praise upon.