Family Therapy for ADHD: From Childhood Through Launching
He is thirteen, he is bright, and everyone agrees he is bright. He also cannot reliably get his bag packed, get out the door, or tell anyone about the assignment until the night before it is due. His parents have concluded he does not care. He has concluded that nothing he does is ever enough. Both of them are wrong, and they have been having the same argument for years.
Ari Tuckman says that if you take one thing from this course, take this: ADHD is a disorder of self-regulation, and there is a two to four year delay in the skills that run a life. Not intelligence, not character, not motivation. A brilliant ten year old can be functioning like a six year old when it comes to teeth, homework and lunchboxes. What follows from that is a rule he applies with every family: how old you are is an interesting fact about you, but what you are allowed to handle on your own is set by what you can actually do. Show us you can do it and it is yours.
Three hours from primary school through to leaving home. He is practical about who should be in the room at each age, and honest that with younger children he mostly works with the parents, because he has no illusions about what a six year old retains from a therapy session. He covers reducing the chaos that makes everything harder, homework and school structure, medication and its side effects in enough detail to hold the conversation, getting two parents onto the same team when one of them probably has ADHD too, and then the part most clinicians see too late: getting a teenager genuinely ready to leave, rather than finding out in the middle of first year that they were not.
You’ll walk away with
- The self-regulation delay as a working principle, and the rule that follows from it, which settles most arguments about what a child this age should be able to do
- A view on who should be in the room at each age, from parent-only sessions with young children through to older teens with a separate channel to the parents
- Time blindness and temporal discounting explained plainly enough to hand to a family, along with why the parents are often more anxious about the deadline than the teenager is
- Why rewards and punishments raise motivation but not capability, and a simple demonstration that makes that land with a parent who has been escalating consequences for years
- Practical work on the environment rather than the child: making the thing that matters louder, making the distractions quieter, and running it as an experiment you are allowed to lose
- Homework handled at the source, including the conversation to have with the teacher about how homework actually works in their class, and having one classmate’s contact details for the nights when nobody can agree what was set
- Medication covered properly for non-prescribers: what to expect, the common side effects, which ones settle, which ones need a change, and how to talk about them with a family
- Two parents onto the same team, including what happens when one of them has undiagnosed ADHD and either over-identifies with the child or is unusually hard on them
- The halo effect teenager whose charm and intelligence have covered the gaps so far, and the positive illusory bias that has them convinced they are fine
- Getting a teen ready to leave: what the parents need to see rather than be told, failable experiments with the exit conditions written down in advance, and his case that a planned year off beats a forced one
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CPD Information For Mental Health Professionals
Enjoy complete flexibility with 100% self-paced learning you can access anytime, anywhere, and on any device. This course is included with your Tatra Training membership, along with every other course in the library.
Course Duration: 3 learning hours
Certificate and CPD hours: On completion you’ll receive a Certificate of Completion to support your CPD records. Your certificates are yours to keep.
Assessment: Complete a short quiz at the end (80% pass mark), which you can resit as many times as needed.
Revisit Anytime: Come back to the course as often as you like while your membership is active, whenever you want a refresher for practice.
CPD Eligibility: This program may be suitable for CPD for professionals such as:
- Psychologists
- Counsellors and Psychotherapists
- Social Workers
- Community Workers
- Mental Health Nurses
- General Practitioners (GPs)
- Occupational Therapists
CPD requirements vary between professional bodies, so please check with your association or credentialing body to confirm you can claim CPD hours/OPD points for this program and what evidence they require.
Course Content
Meet Your Instructor
When your adult clients with ADHD struggle to follow through on treatment plans, or when ADHD strains a couple's intimacy and communication, you need strategies that work in real-world practice. Ari Tuckman, PsyD, MBA has spent more than 25 years translating ADHD science into practical tools that help clinicians support adults, couples, and families navigating attention challenges, executive function gaps, and relationship friction.
A frequent presenter, Dr. Tuckman's teaching emphasises psychoeducation and skill-building that clinicians can apply immediately. He has delivered more than 850 presentations and podcast interviews for professionals and the public across the United States and internationally in Sweden, Turkey, Greece, Mexico, England, Spain, Denmark, Canada, and Iceland.
Dr. Tuckman is the author of five books on ADHD, including ADHD After Dark (2019) and The ADHD Productivity Manual (2025), and was inducted into the CHADD Hall of Fame in 2023 for his significant contributions to the field. He has served as conference committee co-chair for CHADD's annual International Conference on ADHD, the largest ADHD conference in the US. His work has reached audiences on CNN and National Public Radio and has been cited in The New York Times, USA Today, The Washington Post, and The Boston Globe. He contributes regularly to ADDitude Magazine and Attention Magazine, keeping the ADHD clinical community informed on emerging research and practical innovations.
In his West Chester, Pennsylvania, private practice, Dr. Tuckman works with teens and adults living with ADHD, as well as couples and families affected by attention and executive function challenges. His clinical focus spans ADHD diagnosis and treatment, executive function coaching, couples therapy, and sex therapy — including how ADHD shapes intimacy, desire, and relationship dynamics. His approach is grounded in helping clients understand their brains first, then build systems that match how ADHD brains actually work, rather than fighting against them.
Whether you're refining your assessment protocols, coaching clients on productivity, or helping couples navigate ADHD-related conflict, Dr. Tuckman's frameworks offer clear, evidence-informed steps you can teach and adapt.
For clinicians, his courses and materials provide concrete intervention strategies, language for psychoeducation, and tools to address the executive function deficits that undermine treatment gains. You'll learn how to support clients in managing time, organising tasks, sustaining attention, and regulating emotions — and how to help couples repair trust and intimacy when one or both partners have ADHD.
Qualifications
- Doctor of Psychology (PsyD)
- Master of Business Administration (MBA)
- Licensed psychologist in private practice
Selected Books
- The ADHD Productivity Manual (2025)
- ADHD After Dark: Better Sex Life, Better Relationship (2019)
- Understand Your Brain, Get More Done: The ADHD Executive Functions Workbook (2012)
- More Attention, Less Deficit: Success Strategies for Adults with ADHD (2009)
- Integrative Treatment for Adult ADHD: A Practical, Easy-to-Use Guide for Clinicians (2007)
Teaching & Roles
- Conference committee co-chair, CHADD International Conference on ADHD
- Former board member, CHADD
- Former vice president, Attention Deficit Disorder Association (ADDA)
- Frequent international speaker (850+ presentations and podcast interviews across nine countries)
- Faculty, Coach Approach Training Institute
Feedback & Reviews
This course includes:
- Lessons 3
- Topics 0
- Duration 3 hours
- Quizzes 1
- Language English