Akıllı Ama Zorlanıyor (Smart but Scattered)

The original title is Smart but Scattered. The first edition was published by Guilford Press in 2009. In 2024 a second edition was published, with Colin Guare joining the authors.

There is a Turkish edition: Akıllı Ama Zorlanıyor, Diyojen Yayıncılık, 2018. According to the Kitapyurdu listing, the translator is Gökçe Ünal and the book is 370 pages. Because the Turkish edition came out in 2018, it is a translation of the first English edition; the novelties of the second edition are not in the Turkish.

The authors and the context

Peg Dawson has a doctorate in school and child clinical psychology, worked for many years as a school psychologist, and served as president of the National Association of School Psychologists. Richard Guare is a clinical psychologist who specialized in neuropsychology and a board-certified behavior analyst. For a long time the two worked together at the same learning and attention disorders center in New Hampshire.

The two also have a handbook for clinicians that has reached its third edition. Smart but Scattered reads like the same clinical framework written for parents.

This context explains the nature of the book. Rather than a parenting book, it is a practice plan that a behavior analyst and a school psychologist hand to the parent.

Is it an ADHD book

Not exactly. The book is about children whose executive skills are weak. Some of these children have ADHD, some do not.

The publisher says the book is aimed at children between four and thirteen. Children who are disorganized, who leave their work half done, who cannot get their time right, who explode at a small setback.

Most children with ADHD fit this description. But there is an important point: ADHD and executive function weakness are not considered the same thing. The 2005 meta-analysis by Willcutt and colleagues found clear group-level weaknesses on executive function tests in children with ADHD, but also showed that these weaknesses are not seen in every child with ADHD.

For this reason the book should not be read as a source that describes the whole picture of ADHD. Diagnosis, medication and the nature of the condition are not here. What is here is a concrete working plan for particular skills that do not function in daily life.

In the article on executive functions on the site I explained in more detail how these skills relate to ADHD.

Eleven skills

The spine of the book is a list of eleven executive skills. Dawson and Guare's classification goes like this:

• Response inhibition: Being able to stop before acting.
• Working memory: Being able to hold information in mind while doing a task.
• Emotional control: Being able to manage emotions to reach goals.
• Flexibility: Being able to adapt when plans change.
• Sustained attention: Being able to stay focused on a task even if it is boring or tiring.
• Task initiation: Being able to start a task without putting it off.
• Planning and prioritization: Being able to sequence the steps toward a goal.
• Organization: Being able to keep things and information in order.
• Time management: Being able to estimate time, divide it up and keep to a deadline.
• Goal-directed persistence: Being able to hold out for a long-term goal.
• Metacognition: Being able to observe and assess your own way of thinking and working.

I wrote the definitions in my own sentences. The strength of the list is that it breaks an abstract concept into behaviors a parent can observe at home. Instead of saying my child is disorganized, being able to say my child can start a task but cannot sustain it, or plans but cannot estimate time.

This distinction shows that two children who seem to have the same problem may need very different help.

A caution: these eleven skills are not a scientifically validated neuropsychological model. It is a practice-oriented classification based on clinical observation. It works, but other researchers group executive functions differently.

The architecture of the book

The first edition has three parts.

The first part is about drawing up the child's skills profile. The parent assesses which skills the child is strong in and which they are weak in.

Then the book does something surprising: it asks the parent to draw up their own profile too.

This part seemed to me the cleverest place in the book. A parent with weak organization trying to teach order to a child with weak organization, and a parent with strong flexibility trying to understand the rigidity of a child with weak flexibility, are very different challenges. The book takes up this pairing separately: the fit between the child's skills and the task expected of them, and the fit between the parent's skills and the child's.

Since ADHD is hereditary, a significant portion of the parents of children with ADHD experience similar difficulties. This chapter gives those parents a chance to see the situation without blaming themselves.

The assessment in the first part is not a diagnostic tool. It rests on the parent's observation, and the parent's tiredness or expectations that day can affect the result. Using it as a road map is right; using it to put a label on a child is wrong.

The second part is basic principles and an ABC framework. This model, which comes from behavior analysis, suggests three points of intervention.

A, antecedent. Changing the environment: making the task smaller, putting in visual cues, reducing distractions, setting up order in a way the child can manage.

B, behavior. Teaching the skill directly: showing step by step, doing it together, gradually withdrawing support.

C, consequence. Motivating the child: praise, rewards, consequences that make using the skill meaningful.

The order matters. The book directs the parent to look first at the environment, then at teaching, and last at motivation. Most parents start from the opposite end: they set a reward or a punishment, and when it does not work they decide the child does not want to.

The third part is application. First come ready-made plans for daily routines. Then a separate chapter for each skill. At the end, what happens when what the parent does is not enough, and working with the school.

Ready-made plans

This is probably the most used part of the book.

Routines are broken into small steps; it is worked out how to give support at which step and how to reduce the support. A parent can open the book and apply a routine plan almost as it stands.

As a reader with ADHD, reading these plans I thought this: a scaffold this detailed is the very thing I tried to build on my own in adulthood. If someone had built this scaffold when I was a child and then slowly taken it down, it would have saved me years.

The philosophy of the book is here too. The aim is not for the child to need this support forever; it is for the support to be reduced as the child internalizes the skill.

Reading a skill chapter

The skill chapters apply the ABC framework from the second part to individual skills. I want to explain with an example what kind of thinking this turns into in a parent's hands.

If task initiation is weak, the first question is about the environment: is the task too big in the child's eyes, is the starting point unclear? The second question is about teaching: has the child been shown how to define the first step? The third question is about consequences: is the starting itself noticed and appreciated, or is only finishing cared about?

I built these questions myself, starting from the logic of the book. But this is what the book really gives the parent: more than a list of advice, a method for finding where a problem gets stuck.

The two hardest skills

I think the ones that challenge parents most on the list are emotional control and flexibility. Both produce conflict directly. A child whose plan changes explodes, and the parent explodes at the exploding child.

Difficulty with emotion regulation is increasingly accepted as an important part of the picture in ADHD. The contribution of this book is that it treats these behaviors as skills that can be supported. Instead of a moody or stubborn child, a child who cannot yet regulate their emotion or cannot yet adapt to a change of plan.

This view changes the parent's reaction too. Force is used on a child considered stubborn. For a child with weak flexibility, on the other hand, the change is announced in advance and transitions are prepared. Since difficulty with emotion regulation in a child can continue into adulthood, this preparation is a long-term investment.

Where is the evidence

The two things the book rests on, behavior analysis and environmental arrangement, are areas where the evidence is strong. The American Academy of Pediatrics guideline (Wolraich et al., 2019) recommends parent behavior training and classroom behavioral interventions for children with ADHD; the book's ABC approach is within this family.

There are also supporting studies for interventions aimed at organizational skills. The randomized controlled trial by Abikoff and colleagues (2013) reported that a training aimed at organization, time management and planning skills in children with ADHD brought improvement at home and at school.

On the other hand, I did not see evidence that the Smart but Scattered program itself, as described in the book, has been tested in controlled studies. The book is a good application of principles that have evidence, but it cannot itself be counted as a separately tested intervention.

There is also an important distinction: programs that try to train executive functions with computer games, like working memory training, have struggled to show effects that generalize to daily life. Dawson and Guare's approach is different from that. It does not train the skill abstractly; it supports it within real-life routines. I think this choice is right.

The word on the cover

I got stuck on the title of the book and cannot pass without writing about it.

Smart but. The English has the same structure. On the cover it is a very successful phrase from a marketing point of view: the parent immediately recognizes their own child.

But this phrase carries a very heavy load in the lives of children with ADHD. Smart but lazy, talented but careless, has potential but is not using it. As someone with ADHD, I heard these sentences for years too. What followed each one was the same: that I did not want it enough.

The content of the book refuses this reading. What it describes is a skill deficit instead of unwillingness. Still, the phrase on the cover can strengthen the expectation of potential in the parent's mind. That is why it matters to know that intelligence and executive skills are separate things. I talked about this in the article does ADHD affect intelligence.

Where it falls short

One of the last chapters of the book is devoted to situations where what the parent does is not enough, and the existence of this chapter is a sign of the book's honesty.

For a child who has an ADHD diagnosis or is suspected of having ADHD, this book does not replace an evaluation, medication treatment when needed, or specialist support. The decision about medication is made with a child psychiatrist.

Applying the plans demands a high level of consistency from the parent. If the parent has ADHD themselves, the parent profile chapter in the first part should not be skipped.

The first edition does not go much into technology; the second edition added a new chapter on technology use and expanded the school chapter. Since the Turkish edition is based on the first, these are not in the Turkish.

The school chapter is written according to the American school system. Although the suggestions for cooperation with the teacher work in general, the system-dependent parts cannot be carried directly to Turkey.

The authors also have books adapting the same framework for adolescents and adults: Smart but Scattered Teens, and for adults The Smart but Scattered Guide to Success. For an adult reader who comes to know themselves before their child while reading the eleven skills, the second may be a more fitting address.

For whom

For a parent whose child constantly struggles with daily routines and who does not know what to do. Especially one who has swung between yelling, bribing and punishing and seen that none of them works.

For the parent of a child with an ADHD diagnosis, as a practice book that accompanies the diagnosis and treatment process.

Someone who wants to understand emotionally what their child is going through will not find that depth here. The book is concerned more with behavior than with feeling.

There is no need to read it from start to finish. It is enough to do the assessment in the first part, choose the two weakest skills and go to those chapters.