Printables and Checklists for ADHD Family Life

The printables in this corner are household paper tools: checklists, planner pages, boards and cards that carry everyday tasks such as getting dressed, packing a bag and settling for bed. Each page has one job, lists its steps in the order they happen, and gives the child a box to tick or a line to wipe clean. They are organisation tools for family routines, nothing more: no page here checks, scores or screens a child in any way, and every list is a list of tasks or things, never a list of signs. Start with the routine that frays most often, use the morning checklist for many families, and keep each design simple enough to remake in ten minutes when life changes.

Five rules make these pages work. One job per page: mornings get their own checklist, bags get another, and a page trying to run the whole day gets ignored. Steps in real order, written as short actions a child can do, such as shoes by the door, rather than vague instructions such as get ready. Few steps, honestly counted: five to eight is plenty for one routine, and a long list is really two routines wearing one coat. Pictures or symbols beside words for younger children, drawn or printed, so the page can be read before reading is fluent. And a finish line the child controls: a tick, a sticker space, or a wipe-clean box, because completing the page is the small reward that keeps the page alive. Every guide in this corner applies these rules to one routine and shows the page it produces.

The corner builds a working set, page by page:

• Morning and bedtime checklists that bookend the school day.
• A backpack checklist fixed by the front door, where bags actually live.
• A homework session checklist that opens and closes study time.
• A weekly family planner page and a travel-day checklist for journeys.
• A school meeting notes page for parents, a calm corner card set, and a wipe-clean chore board.
• A holiday packing checklist children can run themselves, and a one-page handover sheet for babysitters and family.

You do not need the whole set. Most houses run well on three or four pages that match their real friction points, and the weekly planner page is the one that holds the others together across the week.

As a plain illustration: one invented family runs three pages. The morning checklist lives on the bedroom door, the backpack list on the wall by the front door, and the planner page on the fridge. In a sample week, the morning page is ticked on five school days, the backpack page stops two forgotten items at the door, and the planner carries a dentist visit, a club night and a birthday in one view. The numbers are simply the shape of an ordinary week drawn for this page, not a record or a promise; another family would tick fewer days and still be using the system well. The point is placement and fit: the right page, in the right doorway, for the routine that happens there.

Printed pages fail in kind, predictable ways. They go stale when a routine changes but the page does not, so review each page when the term, the season or the child's age shifts, and remake rather than patch. They get tuned out when they stay up too long in the same spot, so a fresh colour, a child's own redraw of the page, or a move to a new doorway can wake a good list up again. They collapse when an adult uses them as a score sheet for blame; these pages are memory aids, not report cards, and the tick belongs to the child. And they multiply when every small problem gets its own page, until the walls feel like an office. Keep the set small, retire pages that have done their job, and let a mastered routine graduate off paper entirely.

Choose one routine, list its real steps in order on a single sheet, add tick boxes, and put the page where the routine happens. Live with the draft for a week, cross out what never happens, add what you forgot, then make the clean copy together. That is the whole craft. Every other guide in this corner is that same ten-minute process, applied to a different doorway in family life.