ive made a bunch of comments like this before but my psychiatrist recently recommended this guy to me whos a the leading expert on adhd i found one of his lectures on youtube and found it super illuminating it seems aimed at parents with adhd kids but as a 29 year old i still learned a lot about myself  playlist version  continuous version  below is a sample quote i feel relates to your post but i just want to preemptively clarify that he uses consequences in more of a rewardcause-and-effect way than a punitivediscipline way because at first it sounded to me like he was advocating for the tough love youre complaining about hes not eg the video game references   the fourth executive ability is the source of self motivation self motivation is the fuel tank for all future-directed behavior there is no getting ready for tomorrow if there is no self motivation what has the adhd child lost here they can not motivate themselves what does that mean it means that you will always be dependent on the environment around you and its immediate consequences for how hard and how long you can work and if there are no consequences in that context you can not work you can not persist you will not get it done the fourth executive ability now explains to these parents why this child can play video games for hours and cannot do homework for more than a few minutes because the video game provides external continuous 100 consequences for interacting with it and the homework does nothing when a problem is solved on a sheet of paper nothing happens the consequences are delayed and therein lies the trouble so the corollary of this is if you want to see and adhd person fail you put him in any environment where there are no consequences and i guarantee you failure the work will not be done because this person can not self motivate and this is not a choice and this is not willful and this is not a child who just could if they wished wake up tomorrow and smell the coffee and get busy and do the work they can not this is an internal neuro-genetic executive failure you cant self motivate like other people so it doesnt matter what your goals are you wont get there because self-motivation is required for all goal directed actions  bonus related quote  ero - event response outcome if eros are kept together you dont need a frontal lobe and adhd people can do them thats a video game but the minute you stretch these things apart with time like a book report youve got to read this book your reports due in 30 days itll take a week to grade all the papers i just put a month between the e and the r and a week between the r and the o and if you have adhd youre disabled big time so the solution is to get the es rs and os back together and that means baby steps little e r o bridges across time and thats how you would do a future assignment  edit i think i also remember him explicitly saying tough love doesnt work but i dont have the quote saved and its going to be difficult to find in a 3 hour lecture