Time your child can see, instead of time they have to feel.
Almost every hard moment in a neurodivergent household has a clock buried inside it. Five more minutes. Almost done. We are leaving soon. Those phrases assume a child can feel time passing, and for a lot of autistic and ADHD kids that assumption is simply wrong.
A visual timer replaces the feeling with a picture. Instead of asking a child to track an invisible quantity in their head, it shows the remaining time shrinking in front of them, which turns a question about time into a question about space. That swap is why a timer often works when a warning does not.
Below are the specific moments families use the Vizy Timer for, each one written up on its own page with the setup, the common mistake, and the questions parents actually ask.
Try the Vizy Timer free →What the research actually shows.
A meta-analysis of 27 studies covering 1,620 children and adolescents with ADHD and 1,249 controls found that the ADHD group perceived time less accurately and less precisely, and tended to overestimate how long an interval had lasted.
Zheng, Wang, Chiu and Shum, Journal of Attention Disorders, 2022When visual supports were used to signal an upcoming transition, the delay between an instruction and the child starting the next activity dropped substantially compared with verbal cues alone.
Dettmer, Simpson, Myles and Ganz, Focus on Autism and Other Developmental Disabilities, 2000A review of 31 studies concluded that visual activity schedules meet the criteria for an evidence-based practice for autistic individuals, supporting a range of skills and reducing interfering behavior.
Knight, Sartini and Spriggs, Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 2015Among children experiencing significant school distress, sensory differences were reported across an average of 4.8 systems, which is part of why an auditory-only warning so often fails to land.
Connolly, Constable and Mullally, Frontiers in Psychiatry, 2023VizyPlan supports routines and communication at home and school. It is not a medical device and does not diagnose or treat any condition. Talk to your child's care team about clinical questions.
Every moment families use it for.
Each one is its own guide, with the setup, the mistake most families make, and the questions parents actually ask.
Ending Screen Time
You said twenty minutes an hour ago. Now the tablet is coming out of their hands and the reaction is the size of a genuine loss, because to your child it is one.
Leaving the Playground
The playground was a good idea for fifty minutes. Then it is time to leave, and you are the villain in a story that was going beautifully a moment ago.
Getting Off the Swing
The swing is not one activity among many. For a lot of autistic children it is the reason the playground exists, and asking for it back is asking for something regulating to stop.
Brushing Teeth
Two minutes of a vibrating brush against sensitive gums is a long time when you cannot tell how much of it is left. Your child is not being difficult about hygiene, they are enduring something with no visible end.
Getting Out of the Bath
Getting your child into the bath took twenty minutes. Getting them out is going to take twenty more, and the water has been cold for a while now.
Homework Work Sprints
Twenty minutes of assigned work has taken ninety, and most of that was spent not starting. The problem is rarely the math, it is that do your homework has no visible finish line.
Cleaning Up Toys
The floor is covered, you have asked four times, and the tidying that has happened so far amounts to one block moved eight inches. Nobody in the room is enjoying this.
Waiting for a Turn
Your child has been told to wait their turn, and the wait has no visible length. To them it may as well be forever, and forever is worth protesting about.
Waiting at an Appointment
Twenty-five minutes past your slot, in a waiting room with fluorescent lighting and a television nobody chose, and your child has asked when eleven times. So have you, internally.
A Sensory Break at School
Your child has a break pass, and either they never use it or they use it and do not come back. Both problems have the same root, which is that nobody defined how long a break lasts.
Calm Down Corner Time
You built the calm corner with cushions and good intentions, and your child treats it like a naughty step. Somewhere along the way it became a place they get sent rather than a place they go.
Getting Dressed in the Morning
It is 7:41 and your child has one sock on and no memory of the last eleven minutes. You have said hurry up so many times that the words have stopped meaning anything.
Eating Breakfast Before the Bus
Breakfast has been on the table for eighteen minutes and two bites have happened. The bus comes in nine, and you are calculating whether hunger or lateness is the bigger problem today.
Staying at the Dinner Table
Your child is up and gone within ninety seconds, and family dinner has become a thing that happens to other households. Every attempt to enforce it turns the meal into a standoff.
Trying a New Food
The new food has been on the plate for ten minutes and the negotiation has escalated to threats nobody meant. Everyone at this table is now upset about a piece of broccoli.
Hair Washing
Your child is fine in the bath right up until the shampoo appears. Then it is water on the face, a head tipped back, and a level of distress that no amount of reassurance touches.
Getting a Haircut
Clippers, a stranger, a cape around the neck, hair falling on skin, and a mirror showing all of it. A haircut asks a sensory-sensitive child to tolerate six difficult things at once while sitting still.
Nail Trimming
Nail trimming has become a monthly wrestling match that you both dread and keep postponing, until the nails are long enough that it is no longer optional.
Ending a Playdate
The playdate has been lovely for ninety minutes and you can see the edges starting to fray. Push another half hour and it will end badly, and your child will remember the ending rather than the ninety minutes.
Leaving a Relative's House
The goodbyes have been going for twenty minutes, three adults are offering advice, and your child has reached the point where leaving is no longer physically possible without a scene.
Time at the Grocery Store
Strip lighting, freezer hum, PA announcements, and forty minutes of decisions. The grocery store is one of the hardest sensory environments your child enters voluntarily, and you have to go every week.
Car Journeys
Are we nearly there. Asked for the ninth time in twelve minutes, from a child who is not being annoying but genuinely cannot tell whether the journey has lasted five minutes or fifty.
Video Game Shutdown
You gave a ten-minute warning and it landed on a child who was three minutes into a twenty-minute match. From inside the game, your timing was arbitrary and unfair, and the reaction reflects that.
Stopping a Special Interest
Your child is deep in the thing they love most, and you need them to stop for dinner. What looks like ignoring you is usually a genuine difficulty pulling attention out of something absorbing.
Bedtime Wind Down
Bedtime was supposed to start at seven. It is now twenty past eight, you have said last one four times, and the wind down has become the most activating part of the evening.
Staying in Bed at Night
Your child is out of bed for the fifth time and the requests are getting more creative. What they usually want is not water, it is confirmation that you are still there.
Quiet Time Alone
Your child has been around people since seven this morning and it is now five. Nothing is obviously wrong yet, which is exactly the moment a protected quiet hour would help most.
Sibling Turn Taking
Two children, one console, and a fairness dispute that you are somehow the judge of. Whatever you rule, one of them is going to believe you sided with the other.
Practicing an Instrument
Practice was meant to be fifteen minutes. It has become a forty-minute negotiation about fifteen minutes, and your child now associates the instrument with an argument.
Speech Practice at Home
Your speech therapist sent home practice targets three weeks ago. You have managed it twice, and both times it ended with everyone frustrated, which is not what anybody intended.
An Occupational Therapy Home Program
The sensory diet came home on two sides of paper with six activities on it. Three weeks later you have done one of them, twice, and you feel like you are letting your child down.
Handwashing
Your child ran their hands under the tap for two seconds and declared it done, or spent nine minutes at the sink and had to be extracted. Handwashing goes wrong in both directions.
Toilet Sitting Time
Sit until something happens is an instruction with no visible end, delivered to a child who may not yet feel the signal. No wonder the bathroom has become somewhere they resist going.
Packing the School Bag
The reading folder is missing again, the gym clothes surfaced on Thursday, and the search happens at 7:52 every morning while the bus is coming.
Shoes and Coat Before Leaving
Everything was going well until the hallway. Now one shoe is on, the coat is a negotiation, and the four-minute buffer you built has evaporated.
Waiting While a Parent Is Busy
You are on a call you cannot reschedule and your child has appeared at your elbow four times in six minutes. Each time, the need is real to them and impossible for you.
Board Game Turns
The game was going well until someone took ninety seconds over a move and someone else could not tolerate the wait. Family game night has ended in an argument again.
Transitioning Between Activities
Your child was fine, and then you said it was time to move on to the next thing, and now they are not fine. The activity was not the problem. The edge between two activities was.
Therapy Session Work Time
Fifteen minutes into the session and the work has stopped. Not because the target is too hard, but because the child has no way of knowing whether this is nearly over or barely started.
Tolerating Medical Procedures
A blood pressure cuff, an ear check, a swab. Individually brief, but to a child who cannot tell how long brief is, each one is an indefinite loss of control over their own body.
Wearing Something New
The new school shoes have been worn for eleven seconds and are now in the hallway. You have four days until school starts and a receipt you are already thinking about.
Reading Practice
The reading log says ten minutes a night. In your house it is either two minutes and a fight, or thirty minutes of one page and a child in tears.
Chores Without Nagging
You have asked three times, your tone has changed twice, and the trash is still full. Neither of you wants to be having this conversation, and you are both having it daily.
Ending a Preferred Activity
It does not matter what the activity is. If your child loves it, ending it registers as loss, and the size of the reaction tracks the size of the love rather than the size of the interruption.
Getting Ready for Swimming
Wet floors, echoing tile, hand dryers, strangers, and a costume that has to go on while your child is already overloaded. The changing room is often harder than the pool.
Sports Practice Drills
Your child was keen for the first fifteen minutes and has spent the last ten looking at the fence. The coach reads that as disinterest, and it is usually not.
Homework Breaks
The five-minute break has been going for nineteen minutes and returning to the table is now harder than starting was. The break you offered to help has become its own problem.
Morning Routine Blocks
Nobody refused anything this morning, and you are still fifteen minutes late. The morning did not break, it drifted, and drift is much harder to spot than refusal.
Coming In From Outside
Your child has been outside for two hours and coming in is going to cost you twenty minutes and some goodwill. Outside is where they regulate, and inside is where the demands live.
Visiting the Dentist
A reclining chair, a bright light, a stranger with instruments, and a mouth that has to stay open. The dentist asks for trust in a position where your child has the least control they will have all year.
Settling After School
Your child walked out of school looking fine and detonated in the car park over a snack that was the wrong shape. What arrived home was not a bad mood, it was an empty tank.
