Developing Executive Function Skills: a Checklist for Parents
I’m an experienced speech-language pathologist AND I’m a parent. Even I get tired of reminding my kids of the same things over and over and over and over. Or constantly calling their attention to what they should be doing at the moment. While some of that is inevitable, there are things you can do to help your child develop self-leadership and stop the seemingly endless cycle of nagging.
There’s actually a cognitive reason kids don’t always pay attention when they should or focus on the appropriate task for the moment: their executive function is still developing. Executive function is the boss of the brain, the part of our cognition that tells us when, how, and with what intensity to do things. It’s like the director of a play, unseen but responsible for making sure everything runs smoothly. For children, the boss of the brain is still learning her job into their twenties. If you’re constantly reminding your child of things you think he should already know to pay attention to, it’s likely because his executive function is still developing.
The good news is that there are methods we can use (besides nagging) to help develop that internal self-leadership in the brain. Some kids have more difficulty with executive function than others, but all kids benefit from parenting that supports the development of their executive function skills. Here are a few things you can do as a parent to help them (and preserve your own sanity).
Support attention
There are several aspects of the executive function skill of attention that are important to understand: sustained attention and refocusing attention. Sustained attention is when we focus on something and keep our attention there as long as we need to. This is important, but perhaps not as important as you might think. Refocusing attention is a skill we learn to put our own minds back on track with what matters in the moment. Refocusing attention is actually the more useful skill and the one you should help your child develop.
To help you understand, let’s try an exercise I do when I’m presenting. Go find something you can use to keep time—a stopwatch, your phone, your laptop. Set a timer for 1 minute. Imagine something, one simple thing. A horse, your favorite food, or your grandmother. Now, when you’re ready, start the timer, close your eyes, and try to think about that one thing and only that one thing for one minute. Come back to this blog post when your timer goes off.
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How did it go? Were you able to focus? How many times did your mind wander? Once? Twice? 100 times? When I do this exercise in presentations, there are usually a handful of people who claim they could focus for the full minute, maybe one in fifty adults. Those are adults, and only one in fifty could focus for one minute. Now imagine you are a child. Imagine being asked to pay attention for hours every day. In our school environments, it is amazing that any children at all can muster the attention and focus required of them, let alone kids who need extra support for executive function.
I use this exercise to demonstrate that, while sustaining attention is important, learning to refocus attention when we’re distracted is even more important. No child is going to sustain attention through an entire hour of homework, let alone a whole school day. They need to learn to identify what is important in the moment and refocus their attention to it. Instead of constantly telling kids what they should be paying attention to at any given moment, we can help them develop internal self-leadership by helping them identify what is important and refocus their own attention.
This is actually quite simple to do, and many people see results almost immediately. You simply employ reflexive questioning. Reflexive questions are questions that increase self-awareness of actions and environment. When we ask them, we are reflecting self-awareness back to the child. The reflect the situation back to the child and help them connect their own thoughts with what is going on around them. They help a child visualize what an appropriate next step is rather than telling them. Reflexive questions give the child the opportunity to fix their own mistakes, developing self-awareness, self-monitoring and self-correction. Awareness supports attention.
Some great examples of reflexive questions that I use all the time include:
Where are your thoughts right now? (Helps raise child’s self-awareness)
Is that important right now?(Helps connect self-awareness to situational awareness)
I have several resources to help you learn more about reflexive questioning:
My blog post, Reflexive Questioning is an Easy Activity to Help Develop the Brain’s Executive Function
2. Support initiation
More often than not, kids have difficulty starting or initiating an activity because the entire process of completing it feels overwhelming. We can support initiation by helping kids come up with a manageable plan for completing the task. Any activity that a child has difficulty starting could benefit from a plan. You could help them come up with a plan for getting ready in the morning, or even getting dressed in the morning or packing their book bag. There are two main points to remember:
Details, Details!
The more detailed the plan is, the more helpful it will be. Like I said, the problem with initiation is often the feeling of overwhelm when the child thinks of doing the activity. If the plan is not detailed enough, it will not help with this feeling because the steps will be too big and the child still won’t know where to start. For instance, if you come up with a plan for getting ready in the morning and the first step is to get dressed, that is not likely to be detailed enough. Try spelling out the steps for getting dressed:
Stop what you’re doing
Go to the closet
Pick out a shirt
Pick out a pair of paints
Remove pajamas
Put on shirt and pants
Put on socks and shoes
The Best Plan is the Child’s Plan
The actual process of planning and following the plan is more important than getting the plan “right.” To cultivate the child’s internal self-leadership, you need to let them take the lead in this process. Yes, even when they come up with weird or crazy steps. In all humility, I admit that kids frequently surprise me with the things they come up with that they think will help them follow the plan. And they almost always work. Does she want to spin around twice before putting on socks and shoes? Great. Put it in the plan. Would he prefer to sing a song about getting dressed? It belongs in the plan. This is their plan.
That said, you still want to help the child come up with effective plans. You don’t achieve that by dictating what the plan should look like but by facilitating self-evaluation:
Help with self-evaluation of the plan before they try it. One of our main objectives is to make it feel easier to start the activity, so it’s important how the plan feels to the child. Does it feel heavy or simple? Annoying or exciting? If the child has negative feelings about it, explore changes to the plan together.
Help with self-evaluation after they try the plan. Reflecting on how the plan went is critical to its ongoing success and to developing the child’s self-leadership skills. This is especially important (and easy to forget) when the plan is a success. Don’t forget to congratulate the child and prompt him to evaluate: “Great job!! How did you do that?”
To learn more about planning, check out my blog post Eight Tips for Improving Executive Functioning through Planning.
3. Support foresight development
Russell Barkley is one of the leading neuropsychologists studying executive function. (His book, Executive Functions: What They Are, How They Work, and Why they Evolved is one of my top ten book recommendations for learning about executive function.) Barkley defines executive function as self-direction for a future goal. Executive function is how we look into the future and organize our actions to get where we need to be. It’s the boss of the brain, the part of our cognition that tells us when, how, and with what intensity to do things. I like to draw a distinction between the cueing part of our brain and the doing part of our brain. Executive function is the cuer, not the doer. It’s not the part that does the reading or the math. It’s not the part that finishes the homework. It’s the part that determines when and how the rest of the brain accomplishes those things.
Foresight is input the brain needs in order to self-direct actions. Without foresight, a child will struggle with:
setting goals
inhibition
resilience
self-determination
One of the most helpful things you can do as a parent is support your child’s foresight. Again, reflexive questioning comes in handy here. Ask questions that help them imagine the future as vividly as possible. Employ the five senses and emotions. Help them pre-experience the future. Here are some questions you can ask:
What do you see yourself doing?
How do you think your future self will feel?
What do you think you’ll hear/smell/see when following your plan/doing the activity?
Encourage activities that support internalizing the desired future outcome. Make foresight a physical activity, not just a mental activity.
Draw it
Gesture/point it
Walk it
Role play it
Internalization can also be more symbolic. In therapy, I sometimes use colors to represent steps in a plan. In the getting dressed plan, blue might represent picking out pants. This is most helpful when it comes to executing the plan in a space. If you put a piece of blue construction paper near the pants in the closet, this can be a visual cue to do the blue step (pick out pants). It’s surprisingly effective.
4. Include protein at every meal
When we talk about the executive function, we are talking about a physical part of the body, after all. Protein is vital for brain function. (Check out this article for more info.) Obviously, I’m not a nutritionist, but here are some high-protein foods I’ve incorporated into our family diet:
Hard-boiled eggs
Nuts
Nut butter with apples or other fruit
Yogurt
Protein shakes
Oats
Cheese
Beans
Chia seeds
Tofu
I hope you’ve learned a lot about supporting your child’s executive function! Check out my other resources below.
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I wrote a book! The Seeds of Learning: A Cognitive Processing Model for Speech, Language, Literacy, and Executive Functioning is available for sale on Amazon.
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