The importance of strengthening children's executive functioning skills to help them navigate school and extracurricular activities successfully.
The importance of strengthening children's executive functioning skills to help them navigate school and extracurricular activities successfully.
Project Parenthood is hosted by Chelsea Dorcich. A transcript is available at Simplecast.
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By now, most of us have already headed back to the classrooms or will be in the next week. If your children are back at school and involved in afterschool activities on top of it, organization and planning are necessary, not only for us parents, but also for our kiddos. This is where executive functioning comes into play.
Hi, welcome back to Project Parenthood. I am your host, Chelsea Dorcich, licensed marriage family therapist. I am here to join you on your conscious parenting journey, bringing more curiosity, openness, acceptance, kindness, and non judgment along the way. My goal is for us to accept what is out of our control, commit to improving our parenting life, and discover better outcomes for ourselves and our family.
Today I'll be talking about ways in which we can strengthen our children's executive functioning skills so they are ready for school and the extracurriculars that follow. Our executive functioning is the command control tower of our brain. Think of it as the center which oversees our actions and mental operations including focus, working memory, self monitoring, and self discipline.
Flexible thinking, initiation, activation of task, planning and organizing, effort, inhibition. So building stronger executive functioning skills, we're going to focus on persistence, getting started, time awareness, forgetfulness and memory, planning and organization, and what are some core staples to have to help support these functioning skills.
Increasing persistence. We want to challenge our children to persevere until certain points instead of quitting a task. So make it more concrete as reward and praise for their growing perseverance. Give them something tangible, like read one more page today and then you're done, or read one more paragraph, or can you try tying your shoes two times before you ask for help, or try starting this project.
Before you ask for help, we want to channel the little engine that could mentality into your child. Scaffolding. This is a term you may have heard. This is about providing support to our children to help them succeed by giving them choices and collaborating with them. Start to observe when and where you're already providing support and stop providing it where they are independent.
It's about finding the just right amount of support. Too little support leaves them discouraged, they're frustrated they're not getting the task done. And too much leaves them disempowered. Learning to get started. We know that starting a task requires specific techniques in and of itself. We need to lay this out for our kids that there are barriers to getting started.
Sometimes there's a lack of materials, so we need to make a list. a lack of appropriate space. We can help them choose an uncluttered space or create one. Sometimes the task feels too large, so we break it into tiny bites. Sometimes they just want to do something way more appealing, like play outside. So we can teach them to earn those appealing activities by completing bites of the long term project, or the homework.
This is known as a Pomodoro Technique. Giving them 10 minutes of the undesired activity, and Or have them complete a certain section or paragraph, and then they earn the more appealing activity. Improving time awareness. We really want to help children know how much time has passed, how much time is left, and how quickly it's passing.
My favorite thing to use are colorful sand timers. You can find them on Etsy and Amazon, and they range from 30 seconds to 10 minutes. There are also audible timers, which can call out the minutes left. This is great for announcing time left before leaving for school, or time until bedtime. There's such thing as a time timer, and it has a Bold red visual of the remaining time calendars.
They help children become more aware of the time over long ranges. So maybe a planner with a monthly and a weekly display. Similarly, agendas by middle school, if not before we want them listing each day's events and tasks. And the night before you can go over this with your children seeing, okay, do you have everything prepared?
Is it all in your backpack? Is your Jersey for soccer, wash, et cetera, reducing forgetfulness. developer teams. This, in and of itself, Will help reduce the amount of reminders needed once it's habitual. These routines fear and reminders are needed. You can create poster boards of each step of the routine.
You can use icons or visuals for younger children. Checklist for older kids, and maybe even for adolescents, you're just highlighting 1 or 2 of those frequently miss items or actions setting alarms, which you can label and this can start as your role and gradually shift to the child's responsibility.
Creative reminders. So get involved with your children, collaborate with them, and create these reminders together. You're making a list of frequently forgotten things or problems that hinder your child from completing a task, and with them, brainstorm solutions. They'll feel more empowered and more intrinsically motivated to go through with these steps and tools if they had a say in it.
Working memory. We use this to recall multi step instructions. We can make things a game. So if younger kids, as you're cleaning up or even just playing, you can give them different steps, add one on at a time and see if they can repeat it back to you and see how many steps they can actually remember.
There's such thing as a grocery store game or storytelling game. So if you have the grocery store game, one person in your family can list two things they need to get from the store. The next person can repeat those two things, add two more of their own. Similarly with a story. One person says a part of a story.
The next person repeats it and adds their own. It keeps going writing things down a planner on top of a phone calendar. If you have an older child, they use their phone calendar, have them also have something written down or have them use note cards, signs, sticky notes, list, seeing information right in front of us.
It's easier to jog our executive functions and build a working memory.
So what are some core brain friendly daily habits at home that we can help support these executive functioning skills? It's sleep, exercise, nutrition, stress management, and nature. So sleep, make sure that there are limits on screen time. No stimulants an hour before bed. Chocolate has caffeine. So keeping that in mind and screen time, you know, one hour before bed is stopping.
Warm baths and showers, so when we float in a bath and our ears are below the water, can help calm the kids, or even just cooling off after a warm shower is actually sleep inducing. Getting to bed at the same time each night or within an hour on weekends, really having that kids consistency to have more efficient sleep.
exercising. So it's known that aerobic exercises actually increase these neurochemicals that support learning and promote growth of neural connections. They're called the brain derived neuropathic factor, the BDNF. So if you can have your children find some sort of exercise before school, it will help increase their executive functioning skills and reduce things like forgetfulness or distraction.
Thinking about maybe they walk the dog before school, or maybe they can walk to school, or walk around the neighborhood, or get to school early and walk around school campus. Nutrition. So thinking about breakfast, things like eggs, oatmeal, are shown to benefit cognitive functioning during morning hours at school.
They're metabolized more slowly. So trying to plan meals accordingly. And with homework, usually some kids will do snack, then homework. Try to pair them together. because the Chewie can actually help sustain their attention. Sipping on sugar is something that's been known to help our frontal lobe. The little glucose in something like a lemonade or sports drink, It really fuels the frontal lobe where the executive function comes from, but the word is operative word is sip.
So this doesn't mean a big glass. It could just mean just a little sip of that to get them going for homework. Stress management. So all the things we mentioned, getting enough sleep, having adequate time for getting ready for school, having a protein rich breakfast, healthy snacks, walking to school or before school, this all helps reduce our stress.
When we do have stress, Dopamine can start to flood our prefrontal cortex where our executive functioning skills are. So we want to really manage that stress. And one way to think about this too, is stopping to refuel. So we notice our kids. If they are starting to become dysregulated or really just off task, have them take a break from whatever they're supposed to be doing.
Let them reset and then get back to the activity. Nature decreasing hyperactivity and increasing our ability to focus and sustain attention increases in relation to how much our child spends outside in nature. So building in this quote unquote green time is really helpful. Parents remember at home. We have the lead role.
So we help our Children develop a realistic, positive, constructive view of themselves. The home environment is to develop self understanding and self confidence to become successful at home at school and social relationships. So your ability to make your child feel understood and supported begin to transfer their skills and strategies outside of the home.
Communicate your expectations that they will succeed. Children internalize our expectations of them. Assign responsibilities to them clearly and emphasize that everyone makes mistakes so when they do have a hiccup. Making sure that you're giving doable challenges and you're patient with those challenges.
And supporting them emotionally and socially, spiritually, and physically. everybody. It's okay to use rewards, too, to make that motivation external. Reinforce the long term goals, but with short term rewards. Those rewards will eventually phase out. Their child will learn to get focused on the long term. So be curious and compassionate on this journey.
And remember, without calm, there is no learning. And under stress, we regress. That's it for this week's edition of Project Parenthood. Remember to be curious, open, accepting, kind, and non judgmental on your conscious parenting journey. If you have any questions about this episode, about your parenting journey, and or topics you'd like to hear more about, please reach out to parenthood@quickanddirtytips.com Or leave a message at 646-926-3243. Project Parenthood Quick and Dirty Tips podcast. Thanks to the team at Quick and Dirty Tips, Holly Hutchings, Davina Tomlin, Morgan Christianson, and Brannan Goetschius. May you be happy, safe and protected, healthy and strong, and live with ease.