Executive functioning (EF) refers to a set of mental processes that give you the ability to organize, plan, and execute complex tasks.
When you learn that your child has executive functioning deficits that need strengthening, it can feel confusing and overwhelming. How do you know when your child’s lagging EF skills are getting in the way? What are good ways to help? In this episode, Dr. Nanika Coor explains what executive functioning is and everyday fun and useful ways to help your child improve their capacities to think before acting, mentally wrestle with relevant ideas, and respond adaptively and flexibly to their changing environment.
Project Parenthood is hosted by Dr. Nanika Coor. A transcript is available at Simplecast.
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\When you learn that your child has executive functioning deficits that need strengthening, it can feel confusing and overwhelming. How do you know when your child’s lagging executive functioning skills are getting in the way? What are good ways to help? In this episode, I’m talking about what executive functioning is and everyday fun and useful ways to help your child improve their capacities to think before acting, mentally wrestle with relevant ideas, and respond adaptively and flexibly to their changing environment.
Welcome back to Project Parenthood! I'm your host, Dr. Nanika Coor—clinical psychologist and respectful parenting therapist. Each week, I’ll help you repair and deepen your parent-child connection, increase self-compassion and cooperation from your kids, and cultivate joy, peace, and resilience in your relationship with them.
Executive functioning (EF) refers to a set of mental processes that give you the ability to organize, plan, and execute complex tasks. These skills begin to develop in the first year of life but are not fully developed until early adulthood. These skills are categorized into three domains: inhibitory control and attention, cognitive flexibility, and working memory.
Inhibitory control and attention refers to the capacity to control your behavioral and emotional impulses and put distracting elements to the side in order to sustain attention on the task at hand. This involves the ability to resist the temptation to not complete a task. Research suggests that weaker persistence, less impulse control, and poor attention regulation in childhood puts a child more at risk of earning less money, having worse health, committing more crimes, and being less happy 30 years later than those whose inhibitory control is stronger.
Cognitive flexibility involves your ability to adapt and adjust to changing situations and think creatively. This involves the ability to switch between tasks, adjust to new environments, and consider new possibilities, different perspectives, and new ways of solving problems. You might see a child with weaker cognitive flexibility become frustrated when an original plan fails, and then struggle to come up with an alternative plan.
Working memory is your ability to hold information in your mind while simultaneously acting on and/or manipulating that information. This involves the ability to recall information, keep track of multiple tasks, and use information to complete a task. If your child has working memory issues, it might be hard for them to follow multi-step instructions and complete complex tasks, and it might take them longer to finish assignments.
Ultimately, your child’s EF skills are essential for academic, personal, and social success. By understanding your child’s EF strengths and weaknesses—and your own—you can work to strengthen the EF skills that are less well-developed.
It is indeed possible to help your child improve weak EF skills! Think about ways to make your child’s environment more supportive—like making a change in the physical or social environment. Does an upcoming task need to be made more fun or provide more autonomy for your kiddo? Does your child need you to interact with them in a particular way to help get things done—like practicing together beforehand, offering praise during the task, or feedback afterward?
Before your child begins a task, set them up for success by making sure they’re clear on what goals for tasks are, what completion and success look like, and the logic behind why it’s important for them personally to complete the task. Provide scaffolding that works for your child. That could be verbal or written reminders, using timers to make time more “visible” to them, and establishing routines that create built-in structure.
Dr. Russell Barkley, a psychiatrist who specializes in the assessment and treatment of ADHD and related disorders, suggests parents encourage a “10-3” rule. For every 10 minutes of focused on-task time, remind your child to take a 3-minute activity break where they move their bodies in some way. That might be just walking around the block, play-wrestling with a sibling, or dancing around their room.
Other activities that have been shown to improve EF skills include vigorous exercise, yoga, computerized cognitive training, and mindfulness. And organized sports like martial arts, basketball, or soccer require kids to both hold strategies and rules in mind and make quick and flexible adaptations to others’ actions. They also need to self-monitor their behavior and their performance while engaging in these sports, all of which are beneficial for the development of EF skills. But studies have also shown that unless these activities are practiced in an ongoing manner, EF skills will decrease once more, and despite practice in one setting, the skills don’t always translate to regular life contexts where they’ll actually need to use the skill. This is why the best approach to EF skill development is the one that takes your child’s unique strengths and challenges into account—and also considers their family’s functioning and needs.
You can take lots of real-life opportunities to build your child’s EF skills—and your own—by working together with your child to solve problems. This problem-solving process developed by Dr. Ross Greene is called Collaborative and Proactive Solutions. The more you use this process, not only will you be solving a lot of problems but you’ll also be teaching, modeling, and practicing the very skills that are underdeveloped in kids with EF weaknesses. Both you and your child will need to use skills like emotional regulation, self-reflection, listening, taking another person’s perspective, thinking about possible outcomes, understanding how your behavior impacts someone else, and resolving problems without conflict during a collaborative and proactive problem-solving conversation.
Some of the most effective and lasting executive function foundations are the constant support, shared experiences, and time you and your child spend together enjoying everyday activities like reading books, cooking, or dancing, which are all a kind of scaffolding for the development of their self-regulatory skills.
Sometimes your best efforts at helping your child improve their executive functioning just aren’t working, or maybe you have a tween or teen who is resistant to help. If your child’s EF deficits are causing your child social difficulties and low self-esteem and they seem simply unable to cope with the everyday demands of school and life, it’s probably affecting them very negatively. Eventually, chronically weak organizational, homework, and keeping-track-of-their-stuff skills are going to get the better of them—and the whole family. Seeking professional help can reduce the viscous cycle of parent-child stress, anxiety, and behavioral problems that can get kicked up when a child’s EF skills are particularly compromised. Working with a cognitive behavioral clinician or occupational therapist can potentially help daily life feel easier for the whole family—when a child can’t flexibly cope with change, there are negative effects on all of their family members. Sometimes kids have become so guarded due to reciprocally negative interactions with adults around how they’re often letting others down, that they hold their parents at arm’s length, not allowing them to provide help. This is another situation in which learning the Collaborative and Proactive Solutions process might be worth your while—you can work with your child to figure out how your help can actually feel helpful to them—all while building the very skills (and self-esteem) that your child struggles with.
But an objective clinician outside of the family dynamic may feel safer to your child initially. So don’t wait on getting your child help. The earlier interventions begin, the easier it is for your child to make lasting changes. In the meantime, make your child’s environment more supportive and/or less challenging so that their weaker EF skills have less of a negative impact on them and on you.
Executive functioning is a skill that needs to be learned, and some kids need a lot of modeling and scaffolding to develop those skills. But they are indeed learnable! If you’re responsive to the hand you’ve been dealt (a child for whom EF skills may be challenging) that means you adapt your parenting to meet your child’s needs. Be patient, show your child compassion, acceptance, and willingness to help them learn from their mistakes—and feel empowered to help your child thrive and reach their potential!
How do you scaffold executive functioning skill deficits in your family? Tell me about it on Instagram @bkparents. And be sure to join me live on Instagram on Monday, May 8 at 1pm for a Brooklyn Parent Therapy “Ask Me Anything!” I’m so excited to answer your questions in real time!
If you have a question for me about parent-child relationships, respectful parenting tips and/or parental mental health, shoot me an email at parenthood@quickanddirtytips.com, leave a message at 646-926-3243 or DM me IG @bkparents. And you can learn about my private practice working with parents living in New York State at www.brooklynparenttherapy.com.
Catch you next week!
Barkley, R., PhD. (2022, April 14). Your Child’s 7 Executive Functions — and How to Boost Them. ADDitude. https://www.additudemag.com/slideshows/boost-executive-function/
Murrihy, R. C., Drysdale, S. A., Dedousis-Wallace, A., Rémond, L., McAloon, J., Ellis, D. M., ... & Ollendick, T. H. (2023). Community-delivered Collaborative and Proactive Solutions and Parent Management Training for oppositional youth: A randomized trial. Behavior Therapy, 54(2), 400-417.
Takacs, Z. K., & Kassai, R. (2019). The efficacy of different interventions to foster children’s executive function skills: A series of meta-analyses. Psychological bulletin, 145(7), 653.