The new school year will be here in less than a month for many families, and parents are beginning to think ahead to fall. Our kids are deep into the wild, hot, unstructured days of summer – an important creative respite for our children who also learn through play. How do we prepare our playful children for the tests, quizzes, projects and assignments that are just around the corner? Dr. Liz Matheis offers her insights below as an Executive Functioning Coach.
As parents, we often think about how to help our children, especially those who struggle with poor executive functioning skills such as time management, prioritization, starting a task, completing a task, and keeping school materials organized so they can find their assignments and completed work. With multiple classes, after-school activities and daily life tasks all packed into a single day, life can feel like a hot mess some days for both parent and child.
As an Executive Functioning Coach, Dr. Liz Matheis offers many strategies to help children and teens to get their work done so that they can have their down time to decompress at the end of each day. “It’s unrealistic to believe that our children can go-go-go without a break – the same goes for adults,” says Dr. Matheis. “I often pose it as the following, which seems to resonate – ‘The goal is to get your work done so you can play and rest. You need to have that time so you are ready for the next day.’”
She encourages parents to enroll their child in no more than one activity per season to help strike a balance between extracurricular activities, academics, social life, and home life.
What is “Body Doubling”?
Body doubling, or an “accountability partner,” is the concept of working around – or sometimes in concert with – another person. Sometimes having another person present can help wandering attention spans focus. for Dr. Matheis shares an anecdote:
“When I was a young girl, I realized that when another person was in the room where I was working on homework (and I shared a room with my sister), I was able to stay focused for a longer period of time and get through assignments with greater ease. When I was left alone, I found myself organizing my desk drawers and cleaning my closet just to avoid getting schoolwork done. That is the concept of the body double – the presence of another person around or near the student which creates a level of accountability and motivation.
For my own son, he often asks to sit at the kitchen table while I clean up after dinner when he knows he needs to stay focused long enough to complete an assignment that NEEDS to get done or has an impending due date. I get it. That is still me.
For your child, assess if keeping him at the kitchen table or working area near you is helpful in that it creates more motivation to start and complete assignments. Your child may need the check in or the mere words, ‘Go ahead and get started.’ For many of our children, it’s easier to start an assignment within someone’s presence than it is to start alone. It also helps for a check-in while working on the assignment in order to minimize distractions and maintain focus.”
Where to Begin
All of us have encountered a project or task so overwhelming that you don’t know where to begin. For many children learning a new skill, simply figuring out how to approach the homework can be a challenge because they don’t know where to begin. It can be helpful for an adult or parent figure to review the assignment with your child and write down the list of tasks that need to be completed. Then, make the decision as to whether to begin with the easiest or the most difficult task in the assignment. This is all relative to your child’s preferences. Another approach is to ask your child to make an estimation of how long each task is going to take, then choose whether to start with the task that will take the shortest or the longest and work in that direction.
Dr. Matheis suggests creating a visual list of tasks and numbering them. This creates the mindset that the amount of homework is not endless, and your child has control over where to begin and how to proceed through each task in the assignment. Numbering the tasks also brings the added benefit of building a more realistic understanding of time . For example, your child may think that an assignment will take 5 minutes to complete, when, it’s more like 30 minutes. After a 5-minute timer has rung, you can ask your child to asses how much more time they will need. This can help your child build confidence in the time required for certain work tasks, and improve their estimations of how long an assignment or task will require in the future.
Breaking Assignments Down
When you speak to marathon runners about long-distance accomplishments, they often break their run down into short segments. Overwhelming tasks can cause both adults and children to shut down. When a child looks at that list of homework assignments, or reviews the contents of a project or the amount of information that needs to be studied for an upcoming test or quiz, the temptation to shut down can be immediate. This can lead to procrastination and difficulty in beginning a project.
To help reframe an overwhelming project into something manageable, Dr. Matheis suggests, one approach is to set a timer for a definitive period of time. That might be 15, 25 or 45 minutes. A smaller “chunk” of time can feel less intimidating and more doable for your child. Set a timer on your phone and set the phone across the room, out of reach. Once the timer rings, get up, take a 5-10 minute break, and set the timer for another spurt of time. Repeat until the task is done. This has multiple benefits in that it begins to chip away at the idea that all assignments and tasks take “forever” and begin to also create an accurate and realistic time sense of how long certain tasks take to complete.
For more information, read Dr. Matheis’ original article on executive functioning skills here. You can also find more school-focused guidance from this special needs parent, and clinical and school psychologist here:
