As you and your children are finding your groove in the school year that has not-so-long-ago kicked off, we are all balancing the many demands of work, academics, extracurricular activities, home life, and a social life. It’s a lot, and the balancing act for us and our kids, teens, and young adults requires a great deal of intentional executive functioning skills.
Executive functioning skills are not innate; we are not born with these skills. Rather, they are learned. In an ideal world, these skills would be taught as a class from elementary school through high school. In reality, these skills are sometimes taught by teachers, but mostly that responsibility falls on parents.
Executive functioning skills are used throughout our lifespan. The amount of executive functioning skills needed expands as we grow into adolescence and young adults, and this often coincides with the transition from elementary to high school, and the transition from high school to college. Although weak executive functioning skills are most often paired with ADHD, one does not imply the other.
What are executive functioning skills and why do we need them?
These are the skills that get us and our kids through our daily lives. The following is a list of the prominent executive functioning skills that are most associated with being able to manage the many demands of being a student (from the end of elementary school through college) as well as a successful work career.
Working Memory is the ability to hold information in short-term memory while manipulating information and producing a response or action. For example, your child’s teacher announced that there is an upcoming test this week. Working memory is your child’s ability to hold that information in his short-term memory while finding his planner, finding his pencil, opening up the planner to today’s date, finding the subject for the class, or writing it down and indicating that there is a test on Friday.
This also applies to us as parents. We learn that there is a game on Friday for our child, we have to hold that information long enough in our memory to find our planner (electronic or tangible copy) and write or type it into the Friday slot.
Inhibition or Impulse Control is the ability to have a thought or plan of action and then not carry it out, but rather delay it to another time. For example, while your child is working on a boring math homework assignment, she thinks about a TikTok that her friend shared with her. Immediately, she wants to find it and watch it again. Inhibition or impulse control is the ability to recognize that she is working on a homework assignment, and that it is best to wait until that homework assignment is done before looking for that video.
Time Management is the ability to be aware of the time, how much time a task will take, to allot that time, and to follow through to complete the task while being aware of the time. The other executive functioning skill that works hand-in-hand with time management is prioritization. This is the ability to think about a list of tasks and to assess which one needs to get done first due to an impending “deadline,” whether that’s a deadline for school or because there is an upcoming activity or appointment. For example: washing a uniform so that it is ready for tomorrow’s practice takes priority over playing a video game. Another example is completing the math assignment tonight because it is due tomorrow, and completing the science assignment tomorrow because it is due in 2 days. These time management and prioritization skills follow us throughout our lifetime. This skill is essential in our work careers as adults; think of how frequently at work you might adjust your priorities when new projects or new information comes to light.
Organization is the ability to keep track of belongings and work/school materials, and to have a system of where they are kept and can be found when needed. This applies to clothes, shoes, student IDs, purses, phones, air pods, notebooks, pencils, folders, and backpacks.
Organization is also the creation of systems that are put in place and used over and over again – for example, so that items can be reliably found in the same place. This applies to routines that are established and maintained because they work. The goal is to set up the systems to reduce the amount of thought and mental energy being used to “find my shoes” every day. If you can conserve that thought energy via organization, you have that energy to invest in other places.
The list above is a list of the executive functioning skills most importantly needed for the development of our children and teens so they can function from day to day, and these skills carry us through our lifetime and work careers. There are other executive functioning skills, but these are the most prominent ones.
