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Executive Function
Your Child’s Executive Functioning and 5 Ways to Promote it
Enhance executive functioning skills or wait to eat the marshmallow.
Posted June 25, 2015 Reviewed by Devon Frye
Your child may act like His Majesty the king, but does he or she perform more like a dictator than an effective sovereign?
Executive functioning skills are a group mental processes that enable children and adults alike to implement certain complex emotional, behavioral, and cognitive actions. The term comes from neuroscience and refers to skills arising from the frontal lobe required to make decisions, regulate emotions, delay gratification, plan, organize, focus, and problem-solve based on using experiences from the past to address current dilemmas.
Infant research shows some of these capacities (attention, response inhibition, working memory) begin to develop in the first 6 to 12 months of life. Others including (organization and time management) come later, starting in preschool and continuing to the early elementary school years. All individuals have a range of executive functioning weaknesses and strengths. If your child is inept in certain of these capacities, here are 5 ways to lend them your frontal lobes:
1. Guide them in the practice of delayed gratification.
Ask them to verbalize feelings of anger or frustration when they have to wait for something they want. If they get stuck or find themselves overwhelmed by the challenge, suggest words to describe their emotions: angry, irritated, disappointed, and resentful. Games in which kids are required to watch and wait—such as Simon Says or Red Light-Green Light—can help strengthen impulse control.
In a legendary experiment conducted at Stanford in the late early 1970s, a large sample of children (3 to 5 years old) were offered a choice between one indulgence provided immediately (a marshmallow or cookie) or two if they waited 15 minutes. In follow-up studies, researchers found that the ability to wait longer for the larger reward coincided with higher test scores, educational achievement, and other measures of health. Brain imaging of the same participants midlife showed that those with a higher capacity for deferral of reward had more activity in the prefrontal cortex (anterior of the frontal lobe) and in the ventral striatum (an area linked to addiction). It’s worth waiting for the marshmallow.
2. Break down the task in a series of discreetly defined steps.
Make a checklist of tasks and subtasks, if needed, providing a visual reminder (photo, illustration, symbol, sketches, conceptual map) which may subdue anxiety and provide a prompt when a child’s mind wanders into distraction. The brain is an image processor (with much of the sensory cortex devoted to vision). Visual cues help one retrieve and remember information. Commercial enterprises have been quick to utilize graphic imagery to promote merchandise and services with their brand logos. The symbol is recognized before reading the brand name.
Leave a buffer time between tasks to acknowledge the work that’s been accomplished and break for free play, moments of stillness, or quiet time.
3. Prioritize.
Rank the tasks in order of importance, based on a timeline, the amount of energy involved, or its relation to the other tasks. Prioritizing demands psychological distance from the job at hand and helps a child think abstractly in terms of the big picture and about the interrelationship of its component parts.
It's been said that prioritizing is “the golden rule of time management… each day, identify the two or three tasks that are the most crucial to complete.” Consider budgeting a period for each step with another kind of visual/auditory cue: a calendar, a kitchen timer, or a visual timer. Time itself is an abstract concept and an object makes it concrete and readily observed through sense perception.
4. Have your child write it down, making their goal explicit and measurable.
Lewis Caroll once said, “Any road will get you there if you don’t know where you're going.” Know where you want to go and document it in detail.
In a long-term Harvard study, Harvard MBA graduates were asked in 1979, "Have you set precise, written goals for your future and made plans to accomplish them?”
- 84 percent had no specific goals
- 13 percent had goals but not committed to paper
- 3 percent had written goals and strategies to accomplish them
In 1989, the same group was interviewed in a follow-up. The 3 percent who had distinct, well-defined written goals were earning, on average, ten times as much as the other 97 percent combined. While the study quantifies success only in terms of monetary earnings, it demonstrates how writing down distinct and measurable goals is an imperative step toward achieving them. Writing something down formality to a promise and embeds the commitment with fuller intention.
5. Support self-reflection and the ability to track and evaluate their performance.
As you review progress, help a child revise plans as needed, supporting both their commitment to goal-directed persistence while also retaining some degree of flexibility. Make adjustments as needed. Kids who tend toward concrete thinking can be rigid when faced with unexpected circumstances and struggle to adapt to an alternative course of action or create a novel solution. Encourage them, when an obstacle appears in their pathway, to "be nimble" so they clear the “candlestick" as Jack did.
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