Is it a struggle to get your child (children) ready for an event, function, or for school on regular basis? Do you feel that you must give same instructions multiple times and still you have to remind your child to get him/her to start or complete the task? Do you feel a change in plan or change in daily routine can make your child distressed, upset and annoyed? Do you feel your child is smart but just lazy because he/she is not able to organize and plan his/her school work, room, bag, school worksheet? For any child to perform all these tasks (depending on age) requires executive functioning skills. This is not just true for children but also for adults. Children, as they grow, develop executive functioning skills until they reach adulthood.
We all use executive functions to complete the tasks on our things to do list. This unique set of cognitive skills helps us setting a goal, making a plan, and implementing it. Executive functions are a set of processes that all have to do with managing oneself and one’s resources in order to achieve a goal. It is an umbrella term for the neurologically-based skills involving mental control and self-regulation1. Given below is the list of executive functions for your understanding:
1. Inhibition: The ability to stop ones’ own behavior at the appropriate time, including stopping actions and thoughts. The flip side of inhibition is impulsivity; that is limited ability to exercise restraint.
A child with weak inhibition finds it difficult to think of results/consequences and therefore appears impulsive. For example: at a family gathering when all kids are running around and an adult instructs all the children to settle down for a cake cutting, one child is still running and jumping excessively when others have already settled down. This happens because this child has not taken notice and responded to the change in situation as quickly as other kids.
2. Shift: The ability to move freely from one situation to another and to think flexibly in order to respond to the situation. When you ask your child to stop doing the current activity and ask him to move on to another task which may require problem-solving, does he shift smoothly or not.
3. Emotional Control: The ability to modulate emotional responses by bringing rational thoughts to bear on feelings. For example: when there is a conflicting decision making like playing before homework or after homework; eating dessert first or after a meal, how does your child modulate his emotional response?
4. Initiation: The ability to begin a task or activity and to independently generate ideas, responses, or problem-solving strategies. For example: Child may just have a hard time starting a task. You may hear child saying, “it’s too hard”, “I am bored”, “I don’t like doing this task”, “I need time to think about it as it need to be perfect”.
5. Working memory: Is your child able to hold information in his mind for a particular purpose of completing a task? working memory can be related to a child completing a project or homework but forgetting to carry it to school, forgetting bits of instruction given by the teacher, losing stationery or personal belongings.
6. Planning/Organization: The ability to manage current and future-oriented task demands. Children who struggle with deficient organization skills or planning skills often have difficulty in managing time. They appeared hurried and doing things at the last moment.
7. Organization of Materials: The ability to impose order on work, play and storage spaces. Messy desk, littered pencil box with pencil shavings and paper bits, messy room, cluttered drawers is a result of poor organization skill which results in problem like – not finding a particular worksheet, or a missing book-based project folder, etc.
8. Self-Monitoring: The ability to monitor one’s own performance and measure it against some standard of what is needed or expected. A social setting is perfect example where you can observe whether you child is above to monitor himself. Whether he understands the social setting and behaves appropriately. For e.g., if your child is playing a team game and does not want to adhere to the rules of the game as they constantly frustrate him.
Every child may not be born with executive functioning skills but they have potential to develop it with proper support from parents, care givers and school counsellors. In my next blog I will be talking about the timeline and developmental task requiring checklist, which will help you understand what you can expect from your child if he falls under a particular age category.
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Reference1: Dawson, Peg & Richard Guare. Executive skills in Children and Adolescents: A practical guide to assessment and intervention, Guilford Press, New York, N.Y., 2004
Picture courtesy: Istock and google images
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