Understanding Your Child’s Executive Functioning Differences

Consider the following simple daily routines that your child engages in:

• In the morning, they decide between pancakes or waffles; they get dressed, put their shoes on, grab their jacket and pack up their backpack before heading out the door.
  
  
• At school, they raise their hand to participate, they learn facts about penguins and stand in line at the cafeteria.
  
  
• At dinner, they help you put together the salad, set the table and tell you all about penguins and share what they’re going to be doing tomorrow on their field trip.

All of these aspects of their day require executive functioning skills and kids with executive functioning differences may require more support in these areas.

My job here is to help you understand what executive functioning is, how differences may show up, and how to support children in building executive functioning skills.

What is executive functioning?

Executive functioning skills develop in the frontal lobe – the place where many higher-level cognitive functions live. These skills are crucial to daily life since they include skills like:

• planning
• organizing
• problem solving
• critical thinking
• reasoning
• task initiation
• sequencing of steps
• sustained attention
• impulse control
• working memory
• self-monitoring

This area of the brain is not fully formed until adulthood so ALL kids (across all neurotypes) are still learning and growing in their executive functioning skills. Neurodivergent kids may have more differences in the development of their executive functioning skills since the prefrontal cortex becomes more limited when our nervous system is dysregulated.

What do executive functioning differences look like?

Behaviors related to executive functioning challenges

Remember, behaviors are just the tip of the iceberg. Understanding the underlying cause of each behavior takes good detective skills. This list of behaviors can be linked to differences in executive functioning skills, but they can also be attributed to so many other reasons.

• Delaying the start of a task. For example, when you tell them to start their homework and they instead start organizing their backpack or playing with the dog.
  
  
• Forgetting crucial parts of a task. For example, they say they’re done getting dressed but they forgot to put socks on before shoes.
  
  
• Taking longer to finish a task. Maybe not on purpose, but because the method by which they execute the task is “inefficient”, or they needed multiple reminders or forgot along the way.
  
  
• Leaving tasks unfinished. For example, maybe they started making their bed but forgot to put the pillows on because they got distracted.
  
  
• Complaining about big, open ended tasks. For example, if you say “clean your room”, they may get overwhelmed by the daunting task of cleaning the whole room and feel paralyzed with not knowing where or how to start.

What can we do to support our kids?

Before we start jumping into specific executive functioning strategies, it’s important to play start to narrow down which areas of the task and what executive functioning skills your child needs most help with:

• Is it initiating the task?
• Is it remembering the next step?
• Is it staying focused?
• Is it organizing a plan?

This isn’t something you can always tell by just observing so you may need to ask your child directly, or discuss with their therapists. If they don’t have any therapists for OT, Speech, etc., it may be worth consulting with one for an evaluation or working with your child’s teacher/school district to have their input as well.

First and foremost, you want to start with supporting their nervous system regulation by making the environment comfortable and conducive to their sensory needs – think about lighting, presence of clutter, and background noise, in addition to considering whether they may have a need for extra sensory input.

If your child is also emotionally dysregulated or anxious, exhausted or ill- this may also lock up those executive functioning skills in that pantry.

You can only assess your child’s true executive functioning ability when they are at their most optimal state of regulation since this is when those skills are most accessible. It’s important to keep this in mind so you can always balance your expectations with what is available to them at the moment.

Specific strategies to try

• Break down steps for each task and limit the amount of steps you list at once. Some kids may need you to give them one step at a time, even if it’s as simple as “stand up” to get a task initiated. It’s important to remember that they may need extra support with problem solving, sequencing, and planning to be able to identify this first step so teaching them how to break larger tasks down into smaller steps is meeting them where they are at!
  
  
• Use any external visual or auditory supports that work for your child. Some kids do well with visual timers, charts and task lists that include pictures of tasks or activities; other kids do well with auditory cues to signal the beginning and/or end of a task or step. For kids who are able to read and use their own visual timer, you can create something like this:
  
  

• Body doubling (credit to Lisa Anderson, 1996) is when you intentionally have another person present in the room with you to motivate you to do a task (even if the other person is not involved in the task itself). For example, you can finish writing your email in the bathroom while your child brushes their teeth; you can cut vegetables at the dining table while your child starts their homework. Body doubling increases focus, provides social support, and helps your child feel motivated and less distracted in completing tasks or activities they may find challenging.
  
  
• Optimize your household layout to reduce unnecessary transitions for multi-step routines. For example, keep socks next to the shoes; put a clothes pile in the bathroom so they can brush their teeth, brush their hair and get dressed in the same room; have a duplicate set of a toothbrush and toothpaste in each bathroom. Although it may not seem like a transition to us, having to go up and down the stairs multiple times or walk into different rooms just to get one set of tasks done may be extremely taxing for our neurodivergent children.
  
  
• Encourage your child to walk you through their plan before doing it. Here’s an example I often do with my own daughter:
  • Parent: (while driving home) “When you get out of the car, please hang up your jacket on the hook, put your shoes away and wash your hands.”
  • Child: “OK.”
  • Parent: “What’s your plan?”
  • Child: “When I get home I’m going to hang up my jacket, put away my shoes and wash my hands.”
  • I might then do one final reminder as soon as the car is parked and say, “What’s the first thing you’re going to do?”

It’s important to remember that all children are different so what works for one person may not work for another. This means that these supports may not work for your family or your child and that’s okay! Use this list to adapt and develop strategies that work best for you all.

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