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Executive skills, not just attention, define the real struggles of kids with ADHD. The DSM’s focus on inattention and hyperactivity misses the profound difficulties with organization, time management, planning, and task initiation that Dr. Dawson observed clinically.

Eleven skills, two tiers. She and her co-author settled on 11 executive skills, grouped into six foundational skills (response inhibition, working memory, emotional control, flexibility, sustained attention, task initiation) that emerge early, and five higher-order skills (planning/prioritization, organization, time management, goal-directed persistence, metacognition) that build on them. Intervention should always start with the foundational six.

Brain development lags far behind school demands. Myelination and pruning continue into the mid-20s. MRI scans show the frontal lobes are still largely immature at age 13—exactly when middle school imposes complex schedules, long-term projects, and shifting expectations. The mismatch between expectation and brain reality is greatest here.

“Lazy” is a damaging label that masks skill deficits. When we lack language like “task initiation” or “sustained attention,” we default to character judgments. A child internalizing “I’m lazy” can turn it into an excuse and an identity, whereas executive-skill language points to teachable, improvable capacities.

Parents act as surrogate frontal lobes—but must eventually hand over the reins. The goal is to modify environments, tasks, and interactions so kids can practice and grow their own executive skills, then gradually fade support. The handoff is tricky because a child’s needs shift, and parents often don’t adjust.

Incentives are pragmatic, not bribes. If a child won’t practice a skill, adding a motivator can get them the repetitions they need. This works best when children aren’t already given everything on demand.

Praise effort, persistence, and risk-taking—not “smart.” Specific, process-oriented praise (e.g., “you stuck with it even when it was hard”) builds resilience. A 3:1 ratio of positive to corrective feedback is research-backed but extremely hard to maintain.

Debrief successes, not just failures. When something goes right, ask the child what they did differently. This reinforces effective strategies and builds metacognition.

The ultimate prize is goal-directed persistence, which often doesn’t appear until late high school or beyond. Parents panic in middle school, but many kids find their drive once they discover a passion. Model persistence yourself and focus on the child’s goals, not your own.

Pithy and provocative quotes

“I fairly quickly realized that the American Psychiatric Association’s diagnostic criteria for ADHD, which is problems with attention or problems with hyperactivity, impulsivity or both, really didn’t begin to describe the problems I saw these kids having. I see huge problems with organization and time management and planning.”

“Procrastination increases until the mid to late twenties and decreases gradually after that.” (Citing research that confirmed her clinical impression)

“The brain learns by association. So the more you can link two events over and over again together, you compare them. Then event A triggers event B. So stated start time, action start time. It’s a variation on Pavlov’s dog.”

“At any single point in time, it’s faster not to use an organizational system than to use an organizational system. Right. It’s way faster to take that science worksheet and just stuff it in the backpack wherever than it is to take out the science folder, open it up, take out the incomplete homework folder, put it neatly in the incomplete homework folder…”

“For kids with ADD there are two times: now and not now. Actually, it’s really only now because everything else is not now.” (Paraphrasing Tom Brown)

“When we’re using terms like lazy and not working with potential, those sound like character flaws to me. Those sound like things that kids have no control over. … What’s the intervention for lazy? I mean, we have interventions for task initiation, sustained attention, all of those. Lazy, as I say, sounds like a character flaw. And it sticks with people.”

“Calling a kid smart is probably one of the worst things you can do because then the kid thinks he has to be smart all the time. If he does something that’s not smart, then he’s worried that he’s going to lose esteem in the eyes of others or in the eyes of themselves.”

“Keep your eye on the biggest prize which is building goal-directed persistence. … When my kids find their passion, I’m not going to worry about that because my husband and I are both incredibly hard workers. … Sure enough, once they found the job or the career that they wanted, they threw themselves into it 150%. I never would have believed that if I looked at them when they were 14.”

Tools, practices, and methodologies

Teach “wait” and “stop” early. For response inhibition, embed waiting into daily routines (e.g., “we’ll eat the treat when we get to the gate”). Repeated, low-stakes practice builds the skill.

Prompt working memory by linking to past success. Ask, “Remember what you did yesterday that worked out really well? What do you think you can do today?” This helps kids draw on their own coping strategies.

Mindfulness meditation for emotional control. Use resources like the book Sitting Still Like a Frog (with guided meditations for kids) to build emotional regulation through regular practice.

Plan with a start time (task initiation). Have the child state when they will begin a task, then hold them to that exact time. Explain the brain-association logic: pairing the stated time with the action builds automaticity.

Study plan template. A grid with columns: task, estimated time, start time, where I’ll work, actual start/stop, done. This bakes in time estimation, planning, task initiation, and mental rehearsal (picturing the workspace).

Visual checklists with photos. For organization, take pictures of a clean room/desk/shelves and turn them into a checklist. The child compares the current state to the photo, making the standard concrete and non-negotiable.

Use Alexa or similar devices as neutral reminders. Kids can tell Alexa their plan (“remind me at 5 o’clock to start homework”), shifting the nagging from parent to device.

Incentives to sweeten practice. If a child resists a hard task, offer a contingent reward (e.g., 30 minutes of video games after homework is done). This works best when the reward isn’t already freely available.

3:1 praise ratio. Aim for three specific, positive statements for every one piece of corrective feedback. Praise effort, persistence, and the process—not innate ability.

Debrief successes. When a child does well, ask: “What did you do differently? Why did that work?” This reinforces effective strategies and builds metacognition.

Ask, don’t tell. Use questions to activate the child’s executive skills: “What’s your plan? How long do you think that will take? Do you have a strategy?”

Model your own thought process. Instead of giving answers, narrate how you solve a problem: “Let’s think about this. How could we figure it out?”

Lower organizational standards when needed. Recognize that some disorganized kids may never meet a parent’s ideal; tolerating a messier reality can reduce conflict while still working on incremental improvements.

Time estimation practice. For tasks, ask the child to guess how long it will take, then compare with the actual time. This corrects both under- and over-estimation tendencies.

Unanswered questions and omissions

What about kids with severe, co-occurring conditions? The talk focuses on ADHD and mild executive dysfunction. It doesn’t address how strategies change for children with significant intellectual disabilities, trauma histories, or complex mental health diagnoses.

How do you sustain these interventions when parents themselves have executive skill weaknesses? Many parents of these kids share the same traits. The talk assumes a level of parental consistency, emotional regulation, and organizational capacity that may not be present.

What’s the evidence that working memory can be improved? Dr. Dawson expresses “mixed feelings” and leans toward compensatory strategies, but she doesn’t explore the controversy around cognitive training programs or when direct remediation might be worth attempting.

The role of medication is entirely absent. For many families, stimulant or non-stimulant medications are a central part of managing ADHD-related executive dysfunction. The talk sidesteps this entirely, which may leave parents wondering how strategies integrate with pharmacological treatment.

How do you handle school systems that won’t cooperate? The advice assumes teachers are willing to implement study plans, provide visuals, or adjust expectations. No guidance is given for advocating within resistant or under-resourced schools.

Cultural and socioeconomic factors are not addressed. The examples (affluent communities, MIT-educated fathers, Alexa devices, private schools) assume a level of privilege. How do these strategies translate for families without time, money, or access to such resources?

The “failure to launch” population gets a mention but no depth. The upcoming book is teased, but the talk doesn’t explain how to intervene when young adults are stuck, beyond the general principle that goal-directed persistence eventually kicks in.

What about the emotional toll on parents? The speaker acknowledges her own stress but doesn’t offer concrete support for parental burnout, marital strain, or the grief that can accompany raising a child with chronic executive challenges.

The talk glosses over the fact that some kids do not “turn out fine.” The optimistic longitudinal message is comforting, but it doesn’t address the subset who continue to struggle significantly into adulthood, nor what differentiates those who succeed from those who don’t.

Happy to be here. I mean, I'm used to getting pretty good parent turn up. This is probably about the best I've had in recent months, or if not years. So just a little more background about myself. I started out as a school psychologist.

I worked in the public schools for about 16 years. I was a psychologist as well. And then I joined my colleague and my co author, andy Dick Guer. Dr. Guer.

We had a private practice for a while and we merged with a local community mental health center. So the center for Learning and Attention Disorders is actually part of SECO's mental health center in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Although he and I spent very long time there, semi retired from that business. And I spent most of my time on the road doing these kinds of workshops. I got interested in executive skills as I was transitioning out of the public schools because I was seeing a lot of kids report for attention problems.

And as I worked with that population more extensively, I fairly quickly realized that the American Psychiatric Association's diagnostic criteria for adhd, which is problems with attention or problems with hyperactivity, impulsivity or both, really didn't begin to describe the problems I saw these kids having. I see huge problems with organization and time management and planning and those kinds of things. And I remember talking to my colleague Dick about it this time. Yaki and I both did our doctoral work and University of Virginia, although we were there at different times. But he went on to do a postdoc in neuropsychology at Children's Hospital in Boston.

So as I was describing his issues, he said, well, hey, those are executive skills. Well, this was the late 80s, early 90s, and that term was not being widely used in those days. So he and I decided we really wanted to understand these skills better. How do they develop, what's going on in the brain, how do they impact school performance? And most importantly, how do you help kids in three different executive skills because become more successful students?

So that's what led to all our writing. We wrote a book for professionals first and then we realized there was a huge role for parents and all of this. So that led us to write Smart but scattered and then Smart but scattered teams. We actually had another book coming out sometime in January for the sort of failure to launch kits. We call it smart scattered, installed, so you may want to look for that one.

We've written a book for adults because we realized that contrary to our initial expectations that when kids grow up, all their executive skills are evenly and well developed. That's not what we found to be True. We all need to always look at ourselves to understand that. So. And then we realized that as adults, knowing what our own strengths and weaknesses are is really helpful, especially those of us who work with kids, whether we're parents or teachers or psychologists.

And it turns out the same strategies that will work for kids can be tweaked towards adults. So you wrote the smart Scattered Guide to Success. That one says self help with your belt. At the same time, I was going to stop there. At the same time we were doing all this professionally, I was raising two kids of my own.

I have two sons who are now in their 30s. My older son at the age of 14, is diagnosing an attention disorder. And so I actually think a lot of what I've learned about executive skills, particularly on the intervention side, has come as much from my experience as a mom as my experience as a psychologist. And the nice thing about being the mom of one of these kids is you get the longitudinal perspective. You get to see what they look like when they grow up.

And, you know, most of these kids turn out fine. That's my message right off the bat to parents. Most of these kids turn out fine because you know what? They grow up, they mature, their brains mature. And if you're able to use any of the strategies, which I'll briefly touch on tonight, but which are in much more detail in our books, these kids have a really good shot at success, which is why I enjoy working with them, because they're such a helpful, optimistic group.

So here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to talk for about an hour, and I'm not going to get through my entire PowerPoint because I want to leave time for questions and answers, because that's why I do these parent presentations, so I can learn from the audience. However, I'm happy to make my full PowerPoint available to you. So on my handout, you have my email address. It's up there, Dawsonigmail.com if you email me, I will send you.

It's a Dropbox link. It's too big a file to put in an email, but it's a hotline. So I'll send you this long set of numbers and letters. If you click on that, it will download this PowerPoint. So do that, because, as I say, I won't have time for questions and answers.

Every expert out there on ADHD or on executive skills has a different way of thinking, talking about skills, organizing them, defining them. And the. The range goes from 1 to 40 in terms of people's estimates and how many there are. Dick and I settled on 11. We didn't want to overwhelm people.

So we basically started with the question, you know, of all the skill sets out there that experts are talking about, which ones are the most critical for school success? And can we define a pool that doesn't go overboard? So we settled on 11, and I'm going to go through them one at a time. The next question we asked ourselves after we settled on the 11 was could we come up with definitions for these skills that are so crystal clear that everyone gets it? Because when you delve into the research, you can very quickly get bogged down in abstract concepts and complex terminology, and they can get lost in the weeds.

So we wanted to make our definitions accessible. So I'm going to go through them one at a time. I'm going to go through them fairly quickly because I want to go to. I want to at least give you some idea of the strategies we talk about. I will talk about them in the order in which we think they emerge developmentally.

And I will say, and I hope that they are listed in the same way on your handout. The first six I'm going to talk about are the foundational executive skills. So the 11. The first six, if you're a parent of a kid in elementary school, those are the ones you should be looking. If you are a parent of a middle or high school kid who is struggling with executive skills, you should still start with those first six.

So the first six are the most important in terms of just laying the foundation. I consider them the foundational executive skills. When you get to the last five, they are more complicated skills and they are built on a foundation of the earlier skills. So just that is sort of an advanced organizer. So let's get started.

Groups. So the first executive skill to develop is response inhibition. The first three I'm going to talk about the first year of life. You see, the early signs of these response inhibition is. I mean, there are a lot of different names for that.

Self regulation, self control, impulse control, the ability to delay gratification is another way of talking about it. This experts like Russ Barkley, who I consider the world's leading expert on adhd, maintain that this is the most critical executive skill. If the kid does not acquire response inhibition, how are they ever going to get time management or planning or those later skills? So this is really critical. We basically teach response inhibition by teaching wait and stop.

If you can get wait and stop in the kids, that's response inhibition. That whole idea of waiting. I think it's really important and parents and young kids just do it naturally. I'll just give one example so you can see what I'm talking about. About a year ago I was flying out to Arizona to do some workshops and I went through security at Logan Airport in Boston and was picking up some coffee from Starbucks.

And there was a mom with a young child, she looked to be about three to me, who just picked up some food in the food court. And the little girl wanted to eat the food right then. And I heard the mom saying to the child, no, we're going to wait till we get to the gate and then you can eat your special treat. And the girl was pushing back and she wanted to eat the treat right then. And I just heard the mom say, no, get to the gate first and then you can eat your treat.

And I kept an eye on it because I wanted to know who was going to wait. The mom thought, what was she doing? She was teaching her daughter to wait. It took two minutes maybe. But if you do this day in and day out, especially with young kids to they will learn to wait.

And that's basically laying the groundwork for response inhibition. The next executive skill to emerge is working memory. There are a couple of aspects to this. One is it's the ability to hold onto information or manipulate information while you're performing a complex task. So it's being able to hold in your head information that you need to solve a math problem.

For instance, if I give someone a multi step math problem orally and ask them to solve in their head, they have to hold on to not only the numbers and the procedures they need to use, they also have to hold on to where they are in solving the problem. So that's one piece of also involves the ability to draw on past experience, apply it to the situation at hand and make a decision about how we're going to move going forward. So one of the strategies we use for working memory is just prompt kids to access their own working memory, especially when positive coping strategies. Remember what you did yesterday, that worked out really well. So if you get the same issue today, what do you think you can do?

That kind of thing, working memory. For those of you who have kids with learning disabilities, the work I've done with teachers like I've worked at the Pennington School in New Jersey and another school in Vermont where a residential school for kids with learning disabilities. Those teachers tell me that working memory is the weakest skill for those kids. And if you've got a child so that's what makes things like memorizing math facts and sight words and spelling words challenging. And I have mixed feelings about the extent to which one can actually improve working memory, especially in kids with severe learning disabilities.

So more often, we're trying to give them workaround strategies, compensating strategies for their weak working memory cues in the environment or something like that. Ultimately, though, we don't want to give them strategy, and that's a way station on the way to them being able to generate their own strategies, because as long as we're giving them strategy, they're dependent on us. My goal is to get kids independent, to be able to function on their own. So. So ultimately, I want kids with weak working memory to be able to say, you know what?

Working memory is hard for me, and here's how it affects me in these three areas. And so I got to come up with a strategy for managing that. I'm throwing stuff out mostly, I mean, in part to give you some ideas for questions you might want to ask. So again, I can clarify some of these things as we go forward. Cartoons illustrate working memory.

So Jeremy's mom was saying to him, jeremy, please put your dishes in the dishwasher and push the start button. And the time he takes Jeremy to get over the dishwasher, he swaps the instructions. Run that by me again. It says, but poor working memory doesn't just affect kids, it also affects their parents. It's late at night.

Mom's already in bed. Jeremy pokes his head around the door and says, mom, I have to bring a homemade Stuart for a class party tomorrow. And she says, jeremy, do you know what time it is? He says, I'm sorry, I forgot. And she sighs and says, okay, I think I might have stuff to make my seven layer cookies.

And then Jeremy delivers the singer. It's for Spanish class. I have to make one in one. How many of us have that experience? Okay.

Emotional control, the ability to manage emotions. You know, I've been doing workshops with teachers and with mental health professionals for years, and recently I realized that in many cases, they don't connect emotional control with learning. I have to pull that out of them when I'm asking, you know, what kinds of skills do you need to draw on, for instance, performa, to complete a launch of problems, which is one of my standard activities for some of my workshops. And I always have to draw emotional control out of them. And what I've learned from that is we don't automatically connect the ability to manage emotions with learning.

And yet it's huge. Negative emotions can stop the learning process quick. So that's a problem. But the other side of that is that positive emotions facilitate learning. That's why if you make something fun, it's much easier for kids to learn it because they have a positive emotion associated with that learning.

Kids with significant emotional control issues, there are strategies for that. None of them work fast because it's sort of an instant response in many cases to a situation that charges their emotions. But cognitive behavior therapy is certainly teaching kids to talk to themselves. What could you say to yourself to manage that? Anger, that irritation, that frustration or whatever is one strategy that can work.

There's a lot of research to show that doing mindfulness meditation on a regular, consistent basis with kids can also have a positive impact on emotional control as well as other executive skills. But I think that is particularly helpful for emotional control. And there's some great resources for kids around mindfulness meditation. There's a great book called Sitting Still Like Frog, which is. And it comes with a little CD that has guided meditations using metaphors and language that kids that are healing the kids.

So that's a strategy there. Flexibility. So this is the ability to go with the flow. And when I mentioned that I got interested in executive skills, still working with kids with aviation. Kids with aviation.

And for add, I use those two terms interchangeably. Kids with ADHD certainly have all kinds of executive skill challenges. Flexibility is not necessarily one of their challenges. It's often a strength, right? Because they're living in the moment, they're able to adjust very easily to anything that happens.

The kids who have trouble with flexibility. When I ask audiences what kids have problems with flexibility, the first answer I always give me is kids, always. The autism spectrum. That's a really sort of central feature of kids on the autism spectrum. They tend to be inflexible.

Kids who are anxious are often inflexible. Flexibility is an interesting one because sometimes it lies beneath the surface. So what we see is the behavior or the emotion. But it started with inflexibility. If you have trouble dealing with unexpected events, what happens when they occur?

Your anxiety level rises. You see the anxiety, starting with inflexibility, Sustained attention. Now, this one is a critical feature of an attention disorder. There's a key phrase in my definition, the capacity to maintain attention to a situation or task. And the key phrase is in spite of distractibility, fatigue, or boredom.

And that's really important part. I don't know how many parents I've had in my office over the years. They've been sort of nudged in by a teacher or by a pediatrician because someone thinks the kid has attention problems. And they'll say to me, that kid can't have add. He can play video games for hours.

Video games don't involve distractibility, fatigue, or boredom. Right. So what I told parents is it's not the kids with ADD can't pay attention. It's that they have trouble making themselves pay attention. That's not going to happen with video games.

Where are parents likely to see that? Three domains. Homework, chores, board meeting, routines. Those are all things where they have to make themselves pay attention. And some of them do it better than others.

And kids with ADD particularly struggle with it. Moving on to task initiation, the ability. This is the opposite of procrastination. That's the ecstasy. And I've come to the conclusion over years of thinking and working with these concepts and these executive skills, this may be the last and hardest executive skill to acquire.

And in fact, I finally ran across a research article that confirmed my own personal and clinical impressions. This research article looks at procrastination. Okay? So remember, this is a bad thing. And it gave a developmental timeline for procrastination.

What the article said was procrastination increases until the mid to late twenties and decreases gradually after that. So that's the first time I saw in print what was my own sort of clinical experience. Another article I read surveyed college students. And 88% or 89% of college students say that procrastination is a problem for them. And 48% of them say it affects their grades.

So this is an issue. When I read that article, I thought, man, we gotta figure out how to teach task and information. And if we could figure that out, we could increase college graduation rates. We could decrease the amount of time kids are spending at college and six parents thousands of dollars. So I started thinking about, so how do you teach task and change in any way?

And my first thought was, you just got to teach kids to start right away. That should take care of it. Then I realized that's a little simplistic and probably unrealistic because if you're starting everything right away, when are you finishing anything? So I've revised that. It's still a little simplistic, but I think it's a good jumping off point for thinking about how to teach task initiation.

I think you teach it right to teaching kids to make a plan with a start time and then making sure they start the plan at the time they said they were going to start it. So On Saturday morning, you say to your kid, what's your plan for cleaning up your bedroom? And they say, I'll do it after lunch. Then your job as a parent is to be there after lunch and make sure they start cleaning their bedroom at the time they said they were going to start. And here's why this is important, because the brain learns by association.

So the more you can link two events across over and over again together, you compare them. Then event A triggers event B. So stated start time. Action start time. It's a variation on Pavlov's dog.

And if you remember that old experiment where Pavlov rang a bell and presented meat to a dog and the dog salivated and after a while, all the all he had to do was ring the bell on the dog salivated because he was anticipating the meat. Okay, so stay and start getting actual start time. Let me tell you a story. I had a mom, one of my presentations just about a year ago, I did a presentation in Maine for a small blogger school there actually. And I had a parent in the audience raise her hand and she went after I was talking about this and she said, okay, so let me tell you what happened to my son last night and then you can tell me what I did wrong.

So here's what she said. I pictured her son probably in high school, though I wasn't sure. But here's what she said. She said, I know what you say about plan with a start time. I get that, that makes sense to me.

I also know that you talk about giving kids a little more responsibility over their own lives. And that makes sense to me too. So last night I said to my son early in the evening, what's your plan for taking your shower tonight? And the kid said, I'll take it at 9 o'. Clock.

So the mom says, so 9 o' clock comes and I say to the kid, okay, you're going to take a shower at 9, right? And the kid says, I really don't feel like taking a shower tonight. I'll do it tomorrow before school. So you know what happened the next morning, the mom is dragging the kid out of bed to go to school and there is no time to take a shower. So she said, what did I do wrong?

I had to laugh because I probably would have made the same mistake with my own kids. But what I said to her was, the mistake was at 9 o' clock when you reminded your kid to take a shower at 9 and you said, no, I don't feel like it. Now. You should have said, you Know what? That was your plan.

I got to hold you to it. You said you'd take a shower at 9 o' clock and I got to hold you to it. And here's why. Because the brain learns by association. Give kids that brain explanation, they love it.

I mean, kids as young as third grade, if you're talking about what's going on in the brain, it makes sense to them. So tell the kid we've got it. If we work now to pair the state of start time, the actual start time, over and over again between now and the time you go to college, college is going to go way easier for you. So that's just. I have every story around that, but that's, that's.

I think that illustrates my point pretty nicely. Ah, couple cartoons. During task initiation, Jeremy's mom says, how's the big English project coming along, Jeremy? He says, mom? She says, when's it due?

Is this Thursday. She says, this Thursday? How far am I not getting? He says, what day is this? She says, Monday.

He says, 97. Two days away from starting it. At which point his friend Pierce says, procrastination is like Kryptonite's months, but again, four. Task initiation doesn't just affect kids, it also affects their parents. So Jeremy's mom was saying, jeremy, you can't procrastinate like this on your schoolwork.

He says, why not? She says, it's too much pressure. He says, I work best under pressure. She says, I meant that it's too much pressure on me. I can really relate to this.

My memories of my son in high school was that his deadlines were way more stressful for me than they ever were for him. And it only occurred to me long after he finished high school that I think he was using my stress level to activate him. Because with add up and leave the spiral under, if I'd known that at the time, I would have gotten stressed out way earlier in the process. Rather than waiting to the night or two before the project was due, it might have gone better. Okay, let's.

Okay, so those are the first six, right? These are the foundational skills. This is where you start. And so from now on, they're going to get a little more complicated. And here's why.

It's easier to help with getting a plan with a start time than it is to help you make a plan, which is the next segment skill. Because making a plan involves sequencing, it involves prioritization, it involves breaking stuff down into small steps. Creating a roadmap is the metaphor we use. So this is much harder and I think this is a pretty late developing skill. And in fact I think planning and prioritizing develops way after we start assigning long term projects to kids because we start assigning long term projects to kids in elementary schools.

But I did a survey, I've done it with several schools now where I've worked on all of our executive skills into much more discrete descriptors. And I asked teachers at various grade levels to kids at York New grade level have this skill at the beginning of the year, at the end of the year or is it not developmentally appropriate at your grade level? And what surprised me was the number of teachers. I've only done it through 8th grade so I can't go beyond that. The number of teachers Even at the 8th grade level who feel like that kind of planning for long term projects is not developmentally appropriate at eighth grade.

So what do we do? What do teachers do? They do the planning for kids. And again I think that's developmentally appropriate. However, it misses the opportunity to teach planning.

So you know, if I were a teacher assigning long term projects, I would do the planning with the kids rather than for the kids. And I would, I would, together we would create a plan for every project and eventually I might be able to turn it over to them. We have rubrics in all our book for planning long term projects that could be used for that purpose. But there's another problem with planning or long term projects that goes beyond the fact that kids can't plan. And that is typically when we assign long term projects we expect kids to do them at home which then puts tremendous burden on parents for supervising those long term projects.

So a few years ago someone found a picture on Facebook they sent to me which I think captures the problem really nicely. It's a science project. But the topic of the science project is how much turmoil does the science project cost me? And it's set up the way a science project is. On the left hand side we have materials.

At least one kid, at least one Gretchen, Karen, half baked ideas of very dubious merit and procrastination. Four weeks have to come up with another system for keeping my study clean as the last one didn't work. It's the maintenance part. And if you have ever tried to turn a disorganized kit into an organized kit, you know that this is a long, long term, labor intensive process. It's not simply a question of creating a system and handing it off to the kid and expecting to run with it.

It's not Even a question of, and this will be a little better because everybody's organizational system is unique. Of saying to the kid, you know what, your backpack's a mess. You can't find your homework when you need to do it and you can't find out when you need to hand it in. So let's figure out a way to keep your backpack neat. What would work for you?

You still can't hand it off and expect to the kid and expect me to work with it and finally figured out why. Because at any single point in time, it's faster not to use an organizational system than to use an organizational system. Right. It's way faster to take that science worksheet and just stuff it in the backpack wherever than it is to take out the science folder, open it up, take out the incomplete homework folder, put it neatly in the incomplete homework folder, fold everything up, put it neatly back in the backpack. Yeah, it may take longer in the long run because you spend a lot of time forward and maybe replacing it.

But this reminds me of something. Tom Brown's another expert on add and people have gone to his workshops and said that Tom Brown says that for kids with add there are two times now and not now. Actually, it's really only now because everything else is not now. I think of that whenever I have a parent in my office saying to me, why does my kid lie about his homework? Why does he tell me he doesn't have any?

Or he did it at school. When the teacher's going to email me tomorrow asking where the homework is, he's going to get caught. Hey, lies. Because that's the fastest way he knows to get to him having the evening to himself. So if he convinces you that he doesn't have any homework, he has an evening off.

Yeah, he'll get caught tomorrow. That's not now. So they really didn't. In fact, I swear these kids play the odds. And even if the odds are 90 to 10 against them, that means 10% of the time they got the evening off and that's fine with them.

This is difficult to teach. If people have questions about that, I'd be happy to talk with you about it. One thing I found though over the years is that I think parents have. For kids who are disorganized, parents tend to have very high expectations and unrealistic expectations about their kids ability to organize themselves. In fact, I did a workshop a few years ago.

It was a small group, it was in South Dakota, I think. And so we get to know each other fairly well over the course of the day. And I remember someone in the back row. These were all professionals, but they also had kids with problems. And so this woman said she was so annoyed with her kid who was so disorganized she couldn't stand to look at his bedroom and just drove her crazy.

And someone, so picture was someone else in the group turned around and said to her, you have to lower your standards. Usually we don't give that advice to people. But I think she hit the nail on the head. I think that mom was driving herself crazy because she expected her kid to be completely organized and the kid wasn't. So I think we have to in some cases, learn to tolerate maybe a messier kid than we like, because that's not our style.

Okay, moving on to time management. This, we're down to the last three. And if you look at these carefully, what you'll see are earlier developing executive skills embedded in them. So time management is basically task initiation, sustained attention and planning, with one additional element that's unique to time management and that's time estimation, the ability to estimate how we're going to takes to do something. And in my experience, people with poor time management, that's the piece they struggle with.

And with kids, what I find is more often than not, they underestimate how long an effortful task is going to take. And so they leave it to the last minute. They're in high school or college, they end up calling all nighters to finish the project or pay for by the deadline. I do, though, see a subset of kids with poor time estimation who do the opposite. They overestimate how long a task is going to take and then they don't want to start it because in their mind it's going to to take forever.

And so one way to correct both of those is ask kids to estimate how long something's going to take and have them compare their estimate to the reality. I had a mom do that with homework, with math homework. She said every night her kid thought about math homework. And it finally occurred to me spending way more time fighting about the homework that would take her to do it. So she said to him, how long do you think this math worksheet is going to take?

And the kid said, oh, it's going to take at least an hour. And she said, you sure? Let's see if that's the case. He wrote down the time you started, the time you finished. They did the subtraction was 10 minutes.

He was stunned. He had no idea he could do the work that quickly. So you can build in time estimation into everyday activities. How long is it going to take you to get ready for school in the morning? How long is it going to take you to do that math homework?

How long will it take you to get from here to the grocery store at the corner? I mean, all of those things just getting kids to practice. Okay, Goal directed persistence. Now the way we've defined this, this is a late developing scale because we're not talking about little goals, we're not talking about what you plan to do between now and lunch really. And this is in part, this is Russ Barkham's term.

So we're talking about his concept of goal directed persistence, which is much more longer term goals. And with that in mind, you'll see that this involves a number of other executive skills. Because you can't just set a goal and forget about it. You have to remember it. So there's working memory, you have to have a plan for achieving the goal.

There's planning, you have to start and finish the plan. There's task initiation and sustained attention. You have to resist the temptation to do all those other fun things you'd rather be doing rather than working on your long term goals. So there's response inhibition. And if that's irritating or annoying to you, then you also have to manage your emotions around this.

And so there's emotional control. Having said all that, I will tell you this is the killer skill for middle school parents because they expect their kids to have the skill by middle school. And in my experience, most of them don't. They haven't lived long enough. I mean, I have parents in my office who say to me, doesn't my kid realize how he's doing in eighth grade is going to affect what college he gets into?

4 years, they can't fix your 4 years. They don't live long enough. They don't understand time like that because you have to experience time over time. So that's the issue. So I think we have to be patient with this.

You know, my own son with ADD and I would say his attention problems felt towards the milder end of the spectrum. It was late junior, early senior year in high school before I first saw the first signs of all directive resistance. You know, prior to that, it was me sort of getting after him in terms of the things he had to do to maintain a reasonable academic record. When I saw it finally taking over with him, it felt like I'd taken the backpack off of my back and put it onto his and now he was working. But sometimes it's felt like an on and off switch to me.

If the kid doesn't have you, it doesn't happen. Now you can encourage goal directed persistence. The mistake I made, which I think many parents and even teachers do, in terms of encouraging gold director persistence was I focused on academic performance. So I was trying to encourage my kids to make the honor roll and bring their grades up. They didn't care about those things.

That doesn't mean you abandon gold director persistence, but you find some other way to encourage it. And the easiest way to do that is encourage kids to pursue a goal that matters to them. If they're into sports, then there's an obvious goal there. If they want some expensive object, help them figure out how they're going to save up the money for that and to resist spending that money on less expensive things. By the time kids hit high school, There are two things in particular that many teenagers want that require role directive persistence.

One is a driver's license and the other is a job. Both of those require effort over time. They require multiple steps. They require persistence. So those are all ways of teaching board director persistence while you're waiting for the academic overactive persistence to sort of kick in.

And then finally, metacognition. So this is the ability, it's the ability to think about thinking. You know it. Kids from a young age, you certainly have thoughts, but metacognition means you recognize that you can use those thoughts to do things. You can use those thoughts to understand the world, to solve problems, to make plans.

This is a very late developing skill, in part because it's dependent on or at least facilitated by a brain process called pruning. And what that means is we're born with like a billion neurons in our brains, but they're not hooked up together because it's experience that connects them. So you have these synaptic connections proliferating madly, starting shortly after birth. In fact, they start growing at a rate of about a million new synapses per second. You know, if that continued forever, we would need huge heads.

We would be able to accommodate all those synaptic connections. So there are a couple times in the developmental period when we discard, slough off, or prune excess neural connections. One is during the preschool years. That's mostly around sensory input in terms of executive skills. It's around adolescence that we begin to prune away unused executive, unused synaptic connections.

And that's, that's the rule. It's the use it or you lose it rule that governs pruning and so what that think about how teenagers are spending their time. You know, if they're spending hours and hours playing video games, you know, those synaptic connections are not getting discarded. If they're not spending a lot of time, say the deep reading comprehension activities, it's not that they lose the capacity to do that because there are very few critical periods in terms of writing, is that this is the ideal time to teach those skills. Because when we discard excess neural connections, what we found is the ones that remain work way better.

They transmit larger volumes of information, they transmit it more rapidly. They connect with more distant regions of the brain. And when I think about metacognition, that's exactly what it is. It's making connections. It's being able to connect something the science teacher said yesterday with something the social science teacher said today, or reading a novel and saying, oh, the main character had the same experience I did, but she reacted way differently than I did.

Once kids develop metacognition, they have a whole new brain. They are able to read situations in a much more nuanced fashion. They pick up on cues and they make sense out of those cues. So they're picking up on things like tone of voice and facial expressions and trying to understand what's going on when the person looked that way when I said this to them. That's why that self consciousness increases, increases dramatically at middle school.

Because now suddenly all those nonverbal cues have meaning that they didn't have before. And so I really think one of the reasons they're not big into long term goals is because they're taking their new brain up for a ride and seeing how it works. Because they're looking at the world in a brand new way. Okay, so Those are the 11 skill. And here's why they're important.

The title of this cartoon is Dale's fourth Grade Education pays off in the prospective employer of sanity, Dale. The job you're applying for required in a long division of state capitalism. Cursive writing. Pretty absurd, right? Although I took a flight back from Arizona a few months ago.

It was this relatively small flight and it was a chatty delta captain. And before we took off, he said, okay, I'm going to ask you a question and I'll give you the answer at the end of the flight. And the question was he said, can you name four? This is over the EPA system. Everybody in the plane heard this.

Can you name four state capitals that have the word city in them? So everybody started mad. They tried to think of it and of course there's no access to the Internet, so you couldn't just Google it and find out the answer. But as I was trying to figure out, and I don't think I came up with any of them, I realized that was the first time as an adult that anyone asked me to access state habits, which I remember memorizing when I was in fifth grade. So mostly we don't ask kids to do that.

We don't ask adults to use fourth grade information. I like this because for this to be realistic, what would that employer be saying, prospective employer be saying, the job we're applying for required, you know, planning, time management, organization, goal director, all executive skills and all, if you think about it, higher level executive skills built on that foundation of lower level executive skills. Okay, so let me see where I'm going next. Okay, just want to mention very quickly one other brain process I mentioned, pruning, that's critical to skill development. But there's another process called myelination that's also important.

Myelin is a fatty sheet that wraps itself around nerve cells. Every time a nerve cell fires, a little more myelin builds up. This is an electron microscope picture of a nerve cell. So that dark part in the center is the nerve cell. The lighter part in the ground is the myelin.

Every time we engage in the same behavior, we're firing exactly the same nerve cells. So the more we engage in the same behavior, the thicker the myelin gets. And it acts just like insulation on an electric cord. So the thicker the myelin, the faster the impulse travels. The faster the impulse travels, the better the skill.

This is basically what underlies automatization. That's why you need lots of practice to become automatic at something because you're building myelin. Now, with kids, in addition to building myelin, we're also waiting for the brain to reach full maturation. Or it may take 25 years for that myelination to be complete. Either way.

But the cartoon that reminds us of this, in fact, did I say that yet? Done so many workshops in the past weeks, no. So here's the fact about executive skills. They take 25 years to reach full maturation, and that's in typically developing kids. Now, if you have a child with a neurodevelopmental learning disorder, it may take longer than that.

We certainly know that for kids with adhd. So anyway, the cartoon that reminds us of this is Jeremy is saying. Pierce is saying to Jeremy. Scientific studies show that the decision making areas of the human brain aren't fully developed until the age of 25 and Jeremy says, so the we have an excuse for this. Appear satisfactory in Salis and you may be able to tell if you have a skateboard.

Magic goes from the top floor of that house down to the ground and back up again. I think this is perfectly fine. Okay, come on. What I want to do is show you the evidence. I want to show you a series of MRI scans.

I have to get back to my computer here that show how the brain changes over time. A guy at UCLA, guy named Paul Thompson, took a series of MRIs every few years. He brought the same kids in and took pictures, MRI scans of their brain. Took pictures of their brain. So these are the same kids between the ages of 4 and 21.

And I'm going to take you pretty quickly to age 21. The key to understanding these images is the color. So an immature brain, if you look at the top right here, immature brain is red and orange. A mature brain is blue and purple and the different colors. What they're measuring is density of myelination.

So myelin comes back in again. So at the age of four, there's nothing that's purple. There's not much that's blue. Mostly what is blue is around sensory input like vision and touch because that's pretty much the first systems to mature. I'm sorry about that.

This is the frontal lobe here. And so you can see at the age of four, there's a tiny bit of blue, there's a lot of red and orange and then a fair amount of green and yellow. I'm going to take you pretty quickly to age 21 and I want you to see how late in the process this part of the brain turns blue. And one other thing you should understand about brain development is the brain matures from back to front. So you'll see the blue start at the bottom because this is the back of the brain and travel up.

Okay, so let's go. Okay, so there we are at age 21. I'm seeing purple here. I'm not seeing a whole lot of purple here. So we got a ways to go yet.

In fact, this, you can see the green here. It says the 21 year old brain is mostly mature. That the years of green show that even at the threshold of legal adulthood, there is still room for increases in emotional maturity and decision making skills which will come in the next few years. All right, I want to bring you back to age 13 because that's middle school. And I think the mismatch between expectation and reality is probably greatest in middle school.

Look at that most agreeing. Luckily there's less red and orange. So Robert says with me, but when I look at the blue here, I'm not seeing a whole lot, lot more blue say than I saw at age 4. Think of, let me get back to my PowerPoint. Think of what we ask middle school kids to keep track of.

Remember, organize, plan for, you know, as soon as kids start changing classes. As soon as kids start changing classes. Every teacher has a different set of expectations about how homework is to be done, how long term projects are to be done, how tasks are to be done, how everything is to be handed in, how notebooks are to be organized. Many schools use block scheduling their A days and B days. They use rotating schedules.

So first period on Monday, second period on Tuesday. Some schools have six days rotating schedules. So first period on Monday changes from way to B. These kids have complicated after school schedules and many of them are living in two homes. And we get upset when they forget something.

We are asking a whole lot of an awful lot of information. Okay, so that's sort of my quick intro to executive skills. And I've given you the technical terms and the definitions. This is what the behaviors look like. And each one of these behaviors can be tagged to a different executive skill.

I've identified you have some of these descriptors in your handout. I've set them up in. I've got several slides here. The first one here. There's a very commonly used rating scale to measure executive skills called the brief, the Behavior Rating Inventory of Executive Function.

And it talks about three categories of executive skills. It talks about problems with behavior regulation, problems with emotion regulation, problems with cognitive regulation. Well, these here are problems with behavior regulation and emotion regulation. And you can probably provide the correct label for each. So behavior regulation, that's mostly impulse control, response inhibition, acts out thinking, interrupts others, acts while they're out of control.

The emotion regulation set involves problems with emotional control and problems with flexibility. And so emotional control overreacts to small problems. Low tolerance for frustration are a couple of examples. Problems with flexibility, upset by changes in plans. Get stuck on one topic or activity, resist change of routine.

So those are those. Now these are the problems with cognitive regulation. They're less overt, they're less disruptive. But by the time kids hit middle school or high school, these issues are getting them in trouble. It's all the other ones that I didn't mention.

Task initiation, sustained attention, working memory, planning, organization, they're more internal. But as I say, these can be pretty problematic for kids if they're not developing them at a reasonable rate. That's a pretty long list. I think I pared it down. Yeah.

My colleague Dick's wife is a K1 teacher in New Hampshire for many years. So she took that long list and pared it down and said, this is what you expect in younger kids. So here's part of what has propelled me and it was my thinking about executive skills skills and my eagerness to get everybody to understand them. Because in the absence of terms like planning and task initiation and organization, those kinds of things, what do we end up calling these kids? We end up calling them lazy.

This was a kid that I worked with twice. I worked with him in elementary school. He was one of the most hyperactive, impulsive kids I'd ever seen. He also had Tourette syndrome, so he couldn't take stimulant medications because they exacerbated. His mom stayed on top of everything until he hit high school and then she couldn't do it anymore because by the time these kids at high school, it's hard to keep track of everything the kid has to keep track of or help the kid keep track of.

So she called me at the end of his freshman year and said, I can't do it by myself anymore. I need some help in this school. So I did an evaluation to try to provide documentation to support his need for help. This was the piece of the rating scale I asked. I had to find one teacher who knew the kid will to fill out this rating scale.

So what concerns you most about this pupil? He's lazy and not working with his potential. Please describe the best things about this pupil. He's sweetness, good sense of humor, which describes just about every kind of add that I ever worked with, including my own son. But here's my concern about that.

When we're using terms like lazy and not working with potential, those sound like character flaws to me. Those sound like things that kids have no control over. And it really hit home to me a few years ago, about 3 now I think I was testing a 14 year old who was really struggling with the public schools. So his parents took him out of public schools, put him in the charter school, hoping that he would do better. So they thought the instruction would be a better match for him and he was happier to be there, but he still wasn't doing any more.

And so in the interview with the mom, before I started working with him, the mom said to me, you know, his dad went to MIT and his dad tells him on a fairly regular basis, you could never go to mit, you are way too lazy. That was the message. So I tested the kid and I killed his superior, which probably just in terms of cognitive bandwidth, he could have gotten into MIT and he probably couldn't have done alone. But after I finished testing him, I talked to him, which is typically what I do with kids. I said, so what's going on with homework?

And what he said was, you know, basically, I'm just lazy. And then he said, my dad tells me that all the time. Told me the same story the mom told me. So not only was this becoming part of this kid's identity, now he's lazy. It's also becoming an extremist.

I don't have to do homework because I'm lazy. That's sort of who I am. So. And what's the intervention for lazy? I mean, we have interventions for task initiation, sustained attention, all of those.

Lazy, as I say, sounds like a character flaw. And it sticks with people. He could stick with this kid throughout his entire life. That could be his default. I'm lazy.

So that worries me when those are the terms we use, describe kids. Okay, so quick description. Let me start. 6:30. Okay, so I'm just going to spend a few minutes talking about the kinds of intervention strategies we recommend, give you some general sort of tips and principles and then I'll open up your questions.

You know, until kids are. Until their frontal lobes are fully developed, we end up acting as surrogate frontal lobes for kids. Right? We love to wear frontal lobes. I mean, that mom with the three year old in the airport, that was what she was doing.

We're going to wait till we get to the gate before you can eat your special treaties. So she was acting as response inhibition for her kid. So we do that. We can't do that for everyone. Eventually we have to give up the race.

We have to help kids grow their own executive skills. And that is a very tricky proposition because that too is a moving target. You know, in September, a kid may need a ton of support. By May, he may not need as much support, but we may not know that as parents because we're still treating him like he was in September. So how to ease kids off the need for our cues, reminders and supports is a really tricky decision to make.

And there's no easy answer to that. But in terms of acting as server frontal lobes to modify the environment so these kids will be successful or feel successful until they're frontal lobes mature. These are ways we modify the environment. And I'll just give some quick examples. I've got that twice there, done that.

So in terms of changing the physical or social environment, we add barriers both at the toddler level. We keep kids from tumbling down stairs by putting a gate at the top of the stairs. With teenagers, we don't allow them to have unsupervised parties. It's both response and admission. It's different at 16 than it does it at 18 months.

Reduce distractions or help kids reduce distractions. Provide organizing structures like a clean desk to work on or storage bins to keep stuff in place. Providing supervision. I've talked about that. All of those are ways we modify the physical or social environment.

Modifying the tasks we expect kids to perform, making the task shorter, reducing the amount of work required, or dividing pieces with breaks built in along the way. This is particularly for kids with short attention spans. We got to start from where their attention span is and go from there. Make the steps more explicit. Sometimes kids struggle with tasks because they don't know what to do, and we've only given them half the steps.

If we can make the steps more explicit, they can do better. Giving them a schedule to follow or helping them create a schedule. Building a variety or a choice that one Very often parents will say to me, okay, my kid really struggles with math. So what I tell him when he comes home to do homework, I say do the math first, get it out of the way, which is logical and that makes sense, right? But that's totally taking control away from the kid.

So now he feels like he's got to do what you told him to do. So another way to handle that would be to say, okay, you got math, spelling, and you got to write a paragraph ring. What do you want to do first? Giving the kids some choice. If it doesn't work out, then you can talk about, gee, that didn't seem to work out because you left math for less and you were too tired to do math.

What's the solution for that? But you start by giving the kid the choice and then changing the way adults interact with the kid and rehearsing with them. What will happen in advance. This is particularly helpful helpful for kids with problems with flexibility or emotional control. Just saying, we're going to a family party.

It's going to be pretty loud and pretty noisy, and I know that kind of bothers you, so let's make a plan for how we're going to handle that. In fact, I have three grandchildren. My oldest granddaughter is five now, and I could see around 18 months that she had problems with flexibility, which actually didn't Surprise me, because I have problems with flexibility, so she made back for me. But her mother was brilliant at handling her. When Violet got really upset because she couldn't do what she wanted to do right, then she would say, oh, Violet, let's make a plan.

I know you're disappointed because we can't do that now, but let's make a plan. And, you know, just doing that over and over again. No, this kid is actually. I can already see she's starting to do good planning and she's starting to manage her inflexibility way more successfully than I would have expected when I saw what she looked like at 18 months. Reminding the child to check his Lister's schedule.

Praising the child for using her executives, his or her executive skills. If you can achieve this ratio, and I have to say right off the bat, it's impossible. But there's a lot of research to show that if you can achieve this ratio of 3 positives for every piece of corrective feedback, that alone can change creative race for you. This is so hard to remember to do that. And some praise is more effective than others.

Very specific praise so the kid knows exactly what you're praising him for. Wow, you really stuck with that. I know it was hard for you, but you stuck with it. You persisted. Is way more better than saying, you know what a smart kid you are.

In fact, calling a kid smart is probably one of the worst things you can do because then the kid thinks he has to be smart all the time. If he does something that's not smart, then he's worried that he's going to lose esteem in the eyes of others or in the eyes of themselves. So whatever you think smart is, praise him for that. Don't praise him for being smart. Here are examples of effective praise.

I appreciate you loading the dishwasher without my having to bug you about it. I know you didn't want to watch your sister after school, but it really got me out of the bind at work. Thanks for helping out. Your brother was pushing your buttons, but you worked hard to keep your temper in check. What I like about that one is the kid may ultimately lose it and haul up and hit his brother, but what you saw was he was working hard trying not to do that.

That's what you're praising him for. And maybe the next time he'll be able to not do his brother. I like the way you thought about that and figured out a good solution to the problem. Okay, I'm just going to give you a couple of examples of teaching the Skills. But here's my formula for that.

Create a visual. Create a set of steps. Have the kids do the steps. So this is from Smart but Scattered. This is a bedtime routine.

So basically the kid walks through the steps for bedroom cleaning. I'll just give you one other example because again, it's another visual. Oh yeah, I forgot about this. This is a bedroom checklist that was created by an occupational therapist friend of mine working, she worked at that school in Vermont. And the school decided they needed to tackle the, the bedrooms in the residence hall.

As parents would come to visit the school, they take one look at the, at the dormitory and they say, no, we're not sending our kid here. So they decided they had to tackle it. And what they came up with was a checklist. So when these kids, Jack was one of the kids in that school last year, when the kids moved in first thing in the fall and they put everything away, they took pictures of what the clean room looked like before it got messy. And then they turned it into a checklist.

So you can see this is Jack's checklist. My clean desk, my clean shelves, my clean bed, my clean floor. And the pictures I see are hard to see. But basically this is what those surfaces, everything looks like. There are 10 things on this list that makes good and cleaning look pretty daunting.

But it's broken into four parts, which makes it easier. And you have a picture of what it should look like when you're done. So you can say to the kid, when they're done, is this your closet? Do your shelves look like this picture? I guess we have to work on this.

Okay. Another routine that I really like is teaching kids to make study study plans. The routines I like best are ones that incorporate a lot of executive skills into one routine. So if you look at this, this is not where they write down the homework assignment is this. This is like an expanded to do list because they're getting their homework online or they're taking pictures of it in class or whatever.

So. But the plan is, and parents can do this if they're not doing it at school. I often recommend this as a school based intervention, but if it's not happening at school, when kids get home from school, parents can say to their kid, you know what, you need to get out and run around and play. You've been sitting all day, so that's fine. I want you to get some exercise.

But before you do that, let's make a plan. Now you're saying you're planting seeds for homework and so this is basically where you list what you have to do. Spelling, math, reading. And for each of those tasks, you ask your kid, how long do you think it will take. So we're working on time estimation, right?

So that's part of time management. When will you start? Now, that's the plan with the start time. So we're working on planning and task initiation. The next column, we ask the kids to identify where they're going to work.

We added that in because we have variations on this in all of our books, but we added that one in after I read the research on mental rehearsal and visual imagery. Because what that research shows, if you actually mentally rehearse carrying out a task and visually imagine yourself in that situation doing that task, that vastly increases the likelihood that you're going to do the task. And so where we work, we want the kid to picture situation at the kitchen table, or sitting at their desk in the bedroom or the dining room table. Wherever they choose to work, picture themselves there, because that just increases the likelihood they'll actually do their homework. And then have them write down the actual start and stop time.

So now we really are working on task initiat, time estimation, and then check it off when they're done. So that's just a variation on that. Okay. And using incentives. So here's, here's the thing about this.

We're asking kids, let's say we've got kids with executive skill challenges. What does that mean? It's hard for them. They don't want to do them. And so how do you get them to do them?

If you add an incentive in, sometimes that can make it easier. I'm pretty pragmatic about this. Basically, what I want is for kids to get as much practice as possible. And if they're not willing to practice on their own, but if I throw in an incentive to entice them to practice, then maybe they'll get more practice soon. Something's phone is ringing.

Parents have mixed feelings about this. You know, a lot of parents will say to me, you know, I shouldn't have to pay my kid for something they should want to do anyway. Sometimes parents will say, isn't that just bribing my kid? No, bribing them is to ask them to do something illegal. Right?

We're doing something illegal to get them to do something. No, you're trying to make. You're sweetening the pot, basically. I will tell you, though, that the kids, that this works best with kids who aren't handed everything they want when they want it, which is A problem in affluent communities like yours where it's really easy to hand your kid anything he wants. And so if parents are used to not doing that, I mean, I remember working with another kid, really struggled with math homework or homework in general.

And the mom had a rule, no video games except on the weekends. So. And the kid hated that. And so I said to the mom, so is there any time recently where the kid was willing to do the homework and you didn't have as big a fight? She said, yeah, you know, last night I sort of relented.

And I said, if he got his homework done by 8 o' clock and he could play video games for half an hour, worked really well. And I said to the kid, homework I know is hard for you. Is there any time you found it to be easier? He said, yeah, last night my mom let me play video games or half an hour before bed after I finish my homework. That was easy for that mom to do because she had started with a very strict rule, no video games during the school week.

So it's much easier for her to lunch and say, okay, half an hour a night. Assuming you get your homework done, then it would have been, it would have been much harder if this was a kid who could play video games all they wanted. And then the mom had to say to the kid, changing rules. Can't play video games every time you want. We're going to make it so you can only play half an hour a day.

And that's a. Assuming you get all your homework done. So I'm just saying that it's a hard, it's still worth trying, but it's much harder to do if you're used to handing kids, you know, what they want, when they want it. So here are my final comments. How can we work with kids to get them to use their own executive skills?

Because that's their ultimate goal. They need to grow their own, use minimal cues if they need more support. Model your thought process and be through how you got an answer. Rather than telling them what to do, when to do it, say, let's think about this. Can you come up with a plan?

In fact, you'll hear that again in a minute. Use visuals whenever possible. A cue on the desk you can point to or ask them to check their list. A lot of parents have big whiteboards in the kitchen that list the things that kids have to remember, whether it's chores or stuff they have to take to school or whatever. So that produces some of the negative.

Just saying, check the whiteboards, or here's an even better strategy. Karen called me about what is the Amazon Echo? Is it Alexa? So this mom told me she just has kids. Talk to Alexa.

Sam. So what's your homework plan? I'll start at 5 o'. Clock. I say okay, tell Alexa.

Alexa, remind me at five o' clock I'm starting my homework. Is that cooler? Might it stopped all the fights in the house because now this neutral party robot is saying time to start teleport. So if you have Alexa or any of those others, join that up. Praise, effort, persistence and risk taking.

And by risk taking I mean around academic risk taking. I'm not talking about going to joyride parents card you bring on your daughter's lunch. This is really important. Ask children to reflect on their own performance especially when they're successful. We debrief with kids when things go wrong all the time.

What went wrong? Why do you think it went wrong? What are we going to do differently the next time when something goes right we forget to talk to them about it. And what a perfect opportunity to reinforce what they did right. You got a much higher grade on your math test this week than you you did last week.

Why was that? Did you do something differently? What did you do differently? And wow, that worked really well for you. In fact I would apply that three to one rule again.

If you can debrief for three positive behaviors for every corrective behavior you need debriefing for, I think that will take care of that. Pre causes of surrounding use questions to get them to use their executive skills. What's your plan? Do you have a strategy for that? What's your plan?

How long do you think that will take? When problems arise, share your observations in a non judgmental way. Much easier said than done. You know my kids are all grown up now so I can say yeah, keep the emotions out of it. I couldn't do that when my kids were teenagers.

You know I noticed that you whatever queen you about it. Brainstorm strategies together with the child. Make a list of possible strategies. Ask the child to pick one and then chakra. Check back with the child leader to see how it worked.

This is something I used originally for a school based intervention I forgot to close out. It could be a whole class activity too. I think I have one more actually I want to skip this because I want to make one final point. Keep your eye on the biggest prize which is building gold record persistence. Model this yourself again.

Most parents are in my office concerned because and I hear it from middle school parents all the time, my kid has no work ethic. They tell me that's amazing. Which means they don't have full record of resistance. And they're incredibly nervous about that in middle school. And I certainly went through that myself with my own kids.

But in the back of my mind the thought I had was when my kids find their passion, I'm not going to worry about that because my husband and I are both incredibly hard workers. I mean, we've been driven over our entire life to accomplish goals that are really important to us. Our kids saw that day in and day out. I thought when they find their passion, they're going to channel their parents goal right for persistence. And sure enough, and it happened at different points with my two kids because they were very different kids.

But in both cases, you know, once they found the job or the career that they wanted, they threw themselves into a 150%. And I knew I never would have believed that if I looked at them when they were 14. Just wasn't there. Praise, effort, wow, you stuck with it, you figured it out. I can't believe how hard you worked on that.

And then emphasize your child's goals, not yours, because you really want to get them to be who they are. In fact, one of the hardest things as a parent is separating out your hopes and dreams from your kids hopes and dreams. And that's tough. And again I went through that myself. But that's the important, important separation that parents have to make from their kids.

And finally I want to end with I did a parent presentation a couple weeks ago in welcome Canada, which is outside of Ontario. I think this is one. Yeah. And so I made a bunch of suggestions. This mom sent me this email afterwards asking me for the PowerPoint.

But I want to quote from her email. I got permission from her to do it and to use her name so you see who she was. She had a child struggling with emotional control. So here's what she wrote. I already used some of the tips you offered regarding emotional control of my daughter.

Last night as we worked on her language assignment, we set the timer, took breaks, got a drink of water, and when she really started to freak out, I asked her to make a plan and thought of your daughter. A long smile, estimating how long it will take to do the assignment and then doing it in less time than she thought made my daughter feel so proud. When it was all done, I praised her ability to self regulate in her efforts to stick with it even when it wasn't going the way she wanted. Especially when I too wanted to freak out, yell and quit smiling, she says so I love that because you never know. When you do these kind of presentations, can people take these ideas and use them?

This mom could. And I hope you'll be able to take something away from this as well. Okay. Did I have another coat? No, I forgot it.

But like, there is more to the PowerPoint. There's a whole bunch of suggestions for working with teenagers. And then I took a number of the executive skills, and I say, here's some tips for test initiation for sustained attention. So again, write me and I'll send it. I'll send you that Dropbox link by return mail.