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Executive Functions and 10 Tips to Boost Them
Executive Function is the cognitive process that helps us organize thoughts and activities (plan), prioritizes tasks, manages time efficiently, and makes decisions. These skills help us establish structures and strategies for managing projects and determine the actions required to move each project forward. In other words, it’s about how we behave toward our future goals and mental abilities we need to accomplish them. Executive functions are things you do yourself, in order to become more effective and change your future for the better.
The seven core executive functions, skills are:
- Self-awareness: this is self-directed attention.
- Inhibition: Also known as self-control.
- Non-verbal working memory: The ability to hold things in your mind. Essentially, visual imagery, how well you can picture things mentally.
- Verbal working memory: Self-speech, or internal speech. Most people think of this as their “inner monologue.”
- Emotional self-regulation: The ability to take the previous four executive functions and use them to manipulate your own emotional state. This means learning to use words, images, and your own self-awareness to process and alter how we feel about things.
- Self-motivation: How well you can motivate yourself to complete a task when there is no immediate external consequence.
- Planning and problem solving: Experts sometimes like to think of this as “self-play”; how we play with information in our minds to come up with new ways of doing something. By taking things apart and recombining them in different ways, we’re planning solutions to our problems.
These seven executive functions develop over time, in generally chronological order. Self-awareness starts to develop around age 2, and by age 30, planning and problem solving should be fully developed in a neurotypical person. When we have an executive functions deficit (Executive Dysfunction), it means you can have difficulties in any, some or all of these seven skills. Some people have more working memory deficits. Some people have more regulation problems. Some people have more difficulties with timing, but less difficulties with all the others.
Awareness of these executive functions can help parents set up an early detection of any deficit at these 7 skills, helping before a child begins to struggle in school and/or his life. Then, they can learn to use what they know and strengthen these executive functions over time.
Parents, here’s how you can help children build up these seven executive functions, gaining more control over their deficits and taking strides toward independence along the way.
- Enforce Accountability: Many parents wonder how much accountability is appropriate, should the child be held accountable for their actions if it’s a disability outside of their control? The problem with this disability is with timing; it’s not for not understanding the consequences. You can help your child bolster his executive functions, showing him that you have faith in his abilities by expecting him to do what is needed, it makes her more accountable.
- Write it down: by making information visible, using notes cards, signs, sticky notes, lists, journals, anything at all! Once your child can see the information right in front of him, it’ll be easier to jog his executive functions and help him build his working memory.
- Make Time External: Helping your child see how much time has passed, how much is left, and how quickly it’s passing is a great way to beat the struggle with “time blindness”. Make time a physical, measurable thing by using clocks, timers, counters, or apps. There are tons of options!
- Offer Rewards: Use rewards to make motivation external. Someone who struggles with executive functions will have trouble motivating herself to complete tasks that don’t have immediate rewards. In these cases, it’s best to create artificial forms of motivation, like token systems or daily report cards. Reinforcing long- term goals with short-term rewards strengthens a child’s sense of self-motivation. These rewards should be activities, special moments that increase a good relationship between you and your child instead of buying toys, games, etc.
- Make Learning Hands On: Making problems as physical as possible helps children reconcile their verbal and non-verbal working memories, and build their executive functions in the process. Put the problem in their hands! like using jelly beans or colored blocks to teach simple adding and subtracting, or utilizing word magnets to work on sentence structure.
- Stop to Refuel: Give your child a chance to refuel by encouraging frequent breaks during tasks that stress the executive system. Breaks work best if they’re 3 to 10 minutes long, and can help your child get the fuel they need to tackle an assignment without getting distracted and losing track. Self-regulation and executive functions come in limited quantities. They can be depleted very quickly when your child works too hard over too short a time (like while taking a test).
- Practice Pep Talks: Teach your child to pump herself up by practicing saying “You can do this!” Positive self-statements push kids to try harder and put them one step closer to accomplishing their goals. Your child needs once every day, sometimes more often this pep talk, visualizing success and talking themselves through the steps needed to achieve to replenish the system and boost planning skills.
- Get Physical: Physical exercise has tons of well-known benefits, including giving a boost to your child’s executive functioning! Routine physical exercise throughout the week can help refuel the tank (even make the tank bigger!) and help him cope better with his executive functions deficit. Exercise can be found anywhere, try an organized sport, a bi-weekly outdoors play, or a spur of the moment run around the backyard!
- Sip on Sugar: Sugar has sometimes been known to exacerbate hyperactivity (sugar rush), but when your child is doing a lot of executive functioning (like taking an exam or finishing a big project), it may be a good idea to have her sip on some sugar-containing fluids, like lemonade or a sports drink. The glucose in these drinks fuels the frontal lobe, where the executive functions come from. The operative word here is “sip”, just a little should be able to keep your child’s blood glucose up enough to get the job done.
- Show Compassion: This is a big one. In most cases, children who have an executive functions deficit (Executive Dysfunction), are just as smart as their peers, but their executive function problems keep them from showing what they know. The key to treatment is changing their environment to help them do that. So it’s important that the people in their lives, especially parents, show compassion and willingness to help them learn. When your child messes up, don’t go straight to yelling. Try to understand what went wrong and how you can help him learn from his mistake. “Mistakes are opportunities to learn“
Secondary
Who are TCKs (Third Culture Kids) and Why Are They Increasingly Relevant in Today’s World?
TCKs or Third Culture Kids is a term used to describe people who spend a significant part of their childhood living away from their birth country. This term was coined back in the 1950s – 1960s by Dr. Ruth Hill to describe children of American families living in India. The experience these children had in India was not of a typical child living in India, nor of a typical American child living in the US. Their experience was somewhere in between, hence the term: Third Culture Kid.
The term TCK is often misunderstood because most people assume that the “third” part in “Third Culture Kid” comes from a simple addition of 1+2= 3. But it is not about how many countries influence a person but instead it is about the different types of cultural influence. In fact, most TCK have lived in more than three or four countries.
TCKs have an expanded understanding of the world and research has shown that they are more tolerant of other people, their beliefs and their cultures because they possess a broader worldview. These allows them to build relationships with people from diverse cultural backgrounds, which makes them great international assets as professionals.
This is a fascinating topic, especially if your children are being influenced by different cultures. If you would like to read more about this topic, please refer to the full articles following the links in the reference:
