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Episode Transcript

Welcome to today's episode, understanding executive functioning, helping kids manage the unmanageable. Today we will be focusing on executive functioning skills. So we're going to start with what executive functioning is, what areas of executive functioning tend to be the most challenging for the kids that we work with, but then also looking at strategies and tools to [00:02:00] help basically release some of that stress that can come from executive functioning as a whole.

Executive functioning is a set of Mental skills that help us manage daily tasks and activities. for example, the best way I like to look at executive functioning is if it's a computer or a laptop and you've got information going into the computer and then you've got information coming out of the computer. And if the computer isn't organized or focused on the correct information, the output can look not ideal or not what we're after. So, some of the main areas of executive functioning are planning and organisation, being able to break tasks into steps and prioritising them and managing your time. Working memory, so being able to hold information in your brain.

Emotional Regulation, but I'm going to put Emotional Regulation for a lot of other episodes. Emotional Regulation is basically being able to manage your emotions and respond calmly and [00:03:00] effectively and flexibly. We're going to also look at impulse control. So being able to think before you're acting. Task initiation. So getting started on tasks, even when they feel overwhelming, and flexibility. So being able to mentally adapt when things are changed or plans don't go as expected.

Executive functioning skills are super important for the families that I work with. They help the kids that I work with succeed at school or at home or in social settings and out in the community. Without executive functioning skills, Basically all that high level thinking, so being able to participate at school, setting these kids and adolescents up for jobs or further education, being TAFE or university, without executive functioning skills, it's going to be really hard for these children once they reach that sort of late adolescence, early adulthood, to participate really effectively in life.[00:04:00] 

Because If they can't manage their time, if they can't manage their diary, if they can't focus and retain information, they're gonna have a lot of difficulty being able to effectively participate in employment or further education. So my goals with a lot of the families I work with is that we start at a very young age on implementing tools and strategies for the children to be able to focus and remember things and pay attention in class and be able to retain information so that they can work on these skills very early on.

So once they reach their adolescence and early adulthood, that they've got a set of skills ready to go and they can really participate in the lives they want.

Some of the kids that I work with struggle with these executive functioning skills for a range of reasons, which I won't go into all the clinical reasons because that's not why you're here. But basically, sometimes the kids that [00:05:00] I work with, developmentally, they're just a little bit delayed.

We have a four year old where the kinder is expecting them to be concentrating and focusing like they're in late primary school.

Or we have a child with ADHD who hasn't learnt tools and strategies to be able to regulate their bodies, to be able to sit in a classroom and focus

 As a parent with a child with additional needs or who's neurodivergent, you will know if your child has difficulty with executive functioning skills. You'll notice that they can't sit still in mealtimes or that they have a lot of difficulty remembering to pack their drink bottle at the end of the day of school or their teacher or their kinder teacher or childhood educator has provided some feedback on how they're going in these different settings

So now we're going to dive into some specific examples that hopefully resonate with you if [00:06:00] you think that your child or the child you're working with has some executive functioning difficulties. If we think about the school environment. They have difficulty starting tasks like assignments or homework, even when they know the material.

So they sit there and they procrastinate over the assignment or the homework and they just have difficulty getting started. It feels like you're pulling teeth sometimes. They have difficulty following multi step instructions and often complete only one part of the task that you've actually asked them to do.

So for example, some of the kids I work with, they have difficulties following two or even three step instructions where you might go, Alright, "child", we need to go grab our pencil case. We need to grab the worksheet from across the room and then we need to come and sit down on the floor and they might remember to grab the pencil case and that's it.

So part of what I do with the families I work with is we work [00:07:00] as a collaboration with the school to prompt the teacher or the integration aid or whoever's working with the child specifically, that maybe asking them to do three things at once or two things at once is just too much information for them at this particular point in time.

And you'll need to either verbally prompt multiple times throughout the task, or be able to write instructions on the board in the same place at the same time, so that as the child is learning these new routines, they actually have a point that they can refer back to in terms of the information that they can, remember, and they're not having to feel embarrassed or ashamed that they can't actually remember what they should be doing or what's been asked of them and that they can actually focus on being more independent and more efficient with their time.

One of the other things that is a sign of Executive Functioning Challenges is that they forget everything, but for a child at school, forgetting to bring things to [00:08:00] class or forgetting to take things home at the end of the day, even with reminders, so even that there's something there for you to remember.

But you just can't. For the kids that I support, it's just those small things that sometimes can make a really big difference in the overall mood and their outlook on the day. So if that means you buy two hats for School, and you have one hat that's the emergency hat for the days that they forget the hat in the playground or they lose it momentarily.

If that's having two or three water bottles so that you're not so reliant on one. And you can then start to reduce some of that shame and stress that can happen with these kids when they do forget their drink bottle and they really don't mean to.

 So if we look at the home, we might have some resistance transitioning between activities One of the biggest areas of challenge that I have with a lot of my families is stopping screen time to transition onto something else. If it's [00:09:00] screen time to bed, or screen time to dinner, or screen time to go to school. Screens are a really big difficulty when we're looking at transitions. I'm going to hold the discussion around technology and screens there because I'll dedicate an entire episode where we talk through technology and screens and how to best support you and your family.

Executive functioning skills are like muscles. They can grow and they can improve with practice and support. And with the right tools and strategies, kids can build on these and learn to manage these challenges. They are not traits, they're just skills. 

They may not be better at actually remembering, but they will have the tools to help compensate for the difficulties that they have remembering. I hope that makes sense, but a lot of these strategies they take a lot of time and a lot of practice and a lot of encouragement and reinforcement. So if they don't work on the first go, don't just throw [00:10:00] it in the bin, give it time to actually take effect and to trial and to renegotiate.

All right, here we go. Here are some strategies which for those families who are very experienced and further along in their disability journey, a lot of these will be ones that you've already heard about or you've trialed yourself.

In saying that though, sometimes strategies that you may have trialed a few years ago or six months ago that didn't quite stick then They may stick now because with a bit of maturity and the child further along in their development, things change, strategies change, regulation changes, hormones change, the weather changes, don't just dismiss that something that didn't work then, it doesn't mean it might not work now. 

So you might want to relook and trial them again. I once had a family who we were looking at some fidgets to help their child [00:11:00] regulate in the classroom and I was discussing this with one of the parents and the parent told me that they trialed that three years ago and the child would have been two and it didn't work so there's no point trialing it again. I explained to the family that, well, just because when the child was two, the fidgets didn't work as such then maybe we might need to trial it again now. And especially as fidgets have become more popular and there's less of that sort of stigma around adaptive things in the classroom, I said it might work now. And what if we get the child to have a look at the different fidgets that we could use and have them have a look and them choose the fidgets that best suit them. Anyway, long story short, the fidgets worked a treat. The child was able to regulate better in the classroom and stay focused. So it was a win win, but I've got so many examples of things that families had tried ages ago that didn't sit [00:12:00] well, and we tried them again 6, 12, 24 months, years later, and it now works. 

So the first strategy I want to bring up is visual schedules and checklists. These are fabulous. If it works for your family or the child that you have, they work really well. So visual checklists and aids and those sorts of things help reduce the overwhelm and provide a really clear step by step guide for our task.

And it can be any task. they especially helpful for children who struggle with like that working memory, but also any transition. So for transitions, they can see what's coming next and they can see how their day's going to pan out or how the afternoon or what is expected of them in a task. So instead of getting behavior and pushback and procrastination around a task, if you have a visual schedule or even just a checklist, and it has, see, look, we're going to do this for 15 [00:13:00] minutes and then we're done. We can, I don't know, have recess or have a board game or whatever's next. I have found that the child is more likely to engage in that task when they actually know what's ahead of them.

Some of the examples of visual schedules and checklists that I've used in my work and the families that I support is a morning routine or an evening routine checklist or chart where you have things like brushing your teeth, getting your bag packed, get dressed, have a shower, have dinner and then you can also manage When screen time happens and if it happens and for how long and also Implementing time is within that schedule as well.

For example, if you're getting ready in the morning and you have the child Get ready for school and they're going to pack their bag. They're gonna make their lunch. Obviously not in that order They're gonna brush their teeth brush their hair get dressed all those things [00:14:00] And then they get the tablet or the piece of technology.

When they've done all that for 10 minutes, I have found they're more likely to quickly get through everything to then be able to get the piece of technology at the end. Rather than giving them the piece of technology at the beginning of the schedule or the beginning of the routine, it's a lot harder to transition them out of that to then do the things that they don't want to do.

So anyway, that's a side note. You can use a weekly calendar, which For even us adults is always an important thing to know what you've got up in the week. So to be able to map out school, therapy sessions, fun activities, sporting groups, grandma's 80th birthday, whatever it is, just so the child has an idea of what's to come within their week and they're not just surprised. Being able to turn a really big task into a checklist is fantastic. So being able to pack for school comes. Pack lunch, pack your drink bottle, [00:15:00] grab your homework. Oh, we have sport today, so pack your PE clothes., Just those sorts of things, so that will work well. Also, as a bonus tip, If you involve the child into the development of the visual schedule or the checklist, they're a lot more likely to use it once they've developed it. And if you've got an older child, you can talk about formatting in terms of the visual representation of the checklist, if the text is too big or too small, or if they want a checkbox to be able to physically tick it off, or if they would prefer to cross it out to get more of that satisfaction.

If you involve the child in the development of these resources, one, they're going to be more motivated by it because you could also make it themed, but two, it's actually going to complement the way their brain works better. 

As a little bonus as well, using rewards at the end of a task is really helpful and useful. So [00:16:00] for us adults, I sometimes will go make a cup of tea once my time has gone off. For younger kids, They might be able to choose a board game or something like that they want to play once they've completed the task that they've been asked to do.

In saying that though, movement breaks are not a reward, they are a regulation tool. That is a whole nother episode and a whole nother story, but when we're looking at rewards, we are looking at rewards specific, not a regulation tool that might look like a reward if it was a different child.

 Some of the other strategies that we can look at specifically for time management is apps and timers. So there's a lot of apps out there on the market. A lot of them are free and you can use them as a countdown or a timer. to help children and adults understand the expectations of themselves when [00:17:00] completing a task and to try and remain focused.

So for kids, you can get visual timers, you can get old school sand timers, and they have particular times that the sand pours for, So for example a 10 minute timer, you can also get old school analog timers where there's a red part within the analog clock that counts down. And you can then also look at technology apps if you're wanting to go down that path as well.

So you can use, I'm an iPhone user, so you can use traditional countdown or alarms on iPhone. I'm sure you can use the same with Android. And you could also look at fun apps where there might be a little picture that appears when the timer goes off and those sorts of things. For some of our older, adolescent, early adulthood, and even parents, you can get some apps that actually lock you out of particular apps within the phone.

So for example, [00:18:00] if you are really into socials and you get very distracted by them, you can get an app that cold turkeys you out of them as you're trying to focus. So if you're at work, or at school or at uni, and you need to focus on what you're doing, you can use these apps to make you not look at your phone, basically, as you're trying to complete these tasks to help you remain focused and on your time management.

My last little tip for this episode is to celebrate the small things. It's not about perfection, but about helping your child feel supported and capable and successful. The kids I work with get very little praise throughout their day because we're always focused on what's next, the next goal, the next difficulty, the next challenge. And they don't get a lot of praise, even for something as remembering to bring their hat home at the end of the day.[00:19:00] 

So just really small praise for something when they've tried their hardest and even just praising effort is fantastic. But just small things that the child then knows that their effort is actually being noticed and they should keep trying. Where if we don't even reward effort, we'll then find that kids will just stop trying because it will be too much hard work and there's no motivation to do it and the goalpost is so far away that they'll just stop and give up.

So some other quick and easy helpful strategies can be build predictability. So keep a routine as close as you can to help the child understand their day. Create a quiet workspace so you can limit distractions. So you can create a quiet calm working space. This will help limit distractions. Distractions are really hard to [00:20:00] come up with tools for because a lot of it is just attention. So if you can come up with a area where it's less distracting to do tasks and at school ask the teacher to be really mindful of the placement of your child in the classroom.

As if you've got a child facing the windows, for example, they may get distracted by people walking in front of them. So it might be a conversation worth having with your teacher.

Work on positive self talk. So when the child is in their classroom or at home. They're used to talking themselves through a task and going, okay, what's next?

What could I do? Instead of having a meltdown, I could ask for help. I could ask a friend, I could have a look at the board that has the instructions written out for me. And one of my most beautiful strategies is modeling problem solving. So I do this all the time in my sessions and in the groups that I run.

[00:21:00] I will be in a group and I will forget to do something and I'll go, Oh, I'm going to put it on my to do list or my shopping list. The kids that I support will actually say, Sam, you need to put that on your to do list to remember for next week. Or Sam, have you put that in your diary so you don't forget?

So I'm actively modeling problem solving skills and the strategies that I use within my day to keep myself accountable and to keep myself on task and remember things.

 Thank you for joining me today on the Go Beyond Therapy podcast. We have just finished discussing executive functioning.