There’s a reason everyone in your mom group is suddenly texting about executive functioning. In recent years, it’s come into the kid-psychology space as a skill that’s critical to academic success and goal achievement with thought-leaders like Dr. Becky Kennedy speaking to its ability to “transform behavior” and celebs like Ed Helms and Simone Biles speaking to their own executive functioning challenges.
At its core, executive functioning serves almost like an air traffic control system for your brain. It helps you plan, organize, initiate and self-monitor progress and emotions as they relate to a given task. Think of it as the ability to resist impulsivity and stay focused, hold information—such as instructions—all while maintaining flexible thinking. So it’s executive functioning that enables a child to pick up the homework packet from the bin, bring it home, understand the assignment and due dates, then actually sit down to do the homework and return it to school the next day.
Per Dr. Kennedy, it’s a skill that develops over time (for example, elementary kids are ready for more responsibility, but still need supervision and reminders). It’s also one that can be taught.
While difficulty with executive functioning skills can be a marker of ADHD, it’s generally more closely tied to organizational challenges, and hence is more common in both kids and adults than the latter, which might also be a reason for its increased buzzworthiness. (ADHD typically speaks to hyperactivity, inattention and impulsivity, according to the A.D.D. Resource Center. Unlike executive functioning difficulties, ADHD also requires an official diagnosis.)
In other words, most humans have, at some point in their life, struggled with executive functioning. And as parenting experts and influencers—from Dr. Aliza Pressman to The Mom Psychologist—begin to highlight the issue, it’s easy to spot the challenges for your own child and want to address them. Of course we want our kids to project manage their own lives. And of course most of them need our help doing that.
High Executive Function = High Mental Load
But here’s the rub: Even before I thought about my son’s executive functioning I, as a person with stellar executive functioning skills myself, was well-versed in taking on too much—planning the vacations, prioritizing the housework, organizing the calendars. And I took pride in initiating and delegating these tasks, staying emotionally regulated and self-monitoring progress. It makes me feel good. It makes my family feel successful. And according to Julie Wayne, a professor at Wake Forest University whose research pertains to the invisible family load, that’s not necessarily a bad thing: “The upside is that you’re the leader of the family. If you’re the person organizing and it all goes well, you get to have this over-arching sense of fulfillment.”
The downside? I was both running myself ragged and robbing my kid of the opportunity to practice his own executive functioning skills. Instead of him learning to think through the items he needs in his backpack for school each day, he relies on me to pack it for him. Instead of considering his after-school checklist (take off your shoes, hang up your coat, wash your hands), he waits for me to prompt him and—should he forget—swoop in to help.
You’d think teaching him to do better would lessen my burden. You’d be wrong.
More Teaching Means More Work for Me
You see, the effort to teach executive functioning is a workload all in itself. You have to help your kid hang up their coat. You have to remind them to pack their backpack when they forget. You have to nudge them to sign up for the SAT class on their own. And you also have to remember that you can’t fix everything all at once. This means both more work and more frustration for millennial parents who, unlike the generations before them, have historically relied on a highly hands-on parenting approach. In order for a child to develop executive functioning skills, we’re told, we now have to embrace a mix of doing and coaching all at once. Do you have time to teach a person how to log into the homework portal, how to do the work in the portal and how to submit the work in the portal, all while making sure the damn assignment gets done on time? I sure don’t.
Plus, it’s unclear if it’s even necessary. Did the kids who were raised with less oversight fail to learn to plan, organize and manage their time? Probably not. (Research is sparse, but a technology-free upbringing is another factor that likely led Gen X to become more self-reliant when it came to their own executive functioning.) But now that we’re stuck in this “intensive” loop, it feels like my son’s success rests on the level of effort I put in.
In other words, whether I hang up his coat or prompt him to do it himself, it all adds up to more work for me. Yes, I’m hoping to teach him valuable life-skills. But in the meantime, I’m just a mom—who already has zero extra minutes in her day—who now has to stay up late just to make my child a color-coded door chart.
Will I make the damn chart? Of course I will! But is there a world where letting him figure it out on his own helps both of our sanity? You betcha.
