Four Steps to Boost your Child’s Executive Functioning for a Peaceful Holiday Season
The holiday season is upon us and with it brings excitement as well as many schedule changes and opportunities for meltdowns. One great (and free) way to support your child during this hectic time of year is to support their nonverbal working memory. This is the part of the executive functioning (or EF) system that helps us visualize or imagine ourselves in the future as well as think about the past.
By helping your child pre-experience an upcoming event in their imaginations, you can set them up for a successful experience everyone feels good about.
Step 1: Plan
Create detailed steps for accomplishing a task or explain in depth about how an event may be structured. Writing it out can be very helpful. I like to use the ‘Get Ready, Do, Done’ planning sheet created by speech language pathologist Sarah Ward.
Sit down with your child or talk it out. Give your plan a title (e.g., Plan for Thanksgiving dinner) and start with “Done.”
Ask your child some reflexive questions:
How do you want to feel at Thanksgiving dinner?
Can you draw yourself feeling X at dinner?
Help your child get as specific as possible
What does your body look like sitting at the table?
What do you see on the table?
What things will go on your plate?
What things will not go on your plate?
Who will you talk to?
How do you feel after sitting at the table with the family?
What will happen when dinner is over?
Next move to the “Do” section of the plan. In this space you will walk through the specific events and plan for times it may be difficult for your child to self-regulate. Once the plan is laid out, ask your child if there is anything that you need to accomplish the plan. A fidget? A book? The plan you just made?
Step 2: Internalize
Help your child imagine and pre-experience the plan of action in vivid detail. Have them make a movie in their mind of themselves following their plan. This may sound like:
I see myself packing a small bag with my book, three fidgets, and my toy dinosaur.
I see myself putting the bag next to the front door so I don’t forget it.
I see our family leaving the house and I have my bag with me.
I see us driving to grandma’s house.
I see myself looking at my plan in the car and imagining myself at dinner.
I see myself getting annoyed with my cousin Teddy.
I see myself walking away, going to the bathroom, and washing my hands with cold water then touching my neck.
I see myself taking a few deep breaths and saying to myself, “I can stay calm. I’m a good cousin and I’m going to read my book for a bit.”
If your child is younger this may be difficult for them as the nonverbal working memory is still developing. Have your child imagine with you and see if they can “make a movie in their mind” and you verbalize the plan for them.
Step 3: Execute
It’s time to follow your plan. Check in with the plan while at the event if possible to help observe whether your child is following the plan and how it’s going. This may sound like, “Checking in! I wonder how the plan is going?” Or “I see cousin Joe just got here. What do you see yourself doing if you get frustrated?” It’s okay and encouraged to tweak the plan for anything that isn’t going well.
Step 4: Self-Evaluate
Now it’s time to think about how the plan and event went. This can be done on the way home or in the following days. Sit down with your child and the plan. This is a time for them to reflect and give that nonverbal working memory a workout by remembering/picturing themselves in the past. Use reflexive questions to support your child’s executive functioning brain through this part:
How did the task or event go?
Was the plan helpful?
Would you change anything about it?
Why or why not?
You may be surprised at what your child took away from the event and their insights to their own thinking. You can also add in your own observations using declarative language. This may sound like, “I noticed you doing step 3 in your plan. I wonder how that felt to you?” Or “I saw you walk away when cousin Joe was bothering you. How did you do that?!” Give lots of encouragement and acknowledgement that this is hard stuff they are doing! Keep in mind that this is a metacognitive process which will take time to feel comfortable. The plan probably won’t go as expected the first time, but continuing to reflect and imagine will support changes in the future.
I love using this 4 step process with children and adults. All of these steps help strengthen the three core parts of our executive functioning system: focus, inhibition and nonverbal working memory. And the best part is, it’s free! No extra materials or gadgets required. The other best part is that strengthening these root executive functioning skills can generalize to other areas of life and grow with your child as they take on more life responsibilities and have goals of their own.
Interested in booking a session with Mary?
WRITTEN BY Mary Hadley, M.A., CCC-SLP
Mary is a speech-language pathologist with 16 years of experience. She is a graduate of The University of Dayton in Ohio with a Bachelor's in Early Childhood Education and received her Masters in Communication Disorders from New York University in 2006. She is the founder of Signpost Speech and Language Therapy, LLC where she works with both children and adults to improve social communication and executive functioning. Mary lives in Austin with her husband, two young children and very active German Short-Haired Pointer.
