When are parents likely to observe executive function problems in kids?
A problem I see occurring very often, especially with children who are just put on medication, is that when they reach middle school or high school, the expectations from schools change. The students are expected to be able to manage themselves better and carry out a higher level of executive functioning, like organizing and prioritizing their work and then being able to hand it in to the teacher. We see a lot of kids who are very, very bright, who never had any training and experience in executive functioning, who come to us at middle school, and they can’t function. The same is true of high school students and in some cases—when a child is really intelligent—this can happen in college. We have a number of groups of kids who have failed out of college because they were not able to manage themselves. What they depended on was their parents to manage them, and they were not able to be independent. What can parents do to address executive function problems? Parents need to know that givi
