Supporting Executive Function in Growing Minds

March 28, 2025

WORDS: Danielle Grisham (Head of Learning Support)

We have been back to school for over a month, but it is never too late to discuss executive function and its impact on your child’s day. Executive function is a set of mental skills which include working memory, flexible thinking, organisation, planning, problem solving, emotional regulation and task initiation.

You can think of the executive part of executive function like an executive or CEO of a business, they have the power to put plans into place. While functioning refers to the behavioural output, or the ability to carry out the orders from the CEO. Executive function lives in our prefrontal cortex in the front lobe. This is the last part of our brain to develop – around 25, which means as parents and adults in young people’s lives, we must recognise that development plays a big role in a child’s ability to think, plan, organise and respond to big emotions.

Harvard University’s ‘The Center for on the Developing Child’, suggests that:

‘Executive function skills do not just appear in adulthood. They are built over time, starting as early as the first year of life, with more complex skills building on the simpler skills that came before. Executive function skills are also highly interrelated. Just as an air traffic control system requires the interaction of multiple people—pilots, navigators, controllers, weather forecasters—our human executive functioning system requires that each type of skill utilise elements of the others.’

Imagine a little one starting Pre-Primary this year, they can understand and complete one simple errand (planning and working memory), label a big emotion such as anger, but will still requires an adult to soothe some overwhelming emotions (emotional regulation), they can start a task appropriate for their age (task initiation), and can follow simple safety rules, such as walking on the bricks (impulse control).

When they graduate Year 6, they can strategise when playing games by planning ahead (planning), start to manage leisure time with tasks that need completed (time management), they can transfer their learning to new or different settings (working memory), they show a greater understanding of emotions and begin to develop ‘adult’ emotions, though they may not understand them yet (emotional regulation), they are able to use systems for organising schoolwork and activities (organisation), but they may engage in risk-taking behaviours as they test boundaries and social norms (impulse control).

By the time they are in Year 12, they can establish and maintain multiple plans at once, including goal setting (planning and time management), create and maintain systems of organisation (organisation), generate complex solutions to problems (problem-solving), manage frustration in healthy ways (emotional regulation), check and monitor work (self-management) and manages impulsive behaviour across a variety of settings (impulse control).

Like with other developmental milestones, there is always a range for children to achieve each skill; however, some children will experience delays or find it trickier than others to develop these skills. For example, when you hear ‘the ADHD brain is usually two years behind in development’, they are referring to the skills discussed above. Generally, a diagnosis of ADHD and autism will affect a child’s executive function, and it’s also common in Specific Learning Disorders (such as dyslexia) and language disabilities/delays. Children who experience adversity at an early age will also likely exhibit delays or difficulties in executive functioning.

How can we help?

Give clear and explicit instructions, and in numbers appropriate to the developmental age/level of the child.
Support learning with visual and verbal supports (e.g. when completing maths homework, a times table chart will allow a child to work on the maths skills and not use their working memory capacity trying to recall the times table).
Games like Simon Says and buddy reading can help develop impulse control and social skills.
Help your child see an issue from another perspective to develop empathy and cognitive flexibility.
Talk through ways to solve a problem to help develop problem-solving skills.
Colour coordinate items for easy organisation (e.g. Maths folder is blue, English folder is yellow).
Use visual aids for routines, which can help with “seeing” time and chunking time into doable lots.
Set goals, such as completing an assessment, and break the goal into doable chunks; checklists may also be helpful.
Help give names to emotions, developing in complexity as the child grows older, such as “I can see you frowning, you seem worried”.