Eps 678: Executive Function Middle School Edition

Joyful courage means having the courage to release my emotional attachment to a challenge and trusting that creating room for curiosity and relationship will increase the likelihood of the most optimal outcome.

Resources:

• InBrief: Executive Function, Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University
• Building the Brain’s “Air Traffic Control” System, Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University
• Smart but Scattered Teens by Richard Guare, Peg Dawson, and Colin Guare
• How executive skills develop over time, Peg Dawson and Richard Guare
• A Canonical Trajectory of Executive Function Maturation from Adolescence to Adulthood, Tervo-Clemmens, Luna, et al., Nature Communications (2023)
• Brain Matures a Few Years Late in ADHD, But Follows Normal Pattern, National Institute of Mental Health (2007)
• Dr. Russell Barkley on ADHD, GreatSchools
• 3 Specific Rules for Managing ADHD, Dr. Russell Barkley, PESI
• “Support Me and I’ll Do Better”: Autonomy-Supportive Parenting in Enhancing Adolescents’ Homework Outcomes, School Mental Health (2026)
• Autonomy support and psychological control in homework, Tunkkari et al.
• Get Ready, Do, Done, Sarah Ward and Kristen Jacobsen
• Cognitive Connections, Sarah Ward and Kristen Jacobsen
• Executive Skills Questionnaire, Teen Version, Peg Dawson and Richard Guare
• Executive Skills Questionnaire, online supplement, Peg Dawson and Richard Guare
• Episode 675: When Your Teen’s Grades Start Slipping
• Book an Explore Call with Casey

Transcription

[00:00:00] Casey O'Roarty: Welcome, welcome. Welcome to the Joyful Courage Podcast. This is a place where parents of tweens and teens come to find inspiration, information, and encouragement in the messy terrain of adolescence. This season of parenting is no joke, and while the details of what we're all moving through might be slightly different, we are indeed having a very collective experience.
[00:00:30] This is a space where we center building relationship, nurturing life skills, and leaning into our own personal growth, and man, the opportunities abound, right? My name is Casey O'Rourty. I am a parent coach, Positive Discipline lead trainer, and captain of the adolescent ship over at Sproutable. I'm also a speaker and a published author.
[00:00:53] I've been working with parents and families for over 20 years and continue to navigate my own experience of being a mom with my two young adult kids. I'm so honored that you're here and listening. Please give back to the podcast by sharing it with friends or on social media. Rate and review us on Apple or Spotify.
[00:01:13] Word of mouth is how we grow. Thank you so, so much. Enjoy the show.
[00:01:23] Hi. Uh, hey, everybody. How's it going? Welcome back to the Joyful Courage podcast. Welcome to late October. The first quarter is wrapping up, isn't it? I'm guessing that you've got conferences on the calendar, and if you've got a middle schooler, there's a good chance you've opened up that grade portal recently, and had that experience of tightness in your belly.
[00:01:51] Maybe it's a stack of missing assignments or a test score that made you go, "What is going on?" A few weeks ago, in episode 675, I talk about that exact moment when the grades start slipping and, you know, taking away screens feels like the thing to do, like the only thing to do. And in that episode, I mentioned executive functioning, and I said we'd get back to it.
[00:02:17] Well, here we are. I have heard from so many of you since that show, and this executive functioning topic really deserves its own space. So this is the first of two episodes on executive functioning that I am gonna offer you. Today is for parents of middle schoolers, and next week is for parents of high schoolers, and each one definitely stands on its own.
[00:02:42] So if you've got teens in both places, listen to both. You'll get something different from each show. Here's what I hear from parents all the time. They say, "My child has ADHD. They struggle with executive functioning, and I can't get them to do any of their work, to start their homework, to f- turn their assignments in."
[00:03:03] And sometimes the ADHD is a part of the problem, and sometimes it isn't. Either way, I wanna offer you a bigger frame today, okay? A bigger frame. Executive function is in development during adolescence for every teenager, whether or not they have ADHD. It's something that we build over time with practice, and temperament also plays into it.
[00:03:32] Some of our kids are easygoing with this stuff, and some of them have a much harder time. So today we're gonna talk about what executive function actually is, where your middle schooler is developmentally, and how to invite them into practicing the skills. We're also gonna talk about the piece that I think gets missed the most, which is, you know what I love to talk about, relationship.
[00:03:57] Because if your kiddo doesn't wanna hear from you, it doesn't matter how good your strategy is, right? So let's get into it. And I wanna say, I did a lot of research. You're gonna hear me drop a lot of different studies and organizations that are doing really good work around executive functioning. I'm gonna make sure there's links to all of these resources in the show notes, okay?
[00:04:20] So what is executive functioning? The Center on the Developing Child at Harvard has a picture for this that I love. They compare executive functioning to the air traffic control system at a busy airport. So imagine dozens of planes are coming in and going on multiple runways, and someone has to keep track of all of them, decide who goes first, and switch gears when something changes.
[00:04:51] That is what these skills, these executive function skills do inside of our kids' brains. The Harvard groups it into three core functions, so there's working memory, mental flexibility, and self-control, right? Working memory, mental flexibility, and self-control. Here's the part I want you to hold onto. Kids are not born with these skills.
[00:05:14] They're born with the potential to develop them, and that development keeps going through the teen years and into early adulthood There's two psychologists named Peg Dawson and Richard Guare. They wrote a book called Smart But Scattered Teens. I'm sure that many of you have heard of that book, and a lot of coaches and school psychologists use their framework.
[00:05:39] They break executive function down into 11 skills. I'm not gonna make you memorize all 11, okay? But let me name the ones that show up the most during middle school. There's task initiation, which is getting started without a long runway of avoiding the actual task. There's time management, which is having a real sense of how long something's gonna take.
[00:06:07] Organization is knowing where your stuff is, the physical stuff and the digital stuff. And working memory is holding the steps in your head while you're actually doing them, okay? Task initiation, time management, organization, and working memory. Now, here's something that Dawson and Guare point out that I find so helpful.
[00:06:29] These skills don't all develop at the same time. Some of them, like holding back an impulse or paying attention, start developing in the first year of life. Others, like getting started on a task, planning, organizing, managing time, and stepping back to ask, "How am I doing on this?" Those skills come later. So think about what middle school asks of our kids.
[00:06:55] It leans hardest on the skills that develop last. Your kiddo, yes, can remember every word of a song they heard twice, and still have no idea how long the science project's gonna take them. That's development. That's development. So middle school is this stretch zone, and we're gonna talk about why. There's a study I wanna tell you about.
[00:07:19] In 2023, a team at the University of Pittsburgh, led by Dr. Beatriz Luna, pulled together data from more than 10,000 people between the ages of eight and 35. They wanted to map exactly when executive function develops. What they found, so crazy, what they found is that between 10 and 15, there is a rapid burst of growth, okay?
[00:07:46] From 15 to 17, it keeps growing. It's just a little more slowly, and then it stabilizes at adult levels somewhere around 18 to 20. The researchers say that the, that curve tracks along with the maturing of the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that runs these skills. So your middle schooler is right in the middle of that, that initial burst, right?
[00:08:15] The skills are under construction fast and right now And can we just talk about it, like we,
[00:08:23] ugh,
[00:08:23] we get so frustrated with them, right? And their skills or their lack of skills or, you know, they're, you know, dragging their feet, and we forget, like there is development happening. This is not about our kids won't do what we want them to do.
[00:08:40] A lot of the times it's that they can't, that those skills are still under construction Right? And let's take a look at what happens structurally in middle school. Our kids go from one teacher to six or seven, right? They go to middle school, and they've got all these different teachers, all these different classrooms.
[00:08:56] They might be managing a locker or a backpack that's basically a black hole, right? Their assignments are getting longer, and they're stretched across weeks instead of days. Everything moves onto an online portal that they're supposed to check on their own. The demands jump at the exact moment the skills are still being built.
[00:09:19] Of course, it's bumpy, and bumpy is part of the process. Now let's talk about ADHD because so many of you have kiddos with that diagnosis, and I wanna thread it through this whole episode. Back in 2007, researchers at the National Institute of Mental Health, they did a big brain imaging study, 446 kids.
[00:09:42] They found that in kids with ADHD, the brain matures in the same pattern as everyone else's. It just gets there a little bit later. You may have heard this before, but on average, about three years later in some regions of the brain, and the areas that show the most delay are the ones involved in attention and planning, right?
[00:10:06] The lead researcher said that should be reassuring to families, and I agree. The development is happening. It's happening on a different timeline, right, which is tricky because the schools are not taking that into account, right? They... We have this school system that continues to look at kids of a certain age to be s- should be at a certain place of development, and when kids are not there, they're seen as behind or delayed, and it's really just the way that their brain is developing, right?
[00:10:38] Dr. Russell Barkley, who's one of the big names in ADHD research, those of you who have kiddos with ADHD probably have heard of him, he offers a rule of thumb that a lot of parents, again, find helpful. He suggests that the executive functioning skills in kids with ADHD run about 30% behind their age, and it's a rough guide, and every kid's different, of course.
[00:10:59] But if we do the math that way, your middle schooler's 12, their executive skills might look more like an eight or a nine-year-old, right? So sit with that for a second. How would you support an eight-year-old with a big project? You'd probably sit nearby and break it into pieces with them. That is the level of scaffolding that a lot of our ADHD kids need in middle school, and needing it is normal for them.
[00:11:27] It doesn't mean something's wrong, and it doesn't mean that you've failed, and it doesn't mean that you're coddling them. You're giving them the scaffolding that they need
[00:11:45] So if you listen to episode 675, which I hope that you did, I hope that you did, we started in, again, that moment with the portal and worked our way through the intentional ecosystem that I love so much, right? The parenting ecosystem. Today, I wanna go in a different direction. Last time we started in the moment and moved out.
[00:12:07] This week I wanna start with you, the biggest piece of the intentional ecosystem, and I wanna look at something that we didn't touch on, which is your own executive functioning. So Dawson and Guare, who I talked about already, they have a whole chapter in Smart But Scattered Teens about assessing your own executive skills, and I think it's one of the most useful parts of that book.
[00:12:31] Every one of us has a profile. Maybe you're the parent who has the week mapped out by Sunday night, right? Maybe you're that person. Maybe you're a last-minute person yourself, and you've only just gotten really good at pulling it off. When your young person struggles with a skill that comes easy to you, it can be really hard to understand why they can't just do it, right?
[00:12:57] And that's a gap where a lot of judgment sneaks in, right? If you're a super planner, and I know you're out there, and your kiddo is a last-minute, uh, figure-it-out in the final hour, a lot of judgment sneaks in there. It's hard to witness, right? And when your kiddo struggles with something that you struggle with too, you might see yourself in them, and that can stir up your own stuff.
[00:13:22] You don't want them to suffer the way that you suffered. So there's this, like, frantic energy in the parent, and I'm working with a lot of parents right now who have so much going on just outside of parenting, in life. Work is really challenging. It spills over into family life. You've probably noticed that when you're stretched thin, your own planning and patience are the first thing that goes, right?
[00:13:48] And then we walk into our kid's room carrying all of that energy, and of course they go, "Ah," you know, "Leave me alone. I've got this." So here's two questions to sit with. Where are my own executive skills strong, and where do I struggle? And what energy am I bringing into the room when I check in about school?
[00:14:09] And then we're gonna move a ring in, right? So am I okay? What's going on with me? Now, are we okay? What's going on in the relationship? And in episode 675, I talked about what happens when school performance conversations take over the whole relationship that we have with our kiddos. When middle schooler- with middle schoolers, I wanna look at how that pattern gets started, because for a lot of families, these are the years when just the school drama really begins.
[00:14:40] Kids don't wanna be told. If most of the conversation between you and your teen is about what they're doing wrong, they are gonna push back. They're gonna push back, they're gonna check out. They're gonna roll their eyes, or shut the door, or like I said, say, "I've got it," when clearly the evidence shows that they do not got it.
[00:15:01] And that pushback usually has nothing to do with whether or not they think they need help. A lot of them know that they're struggling. They're pushing back against the dynamic that they're in with you. And the good news about middle school is that dynamic is still forming, so the choices you make now have a lot of influence on what the high school years feel like, right?
[00:15:25] And there's research on this too. A study that was published this year in the journal School Mental Health looked at 226 families in Italy with kids between 10 and 14, right in that middle school window, and they asked the kids, their moms, and the dads separately about how homework goes at home. So what does it actually mean to be involved in homework in a way that supports your kiddo's autonomy?
[00:15:51] The researchers were very specific about it. It looked like listening when your kiddo has a different answer or a different way of doing things than you would. Parents validated their kiddos' feelings when the work was frustrating, and gave them real choices about when and how they do their homework.
[00:16:09] Right? We're talking about autonomy here. That's what we're moving towards. These parents offered a strategy instead of handing over a solution, and they asked their kids to come up with their own ideas before stepping in. Alongside that, the parents told their kids they believed they could get through the hard parts, encouragement, and they let their kids feel respected and valued even when they didn't understand the assignment.
[00:16:33] Here's what the studies found, right? In families where homework support looked like that, kids spent more time on their homework, managed that time better, and got distracted less, and all of that added up to more homework getting done. The researchers contrast this with the kind of involvement where the parent runs the whole operation, right?
[00:16:57] You know who you are. Setting a rigid schedule and monitoring every task, that might get the work done in the short term, they say, but it can get in the way of kids learning to manage themselves, and this is huge, right? Because I hear this from families all the time, "I don't wanna be on their case. I don't wanna be a nag."
[00:17:18] And yet we set up this dynamic where autonomy is not actually being valued, and things fall apart. And I wanna be honest about what this study can and can't tell us. It's a snapshot in time, right? It shows a connection, not proof of cause and effect. It's possible that kids who are already more organized make it easier for parents to step back.
[00:17:41] Yeah, of course, right? And it didn't include kiddos with a clinical diagnosis like ADHD. Still, it lines up with a lot of other research on autonomy, and it lines up with what I see in families all the time, right? Autonomy, valuing their voice, lots of problem-solving, lots of curiosity. You hear me talk about it all the time on the podcast.
[00:18:06] When this is what's alive in the relationship, it serves in so many domains, right? Other research separates two kinds of parent parental control. One is structure, knowing what's going on and keeping routines in place. The other is guilt and pressure, and making a kid feel like a disappointment, and that kind of tied in worse outcomes.
[00:18:30] So keep the structure, and let go of the shame. That's kind and firm, my friend, right? That's kind and firm. So before we get anywhere near planners and timers, I want you to ask yourself what you've been creating, whether you've created a space where your kiddo can actually tell you what's going on at school, and can you receive it without trying to fix it or change their mind about it, right?
[00:18:58] What have you created? And here are some places to get curious. How are they feeling in the classroom, right? How is your child feeling in the classroom? How are they feeling about themselves as a student? What are they noticing about their teachers and how they're treated at school? What are their friends talking about when it comes to school and schoolwork?
[00:19:21] Do they feel capable? Do they feel lost? Do they feel stupid? That last one is a big one in middle school, and kids rarely say it out loud unless they feel very safe. You might not get answers at first, and that's okay. All right? It's okay. You're planting seeds. You're getting that critical thinking going, that self-reflection going about their experience.
[00:19:49] If you jump in with a fix or a lecture, your child learns it isn't safe to talk to you. If you stay curious, they might give you a little more next time you ask. If you're listening to this and realizing the dynamic in your house is already pretty tense, I want you to know that that is really, really common, and it can shift.
[00:20:11] This is exactly the kind of thing I love helping parents sort through. So if you wanna talk about it with me, book that explore call, besproutable.com/explore. I'm here for you. I'm here for you
[00:20:31] So now we're gonna move another layer in, in the ecosystem. Does our house actually work? So again, going back to that episode 675 that prompted me to come in deeper into the executive function topic, in 675, I talked a lot about the rhythm of the home, when and where homework takes place, making agreements together in calm moments, and screen limits that protect time for school and sleep.
[00:20:59] All of that still holds, so go back and listen if you missed it. Today, I wanna get more specific about systems that actually build executive function skills. So the first one is a tool from Sarah Ward and Kristen Jacobson, who worked with kids on executive function. It's called Get Ready, Do, Done, and the magic is that you start at the end.
[00:21:24] You start at the end. So before your kiddo dives into an assignment, they picture what done looks like. Is it a finished poster on the table? Is it a document uploaded to the portal? Once they can see done, they work backwards. What do I need to do to get there, and what do I need to get ready before I start?
[00:21:47] For a lot of kids, especially our ADHD kids, picturing the finish line makes the future feel real enough to plan for That's really cool, right? That's really powerful. I learned so much in preparing for this show and, and next week's show. The second thing after get ready, do, done, the second thing is making time visible.
[00:22:11] So we're gonna call back to Dr. Barkley on this one. He talks about it a lot. For many kids, and for kids with ADHD in particular, time is something they can't really feel, so it helps them to make it something that they can see. So an analog clock in the homework spot is a great start, or a visual timer that shows time shrinking, right?
[00:22:37] You can make a little game of it, too. They write down how long they think something will take, and then how long it actually took. Over a few weeks, they start building a better sense of time. This is also good for you if you are an ADHD parent, right? If you struggle with time management. All of these tools are helpful for everybody, right?
[00:22:59] And then the third thing is about the portal itself. Middle school is often the first year that kids have an online portal, so here's a question for you. Who's checking it in your house? My guess is it's mostly you, and if that's true, think about handing it over as a skill to practice. You might sit together once a week while your kiddo opens it, look at what's there, and then they get to make their own plan.
[00:23:24] Then you slowly step back, right? You slowly step back, and you stay really neutral when you look at the portal. The portal is information. The portal is information. And one more ADHD note, because this one changed, you know, how I think about support. Dr. Barkley describes ADHD as a problem of doing what you know more than a problem of knowing what to do.
[00:23:49] Let me say that again. He describes ADHD as a problem of doing what you know more than a problem of knowing what to do. Your kiddo can tell you exactly what they're supposed to do. They know the essay's due Thursday, and that the phone goes in the kitchen during homework. The struggle shows up in the moment of actually doing it.
[00:24:10] So Barkley suggests support has to happen at the point of performance, meaning in the place and at the moment the task is actually happening. So if you're downstairs and you're calling up the stairs while your kiddo is on their phone, "Hey, don't forget, you got some homework to do," that reminder isn't gonna land, right?
[00:24:33] A talk at breakfast about tonight's plan probably won't hold up by 7:00 PM either. He points out that relying on a kid's memory of the rules or on verbal reminders alone, it often just doesn't work for the ADHD brain, right? And I hope that if you're a parent of an ADHD kid and you hear that, there's some relief.
[00:24:57] Like, they're not just being difficult. It's truly about learning to work with their brain. What works better is putting the information out in the world where they can see it, and Dr. Barkley calls this externalizing. The working memory lives on a sticky note on the desk, or a checklist taped right where the backpack gets packed, instead of in their head, right?
[00:25:25] Time becomes something they can see, like a timer sitting next to their workstation. And for longer assignments, he suggests breaking the work into shorter stretches with smaller goals for each one, and real breaks in between. Listen, this matters for us as parents because it shifts the question. Instead of asking, "Why can't they just remember?"
[00:25:50] we get to ask where this reminder needs to live so that it's there the moment they need it, and the best person to help answer that question is your kiddo, right? Yeah. So you get to be in collaboration, right? Be on their team. Help them understand their brain better as you learn to understand their brain better And then finally, that center piece of the ecosystem.
[00:26:17] Great, what do I do right now? So what do you do this week, right? Start by finding out where your kiddo is together, right? In the executive function continuum, figure out where they're at. Dawson and Guare have a short executive skills questionnaire. I'll put the link in the show notes, and here's what I'd love for you to try.
[00:26:42] You take it, and your kiddo takes it. Then you sit down and compare, starting with your strengths, their strengths, what's hard for you, what's hard for them. When your child sees that you have your own weak spots, it takes so much of the shame out of the conversation, and it turns them into a partner in figuring out what's hard and encouraging them to build skills, right?
[00:27:12] Then you're gonna pick one skill to practice. Just one. If getting started is the hardest thing, that's the one. If they never know how long anything will take, start there. In the moment, try trading a direction for a question. When we're anxious, worried, feeling frantic, we tend to tell, right? "You need to start your homework."
[00:27:37] This week, try asking, "What does done look like for this?" That one question is gonna invite them to do the thinking, and the thinking is the skill that we're trying to grow, right? This is how kids become self-reflective and critical thinkers. Connection before correction or redirection. And if your child has ADHD, here's one more thing to keep in your back pocket.
[00:28:01] When you feel the frustration rising, ask yourself what age this skill is running at today, right? If your 12-year-old's time management is closer to an eight-year-old's or a nine-year-old's, then the support you offer gets to match that, and your expectations can, too, right? And if you realize you've been the frantic, judgy parent lately, I just wanna say we've all been there.
[00:28:29] Do not beat yourself up about it. Offer an amends if you need to offer an amends, clean some stuff up, take some time for yourself to slow down and calm your nervous system, right? Next week, I'm gonna go deeper into how to repair that and to start turning the ship. But here's what I want you to walk away with today.
[00:28:49] School is your child's journey. If you're a middle school parent listening to me right now, let this land. School is their journey. We get to build the scaffolding that holds them, and we get to leave a lot of space for them to do it their way. They are in discovery of what their way even means, right?
[00:29:13] Their way may look nothing like yours, and that's okay. Your middle schooler is right in the middle of the fastest growth these skills will ever have, right? And that's hopeful news. The skills that feel so shaky right now are being built brick by brick every single day, and the way you show up in the relationship has a lot to do with whether your kiddo lets you help build them.
[00:29:39] Okay?
[00:29:44] Next week, I'm gonna be back, and I'm gonna be talking to you parents of high schoolers. We'll get into the kiddo who waits until the last minute, somehow pulling things off, what to do when the dynamic has been tense for a long time, and how to start handing over the wheel. If you've got a teen in high school, or one heading there soon, you won't wanna miss next week's show.
[00:30:07] And if you want support, again, with any of this, I've got you. I've got you. All you gotta do is book an explore call at besproutable.com/explore. We'll get on the phone for 20 minutes. I get to hear a little bit about your family and share with you how we might work together. See if we're a good fit, okay?
[00:30:26] I'd love to talk with you. Thank you so much for being here and for listening. If you enjoyed this show, or any of the Joyful Courage podcasts, please do me a really big favor and leave a review at Apple Podcasts. It helps other parents find the show. Or, just grab the link and pass it around to your friend group.
[00:30:43] Say, "Hey, I listened to this today. It was super helpful. Check it out." Super helpful for me. I really appreciate you. I really appreciate you. I hope that you get to take care of yourself today. Go drink some water, take some breaths. I'll see you real soon
[00:31:03] Thank you so much for listening. Thank you to my Sproutable partners, Julietta and Alana. Thank you, Danielle, for supporting with the show notes, as well as Chris Mann and the team at Podshaper for all the support with getting the show out there and making it sound good. As I mentioned, sharing is caring.
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[00:31:40] I see you doing all the things. I believe in you. See you next time.