COVID-19 has changed just about everything in our lives, and yet, our children continue to grow, learn and build the architecture of their brain during this time. For the next few weeks, the Brain Health Initiative will offer resources and activities that focus on ways to support the healthy brain development of your child. In part two, we talk about executive functioning skills. 

What is Executive Functioning?

As adults, we rely on essential skills that enable us to control impulses, make plans, and stay focused. We aren’t born with these skills, but our experiences at each stage of development, beginning in infancy, provide us with the capacity to develop them. Brain Health Initiative colleagues at the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University, say our genes provide the blueprint, but our early environment leaves a lasting signature on those genes.

Acquiring the early building blocks of these skills is one of the most important and challenging tasks of the early childhood years. Building on these skills is critical to healthy development and optimal performance in learning and relationships, as well as in extracurricular activities (e.g., athletics and play), through middle childhood and adolescence. As young children we depend on these emerging skills to help us learn to read and write, solve simple math problems, participate in class or group projects, and engage with other children. As we enter middle childhood, adolescence and the teen years, these skills allow us to focus on multiple streams of information at the same time, monitor errors, make decisions in light of available information, revise plans as necessary and resist the urge to let frustration lead to hasty actions.

What Can You Do Today to Protect Your Brain Health?

Executive functioning skills are developed through practice and are strengthened by experiences. Even during these challenging times, it is important to provide children the support they need to build these skills.

Optimize and Practice Executive Function Skills with Children from Infancy to Adolescence

Executive functioning skills, primarily located in the prefrontal cortex of the brain, are essential to support optimal learning and development. Although children are not born with these skills, they are born with the potential to develop these skills beginning in infancy across development through brain healthy interactions and practice.

There are three primary components to these skills:

Working memory — The ability to hold information in mind and use it.

Inhibitory control — The ability to master thoughts and impulses so as to resist temptations, distractions, and habits, and to pause and think before acting.

Cognitive flexibility — The capacity to switch gears and adjust to changing demands, priorities, or perspectives.

Have a look at the 16-page guide (available for download below), which describes a variety of free activities and games that represent age-appropriate ways for adults to support and strengthen various components of executive function and social regulation in children.

Each chapter of this guide contains activities suitable for a different age group, from infants to teenagers. The guide may be read in its entirety (which includes the introduction and references) or in discrete sections geared to specific age groups.

Download the guide to executive function.