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Laziness or Executive Skills? As
a psychologist who specializes in children with learning
and attention disorders, I see a lot of kids who are
struggling in school. Very often, their parents are
struggling too, with what is causing the problem. When
they come to see me, the initial interview often goes
like this: Me:
Why don’t you start by telling me how you ended up here and
what you’re hoping to get out of this evaluation?
Parents: We can’t figure out why Sam (this could be Samuel
or Samantha, but for the sake of simplicity, we’ll assume
Sam’s a boy) is having such a hard time in school. He did
fine in early elementary school, and his achievement test
scores are consistently above average, so we know he’s not
stupid. To be honest, we’re beginning to think he’s just
lazy. Me:
Tell me what leads you to suspect that.
Parents: Well, if he hasn’t “forgotten” that he has homework
or forgotten to bring it home, he puts it off until the last
minute and then rushes through it. He makes a million
mistakes but can’t bring himself to go back and check his
work. And if he has a choice between playing video games or
studying for a test—forget it, video games win every time. Me:
Does he remember to hand in his homework?
Parents: That’s another problem. If he has a teacher who’s
really strict and checks up on him, then he usually doesn’t
forget. But if a teacher is looser about that or expects him
to take responsibility for handing it in on his own, then
there’s trouble. And long term projects are a nightmare! Me:
What do you mean?
Parents: He often forgets he has them or forgets when
they’re due. He has a terrible time coming up with a topic,
particularly when he has to write a paper, and he’s not very
good about planning his time or organizing the paper, so he
leaves it till the last minute. He hates proofreading, and
he usually forgets to look at the scoring rubric, so he
leaves out stuff the teacher’s asked for. You can imagine
the grade he gets. Me:
What’s his report card look like?
Parents: It’s like a roller coaster—he does well one marking
period then lousy the next. And if it weren’t for progress
reports, he’d probably fail everything. He’s usually failing
a couple of classes when those come out and then he has to
scramble to bring his grades up. Me:
Are there problems outside of school—like keeping his
bedroom neat or keeping track of things like sports
equipment?
Parents: How’d you guess? Even when we make him pick up his
room, he does the minimum and then seems clueless about why
we’re upset—he doesn’t even seem to see the clutter. So then
it takes him forever to find his mouth guard or shin pads.
He’s a good soccer player, but his coach has taken to
keeping an extra shirt on hand—he’s the only kid on the team
who doesn’t have an assigned number. Me: So
you think the problem with school is he just doesn’t care?
Parents: Actually, no. He seems to get pretty mad at himself
when he forgets something or when he gets low grades on
papers or tests—but we just don’t know why he doesn’t make
the effort or put in the time to do quality work! This
gives a flavor of the kind of child I see. I also ask about
what his backpack looks like, whether he can estimate how
long it takes to do something, if he can work on homework
without taking breaks, etc., etc. The answers are
predictable. And when I ask parents when the problems began,
the answer I get, invariably is, “Things were a little bad
in elementary school, but it all started falling apart in
middle school.” When
you scan the parents’ concerns, it sure looks like laziness.
But there may be a better way to conceptualize the problems
Sam has. Many youngsters who are considered “underachievers”
have a constellation of challenges that fall under the
category of executive skills. Executive skills refer to the
cognitive processes required to plan and organize
activities, including task initiation and follow through,
working memory, sustained attention, performance monitoring,
inhibition of impulses, and goal-directed persistence.
Located primarily in the prefrontal cortex (the part of the
brain just behind the forehead), these are skills that begin
to develop in some form soon after birth, but
neuroscientists are now realizing that it takes a full two
decades for these skills to fully mature. And for kids with
attention disorders, these skills tend to develop even more
slowly.
Youngsters who are deficient in these skills, especially
when they are seen as having average intelligence, are often
viewed by both parents and teachers as chronic
underachievers. They have trouble getting started on tasks,
get distracted easily, lose papers or assignments, forget to
bring home the materials to complete homework or forget to
hand homework in. They may rush through work or dawdle, they
make careless mistakes that they fail to catch. They don’t
know where to begin on long-term assignments, and they put
the assignment off until the last minute, in part because
they have trouble judging the magnitude of the task and how
long it will take to complete it. Their workspaces are
disorganized, and teachers may refer to their desks,
backpacks, and notebooks as “black holes.” For
better or for worse, the problem is a little more
complicated than
laziness. But while executive skills do mature over
time, they can have a significant impact on school
achievement. Fortunately, there are ways to help youngsters
develop these skills. In addition, there are ways to modify
the environment (such as putting in place systems to ensure
that homework gets written down, completed, and handed in on
time) to reduce the impact of poor executive functioning. This
is just a brief introduction to executive skills. Those who
want to know more can obtain a copy of the book
Executive Skills in
Children and Adolescents: A Practical Guide to Assessment
and Intervention (Dawson & Guare, 2004, published by
Guilford Press and available at amazon.com). The authors are
also working on a book for parents, tentatively titled
Smart but Scattered:
Giving Our Kids the Executive Skills They Need to Get on
Track and Get Things Done.
Peg
Dawson, Ed.D. is a psychologist at the Center for Learning
and Attention Disorders, a program of |
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