Executive function: Thinking ahead

“It’s really not until almost middle school that they have a good understanding of time. So when you say we have 30 minutes before we need to leave, they have no idea what 30 minutes is. But sequencing they can do. And so, you can tell them, ‘So we’re going to Grandma’s house. Here are the things we need to do before we go.’”

Dr. Melissa Clearfield,
Whitman Professor of Psychology

Executive functioning skills are important, because they help us achieve our goals. Children with strong executive functioning skills have the focus, patience, flexibility and resilience to succeed in—and out—of school. 

While children continue to develop these skills into adolescence, research shows they surge at 4 years old. And they can be really fun to practice! In this episode, My New Life Host Jessica Rolph welcomes Whitman Professor of Psychology Dr. Melissa Clearfield a second time.

She first appeared on the show 3 years ago to discuss her research demonstrating differences in executive function in infants. This time, the focus is on executive function in older children, specifically a child’s ability to think ahead, a component of working memory.

Transcript:

Three pillars of executive function

Melissa: So generally, we talk about three pillars of executive function, one of them is inhibiting in advisable actions or impulse control, something that is notoriously difficult for this age group of four to five-year-olds. The second pillar is enhancing working memory, and the third pillar is cognitive flexibility.

Jessica: I think I get it on inhibition. Can you explain an example of where a four or five-year-old might be in their ability to inhibit an impulse and where we want to go with that, why this matters? 

Melissa: So it is really difficult for four-year-olds to inhibit a dominant response. It is them thinking about what they want right in that moment and wanting it and that feeling being so big for them, and then sometimes they need to not do what they want or not get what they want right away. And they need to kind of hold on to that want, and that is really hard for a four-year-old.

What is working memory?

Jessica: Now, what about working memory. I know what memory is. Can you explain working memory? 

Melissa: I can. So working memory is about paying attention to the right features of your environment and then gathering information, keeping that information in mind and processing it. But a key component of that is knowing to pay attention to the right parts. So if you’re trying to solve a problem, like you’re a four-year-old who has climbed up on some play structure and you might need to have some things that you’re paying attention to and keeping in mind to figure out how to get down safely.

Jessica: It’s remembering those three and multiple step directions, so can you please Bea, when you’re getting ready for school, can you brush, do double brushing, brush your hair, brush your teeth and make your bed and then bonus for turning out the lights.

Melissa: Too much. [laughter]

Jessica: Is that working memory? Is that what I’m talking about? 

Melissa: It is.

Jessica: Having her remember all those things to do.

Melissa: Yes, that is working memory and how many of those steps kids can remember it really on a lot of factors, it depends on their age, it depends on how long they need to remember all of those. How salient those things are. So if one of those items is like, “We’re going to Disney World!” They might hold on to that one and let brush my teeth and take a bath drop out. And again, that interacts with that impulse control, when you list all the things they’re going to do, they’re going to focus in on the one they want most.

What is cognitive flexibility?

Jessica: And then, okay, cognitive flexibility, so being able to think, flexibly, play this out for me in the mind of a four or five-year-old, what does this look like? 

Melissa: So this looks like you’re going along and you’re doing one thing and suddenly you need to switch to something else. One of the ways we test this as a scientist is called a card sorting task, so you have cards that you give three, four, five-year-olds and they’ve got pictures on it, and some of the pictures are red and some are blue, and sometimes you have the same shapes in both red and blue. So you’ve got stars, circles, squares, and first you kind of train the child to sort based on color. And they get really good at it, they can do that like. Alright, red ones over here, blue ones over here. And then part way through, you’re like, okay, now we’re going to sort by shape, so we’re going to ignore color and just put all the stars over here and all the squares over here. Being able to make that shift is cognitive flexibility.

Jessica: Well, I love that you just said that because we have that exact card set that you described in one of our play kits for late three-year-olds, so thank you for mentioning that. I think that that’s something that we also believe that with practice and with support and parental awareness and child tools for being able to build these skills, that they can grow in their capacities for executive function.

Melissa: Absolutely all it takes is practice, and infants can do cognitive flexibility tasks as well, they’re just simpler. But the goal, if you really want to maximize executive function is to keep working with your kids starting in infancy but all the way throughout. And we engage in cognitive flexibility as well as adults when we need to switch our attention between tasks.

Building executive functioning skills for pre-schoolers

Jessica: If you were talking to parents of pre-schoolers, let’s say three to five, what would you tell them, what do they need to know about the skill development? I’m going to add a little caveat to say that I wish that I had known all of the things that I’ve learned in building out our play kits for four-year-olds. I feel like I’m playing catch up with my kids and some of these skills focus, impulse control, attention, cognitive flexibility, all of these things. There are so many simple things that we can do to support, enhance these skills. So now I want to turn back time, pretend I have a three to five-year-old in my house. What do you want to tell me? 

Melissa: Well, while all of these things are important, what I would recommend to parents, what I do recommend is to pick a couple of these, some of the more basic foundational skills to practice with your child, and to do so in a way that is fun and that fosters warmth and connection, because children, especially at this age and younger, they learn through connection with a person, with their caregivers, with their family. And so everything you do, even as you’re working on these cognitive skills, you want to do so in the context of that warm, loving relationship. But what kinds of things do I tell parents to work on? I think selective attention is a really big deal, it’s the first piece of working memory, and you know this from my last time on the podcast as well, everything stems from attention, from being able to focus on the right things and block out the distractors.

And that is a skill that I think gets a little bit more challenging in this age group, three, four and five, because of their issues with impulse control. Children at this age, they’ve got all these really big emotions and feelings and wants, and they can finally verbalize them, and they do really loudly sometimes. [chuckle] And so what we are trying to do as parents is get our children to maybe not go whole hog in whatever they want to do in that moment, but rather to kind of keep their attention focused, and once you have a little bit of focus, that’s when you can start building things like sequencing, planning. To me, I think that attention piece is really primary.

Jessica: Yeah, I think so too. And I think that that shared attention, just having a little bit of time every day. I remember with the rattle, you talked about 10 minutes a day of a baby and a parent playing with a rattle together or an item, any kind of item and being in play, not shared attention actually increased the baby’s ability to pay attention even for many weeks after the study ended, which I thought was fascinating. So I think we can make a difference to be present sometimes with our kids in these kind of shared activities. I wanted to talk about what you said about planning ahead, so if we think about at four, for example, children are becoming so much more aware of the world around them. So when they were younger, most of what they noticed was whatever was happening in the moment, but now they can see how their actions and words do affect those around them.

Parental support

Are these skills something that just evolve naturally in the brain with a normal environment? So much of obviously just experiencing the world helps build these skills.  What is the role of the parent in this concept of planning ahead and executive functioning skills in general? Where can we support our children? 

Melissa: I think there are a number of ways we can support our children in this. Experience is how children learn. They just need to get out there and do it. They’re not like older kids, they can’t be just told things and then they learn them. They need to get in there actively. And so as parents, we need to provide opportunities for our children to learn. Now, that doesn’t mean that they need a lot of fancy stuff, but just a little bit of the right kinds of toys and play time is important. And I think the other piece of that is that warm loving relationship. They need to feel safe and secure, like they can play, like they can knock things over and it’s going to be okay. They need to feel connected to their people, and that is what enables them to have the brain space to explore.

Jessica: I love all of that, and some of the things that we’ve researched and understood at Lovevery is ways that parents can actually speak to their child to encourage this kind of thinking. So we put in our play guide questions like, when they have a… We go to the library and they’ve got so many books that they want to get. What’s your plan to carry all of that? Or if they’re coloring and not wanting to leave and it’s a tricky transition time, do you think we can get to grandma’s on time and do the activity that you really want to do if you decide you want to color right now? I think these questions that prompt inquiry around planning ahead can be helpful, what else? What do you think of these and what else? How can you build on that? 

Melissa: I do think some of those questions can be really helpful. I will say, children three to four or five years old have a really hard time with the concept of time. There have been some really neat studies on this. If you ask kids in late February, they can tell you that Valentine’s Day was more recent than Christmas. But that is about the extent of their ability to deal with time. It’s got to be things that were fairly far apart and really super salient. It’s really not until almost middle school that they have a good understanding of time. So when you say we have 30 minutes before we need to leave, they have no idea what 30 minutes is. They really don’t, and it can change from day to day. And so, I love that you have this time clock to maybe try to help start working on this with the kids. Although I would advise parents to lower your expectations of how well your child will do with time. But sequencing they can do. And so, you can tell them, “Okay. So we’re going to go to Grandma’s house. Here are the things we need to do before we go.”

And then list them out, and then you can make it into a game. That is one thing that is really effective with children. Let’s see how many of these things you can do before your sister gets home. And the more that you can make it fun and a connecting experience between you and your child, the more your child will pay attention to the sequencing.

Jessica: I just used this. We have this timer, a stopwatch, but then it also has ways to track a comparison. So they can say, “Okay, it took you 30 seconds mum to go get your shoes on. Let me see how long it takes me to get my shoes on.” And it’s been such a great little tool. So you’re right, time is so interesting, but it’s also about motivation and using time and visual tools around time to help children connect with their goals. They do want to go do that thing, but we do need to consider time and the tasks that are required to get that done.

Working memeory for pre-schoolers

Jessica: Let’s talk about working memory. We talked a little bit about working memory in the beginning of this episode. But how does it help a preschooler plan ahead or what more can we know about working memory when we think about preschoolers? 

Melissa: Like I said, early on, working memory is about paying attention to the right features and then gathering information and keeping it in your mind as you are working with it. This can help preschoolers figure out how to solve the problem. You mentioned the example of, we’re at the library and kiddo wants a whole lot of books. How are we going to get them out and home? In this example, you can ask your child to start thinking about, okay, so how many books can you actually carry? And if I can’t carry as many as I want, what else could I do? And you can start showing them how to think about the problem. But all of that requires working memory. You’re having them pay attention to things like the weight of the books, and I don’t know, how much they can carry, and are there any devices like wagons around that they might use? That is exercising their focused attention and it’s also getting at the gathering information, maintaining it, keeping it in mind. So those questions are really supporting the components of working memory.

Jessica: And I think that when you do that kind of work you realize that there’s so much brain growth that is happening in these early years that you can really make a difference.

And that this way of being with your child, these questions that you ask, this being able to tune in to these executive functioning skills, they sound so distant, like “working memory,” but it really matters when it comes to school. And it really matters when you’re doing a task, some kind of addition problem that requires multiple digits and some computation. They have to remember where they are in the steps and it actually really matters. And everything I’ve learned about executive functioning skills is again, that they can be gained through experience and through the right kinds of experiences early. And so, I just want to bring this back to that kind of like importance and maybe you could build on that concept.

Melissa: There are definitely connections between these skills and later academics, and there are a lot of things that parents can do to boost those skills. One really simple thing that we have talked about but not quite in this way, is just talking to your child. Children who hear more words from their parents not only do they show greater language proficiency, but they tend to do better in school. My advice for parents is to really keep it simple. Spend time with your child, put your phone down, turn off the TV, your screens down, and actually focus on your child. Talk to your child, play with your child. It doesn’t have to be fancy. It doesn’t have to be things like you press a button and Mozart comes out. It’s the kinds of more simple construction sequencing toys that frankly a lot of us grew up playing with. We didn’t have a lot of the computerized toys that make everything so easy that kids don’t really need to explore as much. They don’t have as many opportunities to be creative. But those more simple acts, sitting with your child and coloring, or going outside and pointing things out. All of that, those are the building blocks. It’s not necessarily fancy.

Jessica: I love that. It is so empowering. It’s so much of what a lot of us do and it’s just intuitively is right. It feels right to be focusing on that.

Executive function skills for kindergarteners

What have you noticed about interventions that can make a difference if a child is lagging in skills or there’s some concern for them to enter kindergarten feeling prepared? What interventions have been happening in the academic world that you think parents would like to know about? 

Melissa: There are some really neat studies that have used training techniques to try to improve executive function in kindergarteners. One of them that I know of is called Tools of the Mind. One study looked at kindergarteners, I think it was in 29 low-income schools where half were randomly assigned to an executive function intervention, and it involved things like stating and implementing clear rules, rewarding positive behaviors, redirecting negative behaviors in more positive directions. All of those things were supposed to help keep kids focused on the task at hand and it worked. Those kids were better at paying attention even in the face of distraction. They were better at keeping information and working memory. Better at problem solving. Even three years later, those kids were doing better at math and reading. And those things that the intervention were about, those are really things parents can do. Stating and implementing clear rules, rewarding positive behavior, and then redirecting negative behaviors.

Jessica: Yes, it does seem intuitive. I think the tricky part is, sometimes in the implementation. How much do we want to really use intrinsic rewards versus extrinsic rewards? We want to use M&Ms or sticker charts versus: “You did it. Wow. If I were you I would feel so proud.” Just that kind of internal pride of accomplishing something and helping them to see it. There’s a lot of layers to rewards.

Montessori method and thinking ahead

We talk a lot about Montessori at Lovevery. How does the Montessori approach support this concept of thinking ahead? 

Melissa: I actually love this question, I spent some time reading Montessori in the last year or so. I think her work is so interesting. So Montessori was all about following the interest and passions of the individual, and I think one of the biggest challenges for four and five-year-olds is staying focused and impulse control. They want what they want. And what I love about the Montessori approach is it enables you to focus on what the child wants to learn about, what is interesting to the child, and that should reduce the challenges of impulse control and kind of free up the brain space to learn what they want to learn.

So if they’re outside and they’re playing in the dirt and they seem to really be interested in the plants, you can teach them quite a lot about how plants grow and what it takes. But you can’t do that with a child, or you should not do that with a child who just doesn’t care at all, who’s much more into, I don’t know, art or cars. You got to follow where they are, you got to meet them where they are.

Jessica: Yes, I love that. And I think that there’s also this concept, I love the concept of sensitive periods. There’s all these kind of schemas, if you will, or Montessori concepts of sensitive periods and if you can just tune into those, then you can help your child really go deep and it’s so exciting to observe that.

Melissa: It really is. One of the kiddos that I work with he’s nearly four, he loves to take things apart and try to put them back together. Who knows where he’s going to end up. He’s not quite yet four, but this is something that we can all help foster in this child, this interest by giving him things that come apart, that can be put back together and challenging him to think about that as he’s playing. We’re not trying to force him to sit still in a classroom kind of environment, he’s just free to follow his passion.

Jessica: That is such helpful advice Dr. Clearfield. It’s been so wonderful being with you again today.

Melissa: It’s been my pleasure.

Here are my takeaways from the conversation:

1. The three pillars of executive function are: impulse control, working memory, and cognitive flexibility. The Lovevery Reach for the Stars Matching Cards — where you sort by shape, and then code switch to sort the same cards by color — are a great way to practice cognitive flexibility. 
2. Executive function stems from attention, being able to focus on the right things and block out distractors. This is challenging at ages 3, 4 and 5 because of a child’s still-developing impulse control. Working on that selective, sustained focus is primary at this stage, and is best achieved through play with an adult.
3. The concept of time is still very vague before the age of 5. “We’re leaving in 15 minutes” has little meaning. Sequencing, however, is something they can do! “We have three things to do. Can we get them all done before your sister gets home?” The Lovevery countdown timer helps reinforce this skill visually.

Learn more on our Lovevery blog.