Long Term Thinking

Harvard’s Center on the Developing Child’s website includes a guide for Executive Function and Self-Regulation. In this guide, it states that “when children have opportunities to develop executive function and self-regulation skills, individuals and society experience lifelong benefits. These skills are crucial for learning and development. They also enable positive behavior and allow us to make healthy choices for ourselves and our families.” Essentially, it doesn’t matter what life path you hope for your child, or which one they’d like to follow - for anything and everything they do, they’ll need the skill sets of Self Regulation and Executive Functioning… and we have to help them acquire these skills. We need to offer them the opportunities to practice them, learn them, fail at them, and then learn to be resilient and try again. I believe that it is imperative we give children spaces where the tools are ambiguous, the opportunities endless, and the encouragement to believe in themselves.

In a 2008 NPR article, Alix Spiegel speaks with a variety of experts on the topic of Imaginary Play and its relationship to Executive Functioning skills. In a discussion regarding how children spend their time and how this has changed over the last few decades, the article states that  “a growing number of psychologists believe that these changes in what children do has also changed kids' cognitive and emotional development.” And sadly, they do not mean in a good way. After repeating experiments across many decades, they realized the importance of the role Imaginative Play has in a child’s development. There are, of course, many ways we can support and engage our children. Team sports, arts classes, puzzles, tutoring, reading, STEM toys, social opportunities; all of these are essential in creating a functioning independent adult. However, the benefit of these engagements is lessened if the child struggles to maintain self-regulation. “In fact, good executive function is a better predictor of success in school than a child's IQ. Children who are able to manage their feelings and pay attention are better able to learn. As executive function researcher Laura Berk explains, ‘Self-regulation predicts effective development in virtually every domain.’” Just like the skill of walking is a precursor to sprinting, dancing, parkour, and basketball, Executive Functioning skills are a precursor to almost everything you’ll do as a human being. 

Sources:

https://developingchild.harvard.edu/science/key-concepts/executive-function/

https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=19212514