How building executive functions can support your child's motivation in school with Dr. Stephanie Carlson

Let's talk about executive functions and how these skills support your child's academic performance!

In today's episode, I chat with Dr. Stephanie Carlson, Tedx speaker and Distinguished McKnight University Professor in the Institute of Child Development at the University of Minnesota. She investigates basic developmental processes in executive function in children.

If your child often gets stuck in their emotions, struggle with staying focused or struggles with getting organized or planning, this is a must-listen episode for you!

We chat about emotions, sleep (I learned that total hours of sleep isn't as important as I thought!) and how you can support your child in their early years to help them build these important skills that create the foundation of their future emotional and physical health.

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Sources:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BvyTiC_byOo

https://reflectionsciences.com/

https://reflectiveperformanceinc.com/

Study: Metacognitive processes and associations to executive function and motivation during a problem-solving task in 3–5 year olds
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11409-020-09244-6

Join her study!
Dr. Carlson is currently conducting a fully online research study examining the predictors of career interests in children, as EF skills might be one overlooked predictor of the topics and jobs students are drawn to in high school and beyond. To be eligible for this study, you must live in the United States, and your child must be in 4th or 8th grade in the 2023-24 school year. Families will be contacted each year for 4 years. Compensation (wide selection of gift cards) depends on level of participation and ranges from $10-$50 per year.

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:01

The autonomy supportive, and so what that means is to provide kind of just enough support so that your child can do it on their own.

Speaker 2: 0:22

Hello, my dear friend, welcome back to another episode of the curious neuron podcast. My name is Cindy Huffington and I am your host. If you are new here, welcome. I'm a mom of three from Montreal, canada, and I have a PhD in neuroscience. I'm here to share some insights with you that I pull out of neuroscience research or leadership skill research and psychology research, whatever. I could find some books that I'm reading, but most of all, I love falling, you know, finding some researchers, clinicians or experts out there that will help us understand a certain topic even more, and that's what today's guest is all about.

Speaker 2: 0:58

Dr Stephanie Carlson has an amazing TED talk that I want to share with you. I will put the link in the show notes. It's called executive function. Skills are the roots of success, and she is right. When I started going over all her work and digging back into the research around executive functions, I realized that we had covered this very lightly a few years ago and that we needed to dive right back into executive functions. There's so much around this that we need to talk about Still some misconceptions and misunderstandings, I think, as parents, and sometimes we get stuck in these scenarios where our kids are doing something, for example, struggling to follow routines or plan something or problem solve through something or get out of an emotion, and we see it as their fault or we see it as their personality, when, in essence, it's something that we need to work on with them and that we need to support.

Speaker 2: 1:49

So, as their coach or their leader, we need to kind of give them that guidance, that scaffolding that's Stephanie and I are going to talk about, and that's why I think it's important for us to cover this topic, because I know that by the end of it, you'll have some notes written down and you'll be able to say oh, that's what I need to work on with my child, or that's what I'm hoping at least. I do want to take a moment to thank the Ten and Bum Open Science Institute here at the Neuron Montreal for supporting the Curesnown podcast, as well as the McConnell Foundation. Without these two organizations, this podcast would not be possible. So, thank you. This podcast would not be possible without you, the listener. So please, if you haven't done so, make sure you have clicked on the subscribe button, because that allows the platform that you're listening to this podcast on to know that this podcast matters to you, and I hope it does, so please press that and if you haven't done so yet, click on rate the. You know the place where you have to go I don't know where it is, wherever you're listening to it to rate the podcast and to review the podcast. If anything, just at least rate it on five stars and if you have a little extra time this week, take a moment to leave a review. It could be short, just write great if you want to, or not great. Whatever you want to write, it would be really helpful because those reviews and those ratings, as well as your following and downloading the podcast, all lead to me getting some funding that allow me to help get people to edit the podcast, the audio, the video, and create these little clips for you, so that it really is important. It doesn't come to me, it comes to them to help me support you and create more of these podcasts which, by the way, are my favorite. I love this podcast so much and having these conversations with people, so please take a moment to do that.

Speaker 2: 3:30

If you are interested in learning more about executive function skills, I do invite you to check the links in the show note. I will obviously put Dr Carlson's Ted talk as well as some links to her work, but in addition to that, I want to share an article called metacognitive processes and associations to executive function and motivation during your problem solving task in three to five year olds. The reason why I'm doing that is because there are so many other cognitive abilities that we need to talk about, and this is one that links to part of what we talked about in the episode today, which is motivation. We often you know I've heard this from parents who have kids in school where sometimes their trial isn't motivated and the parents don't know what to do. Dr Carlson is going to give you a really important piece of advice around that, and this article is going to support that and talk about metacognitive or metacognition, which is something else that I believe we should know about as parents, and I'm going to have to dig into that. But this article in essence highlights that metacognitive knowledge predicted executive function and metacognitive skills predicted motivation. So they're all interconnected and they're all things that we need to know about as parents, because they are developed in early childhood and it's not only when kids are in school or preschool. It has a lot to do with when they're home with us and, as we'll learn with Dr Carlson today is we have a role in how we build the baby steps towards, you know, building these skills or, as we say, scaffolding, so it really is important for us to know this.

Speaker 2: 4:58

One other thing that we're going to talk about with Dr Carlson is about sleep, and that's another important one, and the impact that this has on your child's executive function skills, and I do want you to reflect on that for one moment by the end of the episode and think of the quality of sleep that your child is having and whether or not this might be having an impact on their cognitive abilities, such as executive function skills, because this does impact their level of focus and how they're performing at school as well. So today's or this week's reflection prompt that I'd like to pull out of this episode has to do with the quality of sleep that your child is getting, and the question that we are asking ourselves has nothing to do with the total number of hours of sleep. It has to do with how long they stay asleep, how many hours, right, and that applies to our quality of sleep as well, even if you're sleeping eight hours a night but you're not consistently, consistently going to bed at the same time or you're waking up several times a night. That is not quality sleep and we're going to dig into that with Dr Carlson, so let's not wait any longer.

Speaker 2: 6:01

Stephanie M Carlson has a PhD and she is a distinguished McKnight University professor. In the Institute of Child Development at the University of Minnesota, she investigates basic developmental processes in executive functions, or brain based brain basis of self control, in children from infancy throughout a lessons, with a focus on the preschool period. She's particularly interested in how executive function skills can be cultivated through play, parenting and education and, in turn, how these skills prepare children for learning and better physical and mental health. Together with Professor Philip David Zalazzo, she developed a brief direct measure of executive function skills, appropriate starting at 24 months of age and extending through adulthood, called the Minnesota Executive Function Scale M-E-F-S. She co-founded Reflection Sciences for Kids and Reflective Performance for Adults to provide assessment and solutions for improving these important neurocognitive skills. Dr Carlson is currently conducting a fully online research study examining the predictors of career interests in children, as executive functions might be one overlooked predictor of the topics and jobs students are drawn to in high school and beyond.

Speaker 2: 7:15

To be eligible for this study, you must live in the United States and your child must be in fourth or eighth grade in 2023, in the 2023-24 school year, families will be contacted each year for four years. So, if you are interested in this study, there's compensation as well and it depends on the level of participation, but it ranges between 10 to 50 dollars, and I will put the link up in the show notes, because it's really important to participate in research. Alright, let's not keep you waiting. Please enjoy my conversation with Dr Stephanie Carlson. Hi everyone, and welcome back to the CureStone Podcast.

Speaker 2: 7:52

I'm here with our special guest today, dr Stephanie Carlson. Hi, stephanie, welcome. Hi, cindy. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you for being here.

Speaker 2: 8:00

You know, I was reading through your articles, which led me to your TEDx talk, which I went down the rabbit hole one night and just was loving everything that I was reading, and I kept thinking about parents and struggles that they mentioned to me in terms of their child and what they're seeing in terms of you know, whether it's delayed gratification or flexibility or emotions and I just kept thinking of your research, thinking that they truly need to hear what you're doing in terms of your research, and I think it's important for them to know that.

Speaker 2: 8:30

So we're going to cover not just kids today, but I also was thinking about parents themselves and I want us to kind of talk about executive functions as a whole also, you know, go into the parenthood section where we can understand how it might be impacting our lives, because I do think that sometimes parents are struggling with certain aspects of parenting or functioning or performance at work or at home and we don't think about executive functions enough. So let's begin with the basics. I always want to make sure that everybody's on the same page. What are executive functions?

Speaker 1: 9:04

So executive function skills are neurocognitive or brain based skills that we use to basically set and achieve goals. So these include being able to pay attention, being able to hold goals in mind or kind of like hold information in mind, being able to resist distractions and reactions and being able to think flexibly, being able to try solving a problem in a new way or seeing something from someone else's perspective. These are all executive function skills and they include self-regulation skills that we would use both in kind of neutral situations like, just you know, learning a new math problem or learning a new way to get to work or to get home, if there is construction, but also in effectively or emotionally charged situations, so when a child steals your favorite toy or when a coworker criticizes you. So we use these executive function skills in daily life in both kind of affectively neutral or what we call kind of cool situations, as well as more hot or emotional situations.

Speaker 2: 10:30

I'm sure that a parent that just heard this definition said or thought alright, so this clearly doesn't develop in childhood, right, like we probably think that this starts later on, maybe in teenagers or even later, because everything that you just described are the skills that parents struggle with with their own child. Is this a skill that develops young at a young age?

Speaker 1: 10:53

Well, yeah, it's true that executive function skills are most conspicuous in their absence, right?

Speaker 1: 10:59

So when you think of a typical young child, it's someone who doesn't remember what their goals are from one moment to the next. They're impulsive, they're Emotional, they throw tantrums and they get easily distracted. So we notice that, and it's frustrating as a caregiver sometimes to deal with those skills, and so you might be tempted to think that they have no executive function. But in fact, you know, one of the real hallmarks of the last couple of decades of research is that we've been able to show through new Measures that kids as as young as 24 months have some executive function skills, and even younger.

Speaker 1: 11:44

If you start to look at the ways that children, even infants, self-soothe, you know even young infants will turn away from a Stimulus that's annoying them or bothering them, and that's that's a way of kind of self-regulating and managing themselves in that moment, and so sometimes it's tempting to think about it as like a glass half empty. But if you, if you know what to look for and what to expect when in development, you actually see these skills Are kind of impressive, even in young kids you.

Speaker 2: 12:21

You mentioned that delayed gratification or we think of like the impulsivity piece. That is something that I think is the most common question that I receive from parents, where you know, I talk a lot about emotion regulation skills and that is part of it, and they don't often think about that being connected. So emotion, or, sorry, executive functions are Part of these emotion regulation skills that we talk about. Right that? What is the role of EF skills in? In emotions and Social emotional learning?

Speaker 1: 12:49

Yeah, so executive function skills are kind of the cognitive piece that is really essential and I view it as I view executive function skills as sort of the Foundation that makes the cultivation and growth of social and emotional skills possible in the first place. We couldn't get there with social and emotional skills without these basic Neurocognitive skills of executive function. So it's being able to hold goals in mind, resist impulses and think flexibly. That enables kids to develop routines that are Well less selfish behaviors, behaviors that are less self-serving and selfish. So, being pro-social sharing, you know, sharing limited resources, showing kindness Even when it doesn't really it doesn't reward you in any direct way being able to be compassionate toward others, being able to think about the group rather than just oneself. So all of those social emotional skills at some level require self-restraint and and kids need executive function skills to be able to do that.

Speaker 2: 14:11

I think of the Marshmallow test, which you worked with that main researcher, I think before he passed right from what I understood from your TEDx talk. Yes, walter, michelle, right, and so why did you redo the Marchmallow test To see if it was still applicable with with kids today?

Speaker 1: 14:29

Yeah, so that's one of the really fascinating findings that I wanted to leave your audience with Because a lot of people might not know about that again, maybe tending to sort of underestimate kids.

Speaker 1: 14:42

We actually found that kids today Delay gratification significantly longer than they did 50 years ago, and we we didn't set out to Kind of answer that question, but I had accumulated all of these data on the delay of gratification task for the Marshmallow test in preschool children for for several years, and Walter Michelle was a great mentor to me and I said you know, I have all these data and parents always say to me about how they are sure that their kids Would delay gratification you know less long, that they would be more impulsive than they themselves would have been as a child or Then kids used to be. So we decided to put it to the test and compare his his data from the 1960s and another data set of his from the 1960s with Professor Larry Aber and, and we found that for each 20 years there was an increased average delay of one minute on the wow on the Marshmallow test. So I love this finding so much because I agree with you.

Speaker 2: 15:56

I think that as parents, Our instinct is to say well, I was able to wait. You know, like my parents, major, that I waited and kids were able to do that. They're just, they're just impatient and impulsive. But I love that finding so much because it does remind us. You know, sometimes I think that our expectations for our kids are a little bit bigger. You know, I see this with Concentration skills or the ability to focus. A lot of parents will say, you know, I just want my two year old to wait 20, 30 minutes while I have a meeting, you know, with during the pandemic. It was really difficult and I would say, well, that's not necessarily developmentally appropriate at that age. It might not. Their child might be able to, but odds are they might not. So do you see the same thing with executive functions, or Especially the impossibility aspect that we have bigger expectations for our kids? For sure, and just because we see an average increase in delay of gratification.

Speaker 1: 16:53

Over the last 50 years. It doesn't mean that young children's don't still struggle, right. So you know, we see clear developmental trajectories On things like delay of gratification. You know, a toddler can wait about less than a minute for For something, whereas an older child, can you know, start to wait much longer Periods of time for For gratification. I mean, a high schooler Can now start to wait years For a better long-term outcome, right, right, and that's kind of what the marshmallow test is all about is you'll you'll have a better long-term outcome if you wait, you know, If you just don't take that marshmallow right now.

Speaker 1: 17:36

So we see clear developmental change in that, but also in these like cooler executive function skills or problem solving skills. So Very young children can only hold about one thing in mind at a time and they can't get unstuck off of that one thing easily. And you see this, you know, with with a lot of tantrums with young children, it kind of starts because they they are stuck on an idea, right, they want that one red cup, yeah, and it's very hard to get unstuck and they get easily frustrated.

Speaker 1: 18:12

So the older children can only get stuck on one thing and they get easily frustrated. So the older children can hold a few things in mind. Elementary age kids can hold a few things in mind and start to flexibly switch between them like, oh, I could look at it this way, or I could look at this exact same thing in a different light. And then you know, secondary or high school age students are able to do that, but now much more efficiently, and we we measure that through like reaction time. So Right, those skills get just sort of faster and faster and more efficient, peaking at around age 25 and then unfortunately declining on average.

Speaker 2: 18:55

So I want to make sure we continue on that path. But I just realized that maybe some parents don't know what the marshmallow test is. Can we just give a quick definition of what or or description of what that task was and what it meant when children would wait longer, just in terms of their, their future and and all that?

Speaker 1: 19:12

In the marshmallow test, children are presented with a small treat, such as one marshmallow, and a larger treat, such as two marshmallows, and they're they're told that If you wait until I come back you know I have to leave the room to go do some work Um, but, uh, if you wait until I come back and don't touch the treats, then you can have the larger Treat, you can have the two marshmallows. But if you don't want to wait, um, that's okay. Um, you can ring this bell and there's like a little hotel style bell or something, and and, um, and then I'll come back, um, but then in that case you can only have the one marshmallow. And so first you make sure that kids actually want the larger um reward, which they do pretty invariably. Um, and you make sure that they understand the rules.

Speaker 1: 20:11

Um, you make sure they understand that it's voluntary. It's kind of like, if you want to, when you want to, um, you can ring this bell and I'll come back, but then you only get the one. So we make sure they understand all of that. And then, um, we measure just how long in seconds or minutes you know they delay um and uh, in my research we've we've looked at up to 20 minutes Um wow which is a long, long time.

Speaker 2: 20:36

Um, that's long but?

Speaker 1: 20:38

but how old are the kids? They will range in age from um. You know in this, this work, that we reported they were all preschool age kids. So so this was um typically a 10 minute delay. And what? And this is identical to a procedure that Professor Walter Michelle had used in the 1960s from Stanford University, and we found that just the average period of delay in that age group increased by one minute for kind of every 20 years or so. When we compared the data, and what do studies suggest?

Speaker 2: 21:16

you know, if a child is able to wait longer, what does that mean for their future in terms of, perhaps, academic performance?

Speaker 1: 21:24

Well, it turns out that waiting longer, longer delay of gratification is related to a host of concurrent things in their lives. So it does tend to be related to academic achievement and IQ and socioeconomic status of the family. And then it predicts things like SAT scores and emotion regulation, reduced drug use and increased income in midlife. And many of those predictions hold up even when we control for their childhood IQ and socioeconomic status.

Speaker 2: 22:17

Wow, I know lots of parents are going to try this test at home this week. After listening to this, I want to go back now to what you were talking about and I think I wanted to find this a little bit more. When we talk about holding one instruction or one item in their head versus multiple for kids in elementary school, you know, I think, about parents who struggle a lot with the morning routine or nighttime routine, especially when there's you know, you come back from school and there's a sport and you need to get ready, get your soccer bag and your shoes and whatever it is. I feel that parents struggle a lot there because their kids will, you know, have difficulties with remembering what's next or what I need to do or what I need to plan. Is that what you mean when you talk about one versus multiple things and holding that in their heads?

Speaker 1: 23:02

That's right. So thinking about the steps in a plan or in a sequence of things, you know you can't always skip to the end, you have to sometimes, you know, do some of the intermediate steps and being able to hold those in mind, being able to plan backward from a deadline or a due date so for an assignment in school, it sounds like if it's doing two weeks, it sounds like, well, that's forever. I've got a really long time to work on that. But one thing that we try to teach kids is to start to think of, to actually map out those two weeks and, like, start working backward from a deadline.

Speaker 1: 23:50

And again, they tend to be pretty present, focused, and so, you know, getting them to imagine their future selves and think about the self you know further out into the distant future is a really good strategy for helping them see the present moment as a little bit less enticing, a little bit less salient and tempting than it is right now. Like to play this video game right now is super tempting and very salient. But if you start and that's kind of if you're just thinking about the present self, that looms really large. But if you can help kids start to think about the future self and imagine you know what it'll feel like to turn in that assignment on time, for example. Then you create a little competition between the present self and the future self and they can start to imagine that longer term consequence and you know the benefits of foregoing something now for the longer term future Right.

Speaker 2: 24:54

Can you do that with a child, or can you have this discussion with a child who's in early elementary school? First, second cycle, grade one to grade four.

Speaker 1: 25:03

Absolutely Even younger. Wow, and play is a really great way to do this, especially pretend play with young kids. So we've actually been researching this in our lab recently with four year olds, where we help them imagine their future selves using just using, a storyboard. You know the kind of thing where it's covered in felt and you can put like little felt figures on it Really low tech, and they love it. And what we're asking them to do is save for the future.

Speaker 1: 25:40

And four year olds, and many four year olds, are like miserable at saving for the future, and so we put them in a situation where they have they have only three marbles and they can play this marble shoot game. And there's their first. They're going to play a small one and then they're going to go play a really big one, but if they don't save any marbles for the big one, they're out of luck, right, if they spend all their marbles on that first game. Most four year olds spend all their marbles on the first game, but what we did is some of them were randomly assigned to imagine their future self before they did it. And imagine if you, if you do save you know, a marble for the big game, how will you feel?

Speaker 1: 26:30

And we also tried if you don't save. We had them imagine if you don't save a marble and then you get to the big game, you don't have any, how will you feel? And we found that, compared to a control condition where they just imagined like their bedtime routine that night so they're still imagining things and so forth, but it's not about the marble game we found that if they imagined saving and how good they'll feel they, they were significantly more likely to save at least one marble for the future. And and and, interestingly, when they imagine not saving and how bad they would feel, it didn't help to the same degree. And so I think that is really interesting, because my intuition is a parent, and you know in talking to a lot of parents over the years is that parents actually try to motivate kids by telling them how bad they should feel.

Speaker 2: 27:33

Right, I was going to say that yeah, with school, right, Like we say like what if you don't like, what if you fail, or what if you don't make it, or what if you don't graduate? We taught we do focus on that.

Speaker 1: 27:42

Yeah, and I really think that this research and you know we have a lot more to do to better understand this but I think it's really suggestive that helping kids imagine positive outcomes is going to be more effective.

Speaker 2: 27:58

I love this so much. Wow, I know that this is. I know that this kind of information is really empowering to parents because it's something that we can do with our kids. With the example that you just described, I think about video games or screen time at home, where sometimes things are out of control and you're trying to find a way to regulate that and to have some sort of system I would assume that we could apply the same thing in terms of having I don't know three coins that are 20 minutes each, or you know 15 minutes each, and telling the child if you use them all this morning, then you're done with your screen time for the day, versus if you kind of disperse it throughout the day. I don't know, I'm just thinking about this on the fly, but I feel that this would be a good way to get that child to realize well, if I want to play before dinner time, I need to save that 20 minute coin. Yeah, I love that idea, right? Yeah, I think we can do this in so many ways. I love this.

Speaker 2: 28:49

So I know the parents are sitting now are thinking great, that's one way. How else? Like, is this a skill that they will eventually learn because of things that are happening to them around, you know, in their life and in their environment, at preschool and at home, and that I'm just waiting for them to be in elementary school so that they are able to have you know like or hold certain amounts of instructions and rules. Or do I have to do certain things at home? You know there was a study that was reading of yours that talks about the importance of that caregiver and the role that they have in scaffolding and building these, these executive function skills. So I know that the answer is yes, but I know the parents don't know how. So how about we kind of give them you spoke about play. Are there other things that we need to be mindful of as we're parenting very young kids? Absolutely.

Speaker 1: 29:37

So executive function skills are first and foremost malleable. So it's not like a blueprint or something that's sort of predestined, that if you just kind of like like give your child food and and and water and sleep, that they'll just spontaneously develop these executive function skills. No, they really do depend on you and your support. They depend a lot on language development and I do just want to make sure to mention that, because talking to your child, talking with your child, and helping to develop what we call self speech, so helping them learn to talk to themselves and learn to talk themselves through their own problems, through their own challenging situations, is really important. And so you know, language input in the home and and modeling that you know, even sort of modeling talking to yourself sometimes is is actually, you know, a really good thing.

Speaker 1: 30:47

But in addition to that, with that kind of background, I want to mention that you know, if you, if you see your child, your child, struggling to to do maybe a new task or to solve a new problem, you have basically three options. So you can let them struggle, so you can kind of sit back and think Well, you know, how are they going to learn, if I, you know. So they. They need to just kind of work it out for themselves, or they could do it for them. So you know, oh, I don't want to see my child struggle. This is this is probably going to be too hard for them. I should do it for them. Or this is going to probably take a really long time and I don't have a lot of time, so I'm going to do it for them.

Speaker 2: 31:45

And we're all guilty, the one to tie their shoes Exactly. Yeah, we've all done it.

Speaker 1: 31:49

We're all guilty of that. But there's a third way, kind of a middle way, which is to support the child's autonomy, to be autonomy supportive. And so what that means is to provide kind of just enough support so that your child can do it on their own or figure it out on their own. But but they can't do it without you. So just letting them flail isn't going to do it. But they're also not going to learn how to do it or internalize that skill if you're always doing it for them. So being autonomy supportive means providing some scaffolding you mentioned that word and that that means kind of like structuring tasks to be appropriately challenging. It means giving hints without actually directly telling them the answer or how to do it. It means following your child's pace, so you know, not being impatient with them.

Speaker 1: 32:54

They might you have to remember that kids at speed of processing, just neurologically, is way slower than ours, and sometimes it's just a matter of allowing more time for them to think, you know, through these things. So allowing them that time which is also hard as a parent sometimes, for sure. And and then lastly, offering choices. So instead of saying oh, like, let's say, they're solving a puzzle together, instead of saying, oh, the red one goes there, it would be. Hmm, I wonder which one fits there. Could it be the red one or the blue one, right? And so you're directing their attention and sometimes it fits, you know, depending upon the age. But if it's a puzzle with a lot of pieces it's really overwhelming.

Speaker 1: 33:52

So things like, you know, oh, let's try to find edge pieces, or, you know, giving them that choice is really helpful for kids, because what happens when you offer a child a choice and they make one? Then suddenly they kind of own it right. So it's a way for them to express their agency, you know, their autonomy, and it doesn't mean that they're, you know, independent or that they don't need you anymore or anything like that. We're not, you know. It just means that you're helping them to internalize these skills, and that's really what we want for our kids. You know, around the world, what parents want is for kids to be able to exhibit the skills and values that are prized in that family or in that society. They want kids to internalize them so that they do the right thing, whatever it is when no one's looking.

Speaker 2: 35:07

Right, it's so true, you know, I do think that this autonomy and being able to do something on their own is something so important for us as parents as well.

Speaker 2: 35:20

But I think it's so hard, like everything that you just described. I know that parents struggle with this because there's always this time factor that's kind of getting, you know, that's reminding us like I need to be I can't believe for work, and if your child wants to tie their shoes, it's just not the right time. Or you're, you know, doing a puzzle with your child, or building using building blocks, and I know that parents often feel like there's, you know, you have to go make dinner, or it's almost bedtime, even with homework. I think that parents really struggle because you know you have a certain amount of time and you don't want homework to to, you know, be too long. You have to get ready for bed. So it's so hard for parents. But I think what you just said is a reminder that that time helps build these skills that, in the long run, will be really impactful, you know, for our child's life. So I think it's really important that we hear this, because we do tend to move things forward a little bit, a little bit quickly.

Speaker 1: 36:12

Well, offering choices is a way to save time also, that's true. So offering a limited set of options reduces the problem space for the child and it just literally speeds things up, because now you know, and then of course it's not like anything goes. You know they have to be sort of choice, you know, within reason.

Speaker 2: 36:38

All right, you had mentioned something and I've been hearing a lot about sleep lately and I just want to touch on that if we can, because, you know, even my friend, you know, right after the holiday, sent me a message and said we need to sleep more. You know, apparently I don't know there's a lot of talk now about sleep, but sleep also has an impact on or not an impact, but there's a role of sleep and executive functions. What is it? And again, thinking of the parent right now, who's listening to this? What do we need to be aware of within our homes?

Speaker 1: 37:08

Yeah, thank you for raising that. Sleep is so incredibly important and it's amazing that we're still learning so much about the benefits of sleep and kind of how it works. And I've conducted some research on this with my colleague, annie Bernier and Julie Carrier, and we've looked at infant sleep and how it would then later predict, within those same kids, they're developing executive function skills, and so the infants were about 12 to 14 months at time one, and then we followed them up at time two, and in fact Annie Bernier so at the University of Montreal is still following this sample. I believe so. But it was interesting that it wasn't the total amount of sleep per day that predicted later executive function skills. It was sleep consolidation.

Speaker 1: 38:14

So, having sleep consolidation means having fewer disruptions of sleep, fewer wakeings within a sleep period, and so we gave them these little monitors to put on their legs or on their wrists while they were sleeping so we could see exactly how much they were awake or asleep.

Speaker 1: 38:35

And this, probably especially at that age, mostly has to do with brain development and with the development of these neural structures and circuits that do develop into prefrontal cortex development and prefrontal cortex, as we know, is really important. The sort of front, most part of your brain, is really important for executive function skills. So there's definitely psychophysiological story behind the relation between sleep and executive function. But there can be just long term accrual of sleep deficits at any age and those very likely impact our executive function skills. And executive function skills are sort of evolutionarily the most expendable. So breathing is going to be a pretty important function that you really can't survive very long without that, and so breathing is sort of highly conserved, it's called. But executive function skills are a little bit more of a bonus in terms of evolution, and so when we're severely sleep deprived they can be the first thing to go.

Speaker 2: 40:06

And now parents, especially with young kids, are saying well, that's why I forget intent to struggle. Right, it's not that mom brain thing, it's a human brain with lack of sleep thing, exactly Right. So now I know you mentioned the consolidation piece in terms of sleep and infants, but I know, even with myself, I had three kids. They're four, six and eight now, and I'm thinking of that first year and even up to the first year and a half, almost two years, sleep was very difficult. You know, they are very close in age, so there was always a newborn in the home. Their sleeping patterns were off. Does that mean, with what you're seeing, with research, that we should be placing a lot of focus on? I don't know if I want to say the word sleep training, but you know, helping them sleep longer periods of time. They are waking up multiple times throughout the night.

Speaker 1: 40:58

I think, yeah, whatever we can do kind of to arrange the environment to be most conducive to longer periods of uninterrupted sleep, but I know that that's easier said than done.

Speaker 2: 41:13

So hard. Right, I'm going to dig into that research a little bit more and try to find studies that I could, you know, share with parents, because I do know that that's a very common question and when it comes to sleep, I get lots of questions around sleep and attachment, or sleep and brain functioning, and it's something that I can't answer and I don't I haven't found enough to kind of give a big summary about it, like it's hard to cover that. So I will look into that because I think it's important to think about that. With executive function skills, I just want to make sure that we have time to move on to parents a little bit, because there was this really interesting post online that showed, you know, a parent, a home and items on the staircase and you know, struggling to make it on time to soccer.

Speaker 2: 41:58

You know practices, and they were saying it's not about the child, it's the parent, it's clearly a parent who's struggling with executive function skills, and I thought it was interesting to see it that way. And even if I think about myself and my partner, you know I do see some, you know, struggles with executive functions as well and I think we're not alone and I think there are, you know, neurodivergent parents as well, who know that they are struggling with this. So you said that it's malleable, right? It's not something that we're, if we have a certain amount of skills around this, that we're stuck with that. So we can definitely change. So it's never too late. You're telling me, if I'm in my 40s, I'm still okay. Yes, yes.

Speaker 1: 42:40

So I think one of the things that we've noticed in the last few years is that executive function, the term executive function is becoming kind of more commonly known and I'm seeing more of a shift also to adults. In audiences that I speak with, for example, they're coming up to me afterward and saying, you know, oh my gosh, you know I struggle with this, or you know my staff struggles with this, or my partner struggles with this. This isn't just, you know, an issue in kids, and so, you know, although on average we see that developmental pattern that I told you about, you know, executive function cells kind of peak around one's mid 20s. There are individual differences at any age. So I think that's really important to keep in mind and I am turning now, given, you know, just so many people mentioning that to me it literally led me to co-found a company on executive function skills for adults, and we had already co-founded a company, phil Zalazzo and I, for executive function skills for kids.

Speaker 1: 44:00

So measurement and development of executive function skills called reflection sciences. And then we more recently co-founded with a partner of ours, reflective performance, and that is designed to both measure and address executive function skills for the adult workforce. So I think a lot of these issues that come up in the workplace and you know, or just trying to manage a home are, you know, very traceable to executive function issues, even though in the past adults might not have known that label or thought to label them that way. So issues with time management being, you know, tardy or absent, being rude to a customer if you're in customer service, having, you know sort of underperforming at work or having low productivity, a lot of you know again that difficulty with time management, a lot of these issues are traceable to executive function skills that can be improved and can be developed and so I'm excited about this kind of relatively new awareness of executive function in adults and its importance in the workforce.

Speaker 2: 45:29

Right, because everything that you mentioned in terms of in schools, you know with children and planning, and you know creating, thinking about the future self and how it will feel to give in that project. I was thinking of parents and adults at the workplace and I think it's the same thing, you know, and lots of parents feel that you know we can do things at the last minute, but sometimes it's that we haven't planned properly and it's not just about not having the time, it's not managing that time properly. Same thing with the household. I think that it's very, you know, I hear a lot of parents talk about balancing work and life and I feel that it's not about just balance.

Speaker 2: 46:08

I don't know if there is such a thing as, like the perfect balance, but I do know that with planning, I see it with myself as well, like the more I plan, the better that week is right. So the more I kind of get into that week and know exactly when do I need to do this, when does that need to get done, you know, when do I have this meeting and working around everything, I just feel better about that week and then I'm able to have a more successful week. I don't know if that's balancing everything. Necessarily. There might be weeks where you work a lot more because of deadlines and there might be weeks where you spend a lot more time with your kids, but in general it's truly the planning piece that makes a big difference.

Speaker 1: 46:44

I think so, and it's, again, easier said than done, right, yeah, but a lot of the same techniques and strategies that we would advise for kids are applicable to adults as well. So engaging in that future self-thinking, for example, and how good it will feel to, you know, kind of have things under control next week. And there are a few sort of principles and best practices about how to cultivate executive function skills in kids that would apply to adults as well. So some of those, if I may, are continuing to stretch yourself. So executive function skills, by definition, are kind of activated and exercised and strengthened only when we're using them and when things are easy and familiar, then we're on autopilot and we're not exercising those executive function skills. So one piece of advice is to stretch yourself. So put yourself in some new situations, try doing things a little bit differently. Brush your teeth with your non-dominant hand Right, you know things like that. So keeping the challenge level up. And then also this choice piece is really important. I think and our data back that up in kids that it's really the offering kids choices that is most strongly related to their executive function skills, and so you know if you're an employer or a parent, you know, offering, just offering choice, so that then employees or kids take ownership over their decision and it helps them assess kind of the fit for, you know, for the task, between their abilities and the task at hand, and then also keeping it joyful, so you know, as much as you possibly can, positive emotion, positive affect, this sort of dopamine rush that occurs when things are joyful is related to improved executive function skills and it allows you to kind of like, see those options that are in front of you.

Speaker 1: 49:15

It's almost never the case that you really only have one response at your disposal, and so being able to be expansive in your thinking and not be either or in your thinking to start to think about, you know, wait, I have more than one option here about how to handle this situation or how to solve this problem, is really liberating.

Speaker 1: 49:42

And then the last thing is to practice these skills, practice these skills in multiple contexts. So you know that's how we get. Transfer of skills from one domain to another is to practice them in multiple contexts, and that's kind of in general, you know some of the principles and best practices that can apply across. And then I have one more suggestion, which is an acronym called STAR. So you know, if you just kind of find yourself wanting to respond one way or react one way to a situation or to solve something, like you're like that infant who is, or toddler who is stuck on kind of with that one thing in mind or that one solution and you can't like get unstuck and think about things, a different way is to use this STAR method, and I'm kind of looking for feedback on this too, so I don't know how it's going to resonate with people, but I was thinking about this and I think you know.

Speaker 1: 50:46

So S is like stop, so you know, first introducing a pause in your stream of action, right. And then the T is think, so like you think twice about things before you know, just acting on impulse or on habit, and then act. So. So you, you know, thought about what your options are, you choose an option and you act, you know you execute it. And then the R is for reflect. So you know, okay, you know, I paused, I thought, considered my options, I chose a course of action, and now you reflect and you say, okay, how did that go? What would I do differently next time? Things like that. So reflection is really the key ingredient in how we can transform ourselves from being, you know, kind of self-serving, impulsive and unregulated beings to more regulated, other serving and kind of long-term thinking.

Speaker 2: 52:05

I completely agree. I think that is one of the things we talk about the most here at Kyrstyraon as parents, and to give this kind of skill to your children, because parents will say things like I went from zero to 100 or I experienced a rage in like a split second and I didn't see it coming. It was so fast and I yell and then I fall in this sort of cycle of feeling guilty. You know that I did that again with my child and I just it's that. You know that lack of control and awareness of what's happening. But you know, I just recently put out this 100 page workbook for parents but like it's a bunch of reflection questions for different situations, because I just want parents to be able to come back to certain events and to think back at how you were, what were you thinking that moment? You know what happened before. Because sometimes we don't piece things together and I've talked about this often here on the podcast where, after having my third child, I was not myself around 4pm and it took a lot of time and reflection to kind of realize that the amount of noise of being home with three very small kids, three kids under the age of four, by four ish, you know a clock. That's when mine I was done. There was too much sound, there was too much movement and I needed to step away a bit. So I brought in a lot of these sort of calming activities around that time let's play with Play-Doh, let's turn the TV off, let's, you know, let's change the environment. So that's when I learned the power of that reflection.

Speaker 2: 53:29

That reflection piece is so important. You I'm going to put the link to your TEDx talk and to your studies, but I really encourage parents to go watch your TEDx talk, because you had this image of a tree and at the bottom of this tree. So you talked about social emotional skills. I believe in academic performance, right, and you know you think of that being the tree and then comes the trunk and then the roots.

Speaker 2: 53:55

At the bottom of the roots is the reflection piece, and I'm not doing a good job at summarizing it, but basically, I think there's so much talk around academic performance and making sure that our kids do well. I personally, because of my own research with emotions, feel that we should be talking a lot more about, you know, emotional regulation skills and social emotional skills, because that makes a big difference in their future as well. But you bring everything together with that executive function piece. And talking about reflection, can you just maybe give a quick summary so that we could end the conversation around here? But you know why is the reflection piece so important? Not just for us as parents, but to model this and teach this to our kids.

Speaker 1: 54:42

Well, thank you, you did an excellent job of summarizing it. But yeah, so the idea is that executive function skills are strongly related to academic skills as well as social and emotional skills. So we talked about the, you know, the connection to social and emotional skills, but really, you know, there's quite a bit of evidence that it predicts academic achievement. You know, because of that cognitive piece it's so important. And so I, we know that success, and you know there's lots of different ways of thinking about success and defining success, but it's going to depend on both of these sort of cognitive and traditionally academic skills, as well as social and emotional skills and well being. And so I view executive function skills as the root of, you know, in this tree of success, which has the two branches of academic and social, emotional, and and, like a tree and how it grows, it depends a lot on the environment. So you know, if there are pests in the roots that are, you know, contributing to sort of toxic soil, then you know the executive function, the tree is not going to be healthy and executive function can't kind of do its job.

Speaker 1: 56:15

And you know there are other kind of environmental influences that I talk about as well, but I also mentioned that the kind of taproot of this tree is reflection, and and and. So at some level, executive function skills being able to hold things in mind, to set goals and pursue them through challenges requires this ability to pause and to to consider one's actions and before acting, and then also to then reconsider them after acting so that we can better adapt to challenges and changes in the environment. And reflection is hard to grasp and it's hard for me to kind of to get my arms around because it's not as easy to measure as executive function skills are, but I do. I do view exact reflection as a bit of like sort of the ghost in the machine, and but again, you know, language, warmth from caregivers, opportunities play all of these things are really important for the development of this, of this tree of success.

Speaker 2: 57:47

I wanted to make sure you know. Maybe a parent also has a question about, like how do you measure this? Like what happens in the lab? How are executive functions measured?

Speaker 1: 57:59

Yes, so we measure executive function skills all day long, and so we really have benefited from the century or more of research in cognitive science and in looking at neurocognitive development. So you know, we have known for some time that prefrontal cortex is really important for these skills and we have known for some time that when if you have an adult who has a stroke, for example, and there's a lesion then in the prefrontal cortex, that there are ways in which they might begin to show some deficits that are not unlike how a typical three year old is in some ways and you know, getting stuck on problems, for example. And so we've really benefited from all of that research Alexander Luria, for example and and have part of my job as a developmental psychologist has been to take those measures and make them work for young kids, make them kind of reverse, engineer them, so that we can start to look at how those skills develop in the first place, not just what happens when there's an accident or a lesion or, you know, some kind of injury. So we have developed a measure called the Minnesota Executive Function Scale and it's validated down to two years of age, you know, and then all the way up through the lifespan and and it's normed on over 50,000 kids in the United States. We need to develop Canadian norms, but, and you know, we have over 175,000 assessments Now and this is, you know, provided by Reflection Sciences, the company that I mentioned to you, and so we're using this, this tool, now to get a better and more more accurate understanding of what to expect when we talked at the beginning about how important expectations are, and so educators are using the tool, in addition to researchers now, to kind of be able to measure, for example, the improvements with social emotional skills program.

Speaker 1: 1:00:36

You know, how do you, how do you measure those improvements and kind of those foundational skills of executive function? So those, those tools are available now.

Speaker 2: 1:00:46

I'm going to make sure that I add all these links. So if there's a company that's interested in so, do you train the companies? Let's say, if there's a leader or they want to work with their team, is this something that they can contact you for within your company?

Speaker 1: 1:01:03

Yeah, absolutely so. So on the adult workforce side of things, again, we've been looking at how executive function skills predict which trainees will complete a hiring or training program and which ones are still on the job six months later, and using data analytics to look at employee fit and so forth. So, and that's reflective performance and, yeah, we'd love to talk with anyone who's interested.

Speaker 2: 1:01:35

Perfect. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me today. I enjoyed this conversation and I told you at the beginning I'd have a lot of difficulty. Keeping it short at your work is so interesting. I really appreciate your time. Thank you so much for having me.