The cornerstone of any intervention plan is building habits and routines. This just makes me smile every time I say it. Once something becomes a habit or a routine it no longer lives in the parts of the brain responsible for executive functioning.
The first time I read that it was like an “aha moment”, right? Okay, so habits and routines, the more we can build those, the better we’re going to be at moving our kids along in their development. And then number three we have to make sure that we’re focusing on executive thinking, not just executive skills. So we’re not just teaching a kid when you have an assignment you need to pull out your notebook and start with this, right?
What we want to do is to teach them to reflect on tasks, so that they can start to expect to create a plan for what they’re going to do. So we can do that starting when they’re very young, when we start kids on a homework routine we teach them whatever works in your house. You get home, you have a snack, you go outside, you play for half an hour, four o’clock is homework time.
And at four o’clock you come sit down at the kitchen table and at that point we’re going to review all of your assignments, the ones that are due tomorrow, how long will it take to get them done, what are you go to start with, what do you need to do, and then if you have any assignments, things that are due later in the week or next week, we plan those out too.
And by doing that you start teaching a routine for reflection and planning, not just fill in the gaps. So obviously as tasks and as life gets more complex we have to help kids create these at a much higher level, but those principles will come back around in everything that we do.
