I first became interested in executive functioning because I was looking for how to help kids with ADHD. And that included my own son with ADHD, but I was already a clinical psychologist working with kids and it wasn’t just him, I had a larger subject pool then that.
And what I was finding was that most of what we were doing at that point in time was trying to clean up after kids mistakes and trying to fix the problem. I was fortunate enough to have a history of knowing lots of ADHD males. I do not have ADHD, but like typhoid Mary I seem to be a carrier of the disorder, and so I am the daughter and sister and mother of males with ADHD, all of whom had significant problems with executive functioning.
And when I started looking at how successful my brother and my father had been I started thinking how am I going to get my son and all of these other kids there. I don’t have to remake them, they’re going to have ADHD that’s okay. But how am I going to make them successful human beings with ADHD?
And so that was my mission and I was a psychologist so I went to the literature and the more I read, the more I started seeing that what we were focusing on with ADHD was just the tip of the iceberg. We were looking at hyperactivity, we were looking at in attention, but there’s this whole other body of literature and most of it not in the hands of the people who needed it.
And it was so helpful to me, and I started seeing kids make much more significant progress once I started using this information about executive functioning. And so it has become my thing to keep up with that information and to figure out how that applies in daily life and I find the research fascinating because it has direct implications for what we do with our kids and our students.
We are in a tremendously exciting era with more and more imaging studies available and particularly these large data sets from groups that are collaborating around the world. So I think we’re going to see great changes in our understanding and our knowledge base that will continue to inform us. I’m looking forward to learning more as the new information comes out.
