Let’s talk a little more about what it means to have a short term intervention. Short term interventions are things that lighten the load on the executive system. We can do that by changing the task. So I can say I need you to get ready for school or I can say I need you to get your coat, your hat, your backpack. Got that? Three things, they’re written down on the checklist in your room, meet me at the garage.
Now I’ve taken some of that executive load off because I’ve already given the information about what it means to get ready for school, okay? We can help children by lending our executive competence. When they come home and they have a task to do and the kid has no clue how to start, we think about well, what would it take to get this done and we sort of plug that destination into our own navigator and we think about what would the steps be along the way and then we can assign those steps to the child.
The other things we can do for short-term success is we can change momentarily the functioning of the brain by offering rewards. So by increasing the motivation and releasing neurotransmitters associated with the motivation system, children will function better.
We do that short term, because the long-term rewards don’t seem to operate the same way in these kids with weak executive functioning for the most part.
The other thing that we can do is we can prompt at the point of performance. So until something becomes a habit or a routine we may be able to tell the child two days later you’ve lost this privilege because you didn’t get this done. But that’s not going to help them build a habit or a routine. The way habits are formed is by daily repetition. And so we have to help kids to perform the task and that means somebody has to be there on the spot to say this is the time to tap kids on the shoulder gently and say homework, turn in your homework now.
But until we’ve built the habits and routines we can’t expect kids to initiate them on their own. So short term accommodations fairly straightforward actually. And the biggest problem is that we have to repeat them far longer than people want to do them.
The question becomes, what’s short term? And short term – and it’s not a flippant answer – but short term is different for different people. And it’s until the child initiates it on their own. That’s how long you have to prompt them.
And somehow we tend to punish kids for problems with executive functioning. It looks so easy and often the kids know what they should do, but they don’t do it at the point of performance. So we need to be patient. We would never, we hope yell at kids who were delayed in learning to decode text. We keep giving it to them and we figure out where things are going wrong and we teach and we teach and we practice and we practice. And really it’s no different for executive functioning.
