By Joshua Rosenthal, PsyD
Here's a scene a lot of parents will recognize. A missing homework assignment turns into a full-blown fight at the kitchen table. Your kid's backpack slowly turns into a landfill of crumpled worksheets, permission slips they swear they already turned in, and homework you didn't even know was assigned. Getting out the door in the morning takes twenty extra minutes and at least one meltdown, usually over a missing shoe or a shirt that suddenly feels wrong.
It's easy to read all of this as a motivation problem, something a better reward system or a firmer consequence should be able to fix. We often see families run into something else entirely.
Signs of Executive Functioning Issues in Kids
All of that, the lost papers, the meltdown over a missing shoe, the fight over homework, comes down to something called executive function.
Executive function isn't about intelligence or effort. It's a set of five separate mental skills that let a child plan, start, and follow through on a task: organization, working memory, initiation, flexible thinking, and time management. The backpack full of crumpled worksheets points to weak organization. The meltdown over a missing shoe at seven in the morning points to trouble with initiation, actually getting a task started once the clock is working against you. Different skills, different problems, even though from the outside they can look like the same thing: a kid who "just won't get it together."
A child can be strong in one of these skills and still struggle with another. That's why a kid who can rattle off every dinosaur name from memory without even trying can still lose the same permission slip three times in one week. Remembering facts draws on working memory. Keeping track of a piece of paper draws on organization. Working memory and organization aren't the same skill, and being strong in one doesn't mean being strong in the other. Building strong executive functioning skills for kids means working on each of these separately, not treating the whole thing as one general habit of "being responsible."
That's also why telling a child to "just be more organized" usually won't work. It's a little like telling someone with a sprained ankle to walk it off. The underlying skill isn't there yet, so wanting it to be different doesn't build that skill. What actually builds it is a specific set of supports, and which ones matter most depends on what's actually driving the struggle.
How to Improve Executive Functioning Skills: Five Tools That Help
Across the families we work with at MPG, these five executive function activities for kids consistently make a real difference, no matter what's underneath the struggle. Think of these less as tricks and more as external support for skills that haven't fully developed yet, the same way glasses support eyes that haven't developed sharp vision on their own. A child isn't failing by needing them, any more than someone is failing by needing glasses to read a menu.
- A visual schedule, whether it's a printed sheet or something written on a whiteboard by the door, gives your child something to check instead of trying to hold the whole morning in their head. A kid who can't reliably remember the order of get dressed, eat breakfast, pack the bag, and find shoes can usually follow it just fine once it's written down somewhere they'll actually see it.
- A timer turns time into something your child can see instead of something abstract. Fifteen minutes doesn't mean much on its own, but watching a countdown tick down gives it a shape kids can actually track.
- Body doubling means just being beside your child, even though you might each be doing something different, and it makes it easier for them to stick to a task and actually finish it. It sounds almost too simple to make a difference, and yet it almost always works, probably because having someone else in the room lowers the effort it takes to begin.
- Breaking a task down into smaller pieces turns something that feels impossible into something that feels doable. "Clean your room" can feel like an undifferentiated wall of mess, but "put the clothes in the hamper" is one small, specific step your child can actually picture themselves doing.
- Writing things down, on paper or on a phone, takes information out of your child's head and puts it somewhere reliable. That matters more than it sounds like it should, because a working memory that's already stretched thin doesn't have much room left over to hold onto anything else.
These five tools form the foundation almost every child benefits from. Where it gets more specific is how you apply them, because a child with ADHD, a child managing anxiety, and an autistic child each need a slightly different emphasis to get the most out of the same basic toolkit.
Executive Functioning Strategies for ADHD
For a child with ADHD, the issue usually isn't that they don't understand what to do. It's that continuing to do it gets a lot harder once the task stops being interesting, which for a lot of schoolwork happens almost immediately. Two adjustments tend to make a real difference here. Build in movement breaks before your child asks for one, rather than waiting until they've already checked out completely. And make the payoff for finishing something immediate rather than distant, because a reward that's three days away doesn't register the same way one that shows up in the next ten minutes does. Some parents worry this amounts to spoiling a child or letting them off the hook, but the timing has more to do with brain chemistry than character. An ADHD brain simply doesn't process delayed reward the same way, and no amount of explaining why they should wait patiently is going to out-argue that.
What Helps When Anxiety Is Driving the Struggle
You may find that some kids avoid starting a task altogether, which can look a lot like disorganization or not having their act together, when what's actually happening is closer to fear. Starting the homework means risking getting an answer wrong, and getting it wrong can feel unbearable in a way that's hard for an adult to fully appreciate from the outside. Piling on more structure doesn't fix this, because the problem was never really about structure. What helps more is easing into things gradually and on purpose. Encourage your child to start with whichever task feels smallest or lowest-stakes, even if it isn't the one that's actually due first, and that's okay. Let them finish something imperfectly and see for themselves that nothing bad happens as a result. Over time, that's what starts to loosen the grip the fear has on getting started in the first place.
Executive Function and Autism
For autistic kids, predictability does most of the heavy lifting when it comes to executive function support, more than any add-on strategy layered on top of it. Visual schedules matter even more here, not less, because they replace uncertainty with something concrete your child can look at and rely on. Sensory input plays a bigger role too. A child who's spending a huge amount of energy tolerating a scratchy uniform tag or a loud, chaotic classroom simply has less left over for planning and starting the next task on their list. Managing that sensory environment ahead of time, whether that's noise-canceling headphones, softer clothing, or a consistent seat they can count on, isn't a separate issue from the executive function work. It's the ground that work gets built on.
What If More Than One of These Fits Your Child?
A lot of kids don't sort neatly into just one category, and honestly, most don't. A child can have both ADHD and anxiety, or autism alongside an anxiety overlay, and when that's the case, the strategies above can start to work against each other if you're not sure which one is driving a particular afternoon's meltdown.
This is usually where a formal evaluation earns its cost. A neuropsychological evaluation maps out exactly where your child's executive function skills are strong and where they're not, instead of leaving you to reverse-engineer the answer from a string of bad mornings. For families where autism hasn't been formally ruled in or out, an autism evaluation answers that question directly, rather than leaving it as a guess that ends up shaping every other decision you make.
For kids who already have a diagnosis and are still struggling with the everyday mechanics of school, ABA therapy builds these skills in a structured way, rather than through trial and error at the kitchen table night after night.
Give a New Strategy Two Weeks Before You Decide It Isn't Working
Pick two tools from the list above, rather than all five at once, and use them consistently, every day, for two weeks. Most families give a new approach about three days before deciding it isn't working, and three days usually isn't enough time for a child's brain to actually build a new habit. Switching strategies every few days tends to do more harm than sticking with one imperfect approach long enough to see whether it helps.
If two full weeks of consistent effort still hasn't moved the needle, it usually doesn't mean the strategy was the wrong one. It more often means the actual driver behind the struggle hasn't been identified yet, and that's when testing and evaluation may help.
If you want help figuring out what's really behind your child's struggle at school, we're happy to talk it through. Request an appointment with our team, and we'll help you find where to start.
Joshua Rosenthal, PsyD, is a licensed psychologist affiliated with Manhattan Psychology Group (MPG). This article is for educational purposes only and does not constitute personal medical advice. If you or someone you care about is in crisis, call or text 988.
