5 Benefits to Learning Executive Functioning Skills for ADHD

Every parent wants their child to do well in school—but ADHD makes it a little bit harder. That’s where executive functioning skills come in.

What are executive functioning skills? They include things like transitioning between tasks, planning, prioritizing, paying attention to detail, managing time well, and so forth.

It also involves emotional regulation. This is difficult for all children since their brains are still developing. But for modern children, in a world buzzing and producing adults with dysregulated nervous systems, this is even more difficult.

However, the primary symptoms of ADHD involve executive dysfunction and emotional dysregulation. That’s why it’s so important for your child to learn executive functioning skills for ADHD to thrive in today’s world.

We’ve assembled a guide to 5 benefits of helping your child develop these skills. Let’s get started!

What Is ADHD?

ADHD, which stands for attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (often abbreviated as ADD or ADHD, depending on the child’s specific symptoms) is quite common. It is sometimes referred to as executive dysfunction disorder, even though it’s so much more than that.

Many adults with ADHD credit it as their superpower. It helps them think outside of the box, persist creatively, and learn an incredible amount about niche topics.

But in the early years, your child may feel that their ADHD presents more challenges than anything else. After all, many traditional learning environments don’t tailor their curricula to fit children with developmental disorders.

This may mean your child is swimming upstream in academic circles. That’s why it’s so important for them to learn executive functioning skills to help them have the tools necessary to achieve.

Some of the warning signs of executive dysfunction include difficulty with time management, transitioning between tasks, focusing on one task, challenges with focus or multi-tasking, lack of planning, difficulty with memorization or storytelling, and so much more.

As you can see, all of these things are primary components of an academic environment. Executive function is one of the primary soft skills that are necessary for success in an academic or professional environment.

1. Tuning Into the Self

There are three categories here: self-regulation, self-awareness, and self-motivation. Mastering all of these categories is a huge part of developing executive functioning skills for ADHD.

When in school, children are accumulating knowledge that allows them to be intelligent, functional members of society. But they’re also learning more important lessons—how to be an adult.

That includes the ability to regulate your own emotions. Many adults haven’t learned this skill, which is why they turn to substances, illicit behavior, or dangerous habits to self-soothe.

These skills aren’t developed yet in most children. But this is especially true for children with ADHD. That’s why it’s so important for academic tutoring to include techniques for emotional self-regulation.

This includes teaching children how to tap into their feelings. How did they react when something happened, and what happened as a result of their reaction? How did that reaction make them feel?

Once children can communicate their feelings, it’s easier for them to figure out what reactions are appropriate. For instance, acting out in response to a bully is understandable. Acting out for attention only disrupts the rest of the class.

Self-Awareness

Self-awareness is also a huge gap for children with ADHD. Children usually aren’t very self-aware, but they develop this as an important social skill as they spend time with their peers.

Often, children with ADHD don’t develop their sense of self-awareness at the same pace as others. This hampers them socially.

Being able to tune into body language, social cues, eye contact, and so much more is important. When children learn how their language is being read by others, they can interact more easily.

Many adults expect that students will pick up this information naturally. However, it’s a crucial part of executive functioning skills training for students.

This will help them perform better academically, especially in group projects with peers, presentations, and more. But it also sets them up for success in the real world. People who lack self-awareness tend to hurt people by accident, struggle socially, and have a harder time bonding because they don’t know how they’re coming across.

Self-Motivation

Self-motivation should be another huge part of any evidence-based executive functioning curriculum. Take a look at any academic coaching resources.

Usually, they focus on the material itself. Adding in some study tricks for neurotypical students is typically the cherry on the proverbial sundae.

But what about students with ADHD? One of the primary symptoms of ADHD is struggling with time management. This includes setting deadlines and sticking to them, accurately estimating how much work can be accomplished in a given sense of time, and feeling any urgency around deadlines.

Many people with ADHD only feel like they can focus when they’re under the gun. Unless they’re faced with intense pressure, their ability to hyperfocus doesn’t kick in. So, they continue to procrastinate until they’re under an inhumane amount of stress.

Often, they pull off these superhuman feats regularly with seconds to spare. But sometimes they don’t, and this negatively impacts their performance.

It’s also not a healthy way to approach projects, and will often negatively impact their workplace reputation if they’re barely making deadlines all the time.

Being able to circumvent this manic-or-nothing response to deadlines means that students have to be taught how to self-motivate. For many neurotypical students, the thought of getting a bad grade is enough motivation.

For many students with ADHD, it’s not. When students learn how to self-motivate, it’s like handing them a box of tools to help ‘hack’ their brains. Once they can circumvent their inability to get started on projects, they’ll feel more empowered.

2. Inhibition

Inhibition is one of the hallmarks of an adult. We all have a Peter Pan friend, one who refuses to show any signs of self-control. A huge part of being an adult is the ability to tell yourself no and stick to it.

Think about it. There’s likely nothing stopping you from throwing a rager every night and getting wasted. Why don’t you?

There are lots of reasons. Alcohol might feel good, but it’s not good for your health. It also is bad for your relationships with neighbors who might not appreciate your taste in music. It’s also bad for your career since you won’t be able to perform top-notch if you were partying all night.

It’s also bad for your family since your children won’t be able to sleep or will have to stay somewhere else. To top it off, a party lifestyle just isn’t sustainable in the long run.

No matter how good a party might sound, you tell yourself no. It’s not for the best. Maybe later you can go to a party, but the weekend when you have a babysitter and a plan is the responsible choice.

That’s the art of inhibition. You inhibit yourself, even when there’s no one looking over your shoulder or trying to do it for you.

Teaching inhibition is a crucial part of academic coaching services. After all, when faced with the decision between going to the movies or studying for a test, what will your student do? A student with low inhibition skills may go to the movies and end up flunking the test the next day.

Whether your child is learning executive functioning skills online or through a classroom, it’s an important part of the academic coaching resources they need to receive.

3. Verbal Working Memory

When you think, how does it sound in your head? For some people, their thought process is more abstract. They may not think in complete sentences but may think about concepts in a more disjointed way.

Other people have a full-running verbal monologue at all times. It’s like a talk show where you’re both the host and the audience, without a chance to ever flip the channel.

Your verbal working memory is responsible for storing information in the short term. This information is leveraged by the brain to make decisions that relate to inhibition and problem-solving.

Verbal working memory is also a crucial part of reading skills for young students. When learning to read, students decode slowly. Being able to hold that verbal memory in their head is crucial when it comes to stringing sentences together.

Even for older students, reading comprehension and memory are crucial to both life and academic success. If ADHD is directly impacting your child’s performance, academic tutoring with a focus on verbal working memory may be the answer.

On any list of executive functioning skills for students, the correlation between academic success and verbal working memory may be the most obvious. If someone has a strong internal monologue, this is often an indicator of intelligence. Developing it can improve memory, focus, and retention — all things that children with ADHD often struggle with.

4. Non-Verbal Working Memory

Did you leave the coffee pot on this morning? Take a moment to picture it in your mind. If you can summon an image of the unplugged coffee pot, that’s your non-verbal working memory.

This ability helps your brain code, store, and recall information about things that can’t be put into words. Mental images from your last mountain hike, recognizing your mom’s face, recalling the lyrics to your favorite karaoke song … that’s all credit to your non-verbal working memory.

Words are only one way we communicate. For instance, what if you could describe your mom’s face as skillfully as a poet? It still wouldn’t be the same as mentally recalling her face and being able to pick her out of any crowd.

Part of academic coaching for executive functioning skills is strengthening the non-verbal working memory. There’s a good reason that ADHD and anxiety often go hand-in-hand, and it’s because the non-verbal working memory is sometimes weak.

Being able to efficiently recall smells, sounds, and tastes is a good way to ground yourself in the world. This is a key tip for emotional regulation, which we discussed earlier.

5. Plan and Prioritize

This is often a key focus of academic tutoring, especially because ADHD motivation is highly interest-based. For instance, a student could spend an entire day researching the mummification process in ancient Egypt.

They’re so obsessed that they haven’t eaten a meal, gone outside, or looked at their phone in the past four hours. For many parents, a student engaged with a topic is a dream come true.

What’s the problem here? For starters, this student has a three-page essay due in an hour. And it’s on ethics in ancient Greece.

There’s no assignment or school project that has anything to do with Egypt. While it’s important to cultivate a child’s curiosity outside of school subjects, prioritization is necessary to succeed.

In other words, a student with strong prioritization skills would write the paper first, and then go down a research rabbit hole regarding mummification. However, that’s not how ADHD works.

Teaching students to visually plan and prioritize can transform their academic careers. It can help students learn how to work with their brain, rather than swimming upstream and fighting against it.

For instance, a visually coded bulletin board can help. For students with ADHD, out of sight is out of mind. With a bulletin board in clear sight with visual organization techniques, a student has a leg up thanks to executive functioning skills training.

Benefits of Executive Functioning Skills for Students

When it comes to executive functioning skills training, academic coaching, and specifically and ADHD coach can make a big difference. That’s why we offer tutoring with a special focus on developing executive function.

When you’re helping students with ADHD, this type of training can make a huge difference. Developing these skills helps when it’s time for students to start high school, or go off to college.

If you want to investigate academic coaching services today, contact us!