Beyond Processes: Executive Function Support for 2e Learners That Actually Sticks

I have started more planners in my life than I can count. Paper planners, app-based ones, even a chaotic color-coded sticky-note phase I would rather forget. Not to mention the 24x18 whiteboard calendar that still read “September” as Thanksgiving approached, a loving tribute to my gift for starting systems and my brain’s total indifference to maintaining them. I am twice-exceptional, and for a long time I assumed the unused planners meant something was wrong with me. It took an embarrassingly long time to notice that my systems did not collapse at random. They collapsed the moment no one was holding me accountable. The semesters I stayed organized were the semesters I had a standing meeting with an advisor and a study partner who expected me to show up. Executive function support for 2e learners turns out to depend less on the systems you choose and more on the people surrounding you.

If you are parenting a 2e kid, you have probably lived a version of this. The planner that worked for a week. The color-coded folders that looked beautiful and stayed empty, while the papers they were meant to hold ended up crumpled at the bottom of a backpack. The folders themselves are rarely the problem, and your child certainly isn’t either, though ‘lazy’ and ‘unmotivated’ often get written between the lines anyway.

REEL’s blog is full of excellent, specific tools for exactly this. One blog post walks through ten of them, from body doubling to erasable clipboards, and the back-to-school executive function guides cover planners, calendars, and timers in depth. I am not going to re-list those. I want to talk about the thing underneath them, the reason a good tool sticks for one kid and never quite catches on for another. I want to move beyond processes and tools.

Executive function develops from the outside in. Young children, especially, cannot manage their own attention or impulses, so the people around them do it out loud and on purpose, for years, until the skill is slowly internalized. Self-regulation is largely co-regulation that has been practiced enough times to go it alone. For 2e kids, whose wiring makes development uneven by definition, that internalizing runs on its own timeline, often well behind the developmental milestone calendar and sometimes well into adulthood. I’ve been there. None of that is a verdict on anyone’s parenting. It is simply how the skills get built, and 2e brains, as we all well know, build it on their own schedule. So, when a planner fails, it is usually because the planner requires a kid to develop, alone, a skill they are still in the middle of borrowing from the people around them.

And that borrowing was never meant to come from one person. A kid assembles executive functions out of a whole web of threads. Some of those threads are people. A teacher who offers lunch check-ins, a friend or group that studies alongside them, a sibling, a coach, a boss, the parent at the kitchen table. Other threads are the kid’s own. The metacognition of noticing which supports actually help, and the self-advocacy of asking for them by name. Parents are one thread among many, and, truthfully, often not the one that works best. What holds is the entire web, not any single strand in it, and over time the strongest strands are the ones the kid weaves themselves.

What a Relationship Does That a Planner Can’t

“Relationship” is a vague word, but here is some of what it actually breaks into.

A regulated presence. Sometimes the hardest part of a task is starting it, and a calm person in a familiar room makes starting possible. This is body doubling, a form of “co-regulation” rather than mere supervision. You are not checking the work or hovering over it. You model what it looks like to work steadily, lending them some calming ballast. A parent answering emails at the same table, a study hall full of other working kids, a friend on a silent video call, an older sibling reading nearby, any of them can do the job. The presence itself is key.

Accountability that is real. Presence and accountability are different things, and 2e kids can usually tell them apart instantly. Accountability is a specific commitment that a specific person will actually follow up on. “I’ll do it later” is not accountability. “I’ll text you a photo of the finished page by 7” is. Concrete, short-term goals. Whether a teacher with a standing Friday check-in, a tutor, a classmate in the same course, or a coworking partner, accountability is critical. And it often works better when it is not a parent at all. It works because someone cared enough to follow up, which feels nothing like being nagged, even if the message is the same. 

A counterweight to shame. A 2e kid can score three grade levels ahead on every aptitude test and get lost, in the best way, for hours in a novel, a coding project, or a half-built or drawn world of their own. The same kid will watch a C appear in a class where they understand the content well, usually because of things like missing packets rather than misunderstanding concepts. Without support, many kids conclude that if they are this capable, the failures must be their fault. A system of organization alone cannot talk a kid out of that story, and a poorly implemented system tends to confirm that shame rather than mitigate it. A person who sees the missed deadlines up close and stays curious instead of disappointed gives the kid a new perspective. The unevenness becomes a fact about their wiring rather than a reflection of their character, and school can go back to being a place where they are good at some things and still working on others.

Collaborative problem-solving. This is the one we tend to skip, and it may be the most powerful. Rather than handing out prepackaged systems, building them together and treating the missteps as data instead of failures helps them build ownership. Relational support means showing up to help kids enact their vision rather than trying to manage and fix their “flaws.” When a plan fails, you get curious together about why, and they can practice the skills that actually last, which is designing and recognizing supports that work for them.

You Can Accomplish Most of This Without Hiring Anyone

I will let you in on something of an open industry secret as someone who is an executive functioning coach for a living: A good executive function coach is not mostly providing some groundbreaking processes. The strategies are largely familiar, many of which are discussed at length through REEL’s various resources. With a few exceptions that come from our educational training and experience, what a coach really provides is relational and recurring: a standing time, a person who expects you, someone who can translate school into a familiar language and provide accountability outside the parent-child dynamic, someone who gets to be curious instead of worried. A warm demander. An adolescent whisperer if you will. That is the active ingredient. The trick is that you do not have to recreate it by yourself. Most of it can be spread across the people already in your kid’s life. What a coach offers is convenience, really, several of these support threads bundled into a single standing relationship with tried-and-true processes at the ready and a history of understanding and building trust with adolescents.

A few ways families do it:

• Spread the load on purpose. Loop in a teacher for a standing lunch or after school check-in, a tutor, a relative your teen actually likes, an older sibling or student down the street. Accountability often lands better when it is not coming from a parent, and a kid who learns to assemble their own support people is practicing the most transferable skill there is. Normalize co-regulation.

• Set up a standing check-in, and notice it need not be with you. Five minutes, same time, predictable and low-drama. Teresa’s account of a teacher’s weekly open-period check-in is a perfect example of how much one reliable touchpoint can do, and it came from a teacher, not a parent.

• Be the body double, when you can. When you cannot, a peer coworking call or a sibling at the same table covers it just as well. 

• Lead with “I wonder” instead of “you need to.” This goes for any adult in the picture, parent or teacher. Anything that opens with “you need to” is likely to get tuned out. The gentler and more collaborative the phrasing is, the more likely kids are to think out loud alongside you than default to defensiveness. 

  
  

The Point Is for the Scaffolding to Fade

This can sound like a recipe for dependence, so it is worth saying plainly that it is the opposite. Every borrowed piece of regulation, from you, from a teacher, from a friend, from a coach, is on its way to becoming the kid’s own. The standing check-in someone else used to run turns into a habit they keep without prompting. Noticing what actually helps, and asking for it by name, the metacognition and self-advocacy, stop being things the adults scaffold and become things the kid does. A teenager who can email a teacher and say, “here is what actually helps me learn,” is the whole game. No one is on the hook forever, and no one is on the hook alone. We are all just lending a kid some executive function until the loan is paid back in skills. And if they still lean on a few support people throughout their educational journey and even well into adulthood, that is not a failure either. We all do. Body doubling has never let me down. I wrote a good chunk of my dissertation at the kitchen table, across from my wife, while she did the real work.

Building Threads in Your Web

If you want the specific tools, REEL has already curated many of them. Start with When Organizing Feels Hard: 10 Tools That Help and the back-to-school executive function guides. For the wider picture of supporting your child day to day, see Supporting Your 2e Child at Home and School. And if you would rather not do any of this alone, well, that is entirely the point. Join a REEL parent group or workshop or the wonderful Google Group and add a few more threads to your web of support!

About the Author

Maxwell J. Greenberg is an academic and executive functioning coach specializing in twice-exceptional learners and a historian of American education. For more on his coaching, visit www.maxwelljgreenberg.com or reach out directly at maxwelljgreenberg@gmail.com.