Supporting Executive Functioning at Home and in School: A 2e Perspective

For 2e learners executive functioning skills can be harder to develop with traditional methods. We’ll explore why these learners may resist common approaches and offer tailored solutions that leverage their strengths. Join us for an insightful online talk with experienced board certified educational therapist, Rachel Kapp of Kapp Educational Therapy Group (www.kappedtherapy.com) and co-host of Learn Smarter: the Educational Therapy podcast (www.learnsmarterpodcast.com). This talk is designed to help you navigate the unique challenges of developing executive functioning skills in twice-exceptional (2e) learners. Learn practical strategies for supporting your child at home, including foundational systems for managing tasks and improving organization. Hear how students can actively participate in their own growth by understanding their unique learning profiles and advocating for the support they need. Discover what requests you can make of your school to ensure your child's needs are being met. This talk will provide valuable insights into helping 2e learners thrive.

Expand to read the transcript:

Yael Valek:

Welcome everyone. I'm Yael Valek, one of the co-founders of REEL, and we're so excited to have you here tonight to learn more about supporting executive functioning for 2e learners. If you'd like to hear this on the Spanish channel, you can click interpretation in the buttons at the bottom of the screen, and Michelle will translate for you.

REEL is a local nonprofit based in Silicon Valley, and we want to ensure that all twice-exceptional students in our area thrive in school by raising parent and educator awareness and understanding of practical research-based strategies. For educators, we create resources and workshops, which I'll show you more about. For parents, we host events such as this among many other things.

What is 2e? If you're here, you probably know, but just in case, the way that we think about it is based on the Bridges model, which is that there is a yellow distinguishing strengths, high abilities, or potential, and blue complex challenges such as ADHD, autism, dyslexia, anxiety. These two combine to create what we call a green 2E student who has both high potential and complex challenges at the same time, which makes them a unique profile that needs special supports, and traditional methods to learn about executive function may not work for 2e learners. That's one of the things we're going to discuss tonight.

So REEL for parents: we host this expert speaker series. We also have a parent support group. In fact, it's meeting tomorrow night, which is free. We go online and go into breakout rooms, and everyone can ask each other questions and get support.

We also have a private Google group. Kelly, if you want to put that one in the chat, you can sign up and join over 850 local parents and ask questions and get resources.

We have a lot of online resources at REEL2e.org, including an IEP guide, and articles about every area you can think of, and recordings of previous talks such as this one. We also have a list of schools that you can look through to see if you want to find a different fit for your child, as well as a couple of paid services.

All of those that I mentioned are free, and we do one-on-one consultations and small facilitated group learning if you want to go a little deeper. As I mentioned, we have this free 46-page guide to IEPs for twice-exceptional learners. Although it is targeted for the Bay Area in California, most of it is relevant anywhere. So you can download that on our site.

We also have services for educators. We create custom professional development. One of our most popular things that we do at schools is the learning different simulations where we come and help educators feel what it might be like to walk in the shoes of a 2e learner. We have a lot again of online resources, recorded talks, and an educator newsletter as well. So please reach out if you'd like us to come to your school.

We work with educators based on our model, the DEAR REEL model, which addresses developing connection, embracing flexibility, attending to strengths, and reframing behaviors. And you can download this model for free on our website, including practical tips at every age and stage to address these areas on our website as well.

Our events are about wrapping up for the school year, but check our website soon. We will announce the fall events. But we do have two more support groups over the summer, and you can see the recordings of the previous events from this year as well on our site.

We are also part of the neurodiversity education series. So you can visit this website to see a lot of other talks from well-known speakers on many different topics related to neurodiversity.

If you'd like to join the Google group that I mentioned before or follow REEL on socials, we are on a few of them. And on YouTube, you can find on our channel all of our previous recordings of all events such as this one. And this one will be there too shortly.

And now I would like to introduce our speaker, Rachel.

Rachel Kapp:

Thank you so much for having me. And before we just get started with all the things, I just wanted to thank the REEL team. This truly is an incredible resource to have, and the fact that it's free and accessible is very much in alignment with my mission of expanding awareness and access to the work that we do as educational therapists.

That's one of the reasons we have the podcast. Not everybody has access to the work that we do. So I'm thrilled to be here and collaborating with you guys, and I'm really excited to walk you through all things executive functioning.

So let's dig into it. Let me just pull it up here. Okay. So today I'm going to sort of walk you through a little bit of what we're going to talk about, and I'm going to introduce myself. I'm going to give some sort of guidelines and a basic level of understanding about educational therapy and the perspective from which I come.

We're going to talk about executive functioning skills through ages and stages. It's an extremely common question that we get asked all the time as educational therapists: what should my child be doing? And just to answer that question right now is whatever they are is what they're doing. So that's where we're that's the mindset that we're going to start with.

We're going to talk about general guidelines for improving executive functioning skills, key executive functioning skills challenges that emerge, and we'll talk through some case studies.

I'm really excited to leave time also at the end for questions. I know we gathered a ton of questions prior to the start of this, and we'll dig through that. But like I said, the majority of you are here and wanting to get some answers. You will have a lot of answers tonight. You will also have a lot of things to think about in terms of your own executive functioning too.

So we're going to dig right into that. A little bit about me that was already shared. I own KAPP Educational Therapy Group, a virtual practice of clinicians and educational therapists that specialize in executive functioning skills challenges. I'm a board-certified educational therapist, and I co-host and co-founded Learn Smarter, the educational therapy podcast. If you are interested in digging deeper into almost any of these topics, we have an episode on it. And if we don't have an episode on it, we will create an episode on it. You do not have to listen to the podcast in order. You can go to whatever episode feels meaningful for you at that particular moment.

And also, we have some really amazing authors and thought leaders in the field who have joined us on the podcast. If you are interested in hearing about the impact of educational therapy specifically, I would encourage you to listen to some of our student success stories. We have our learners, our clients come on the podcast themselves. It's kind of like congratulations, you've made it to the point that you can be on the podcast.

And so they all get very excited, and it's actually wonderful to hear these kids and teenagers and young adults and adults—because we work with learners fifth grade through adulthood at my practice—kind of verbalize their own journey and their own story and their own growth. So we love those episodes.

So a little bit about what educational therapy is. We often get confused with tutoring, and we are not tutors. We are primarily interested in how learners are acquiring information and then demonstrating their knowledge. We're not subject specific. We're not content specific. And so our goal is also to work ourselves out of a job.

So the goal of good educational therapy intervention, I like to say, is really twofold. One, it always improves family and home life and quality of life. But the goal is also to be done, and it's to have independence and autonomy in your life, in your learning, and in school.

We like to give learners at my practice a sense of control over their time and their learning rather than feeling like their time and learning is controlling them. And we do this in a very methodical way, which we'll talk a little bit more about tonight.

I always love to share sort of my philosophy, which is that all learners are trying to please their parents, the adults in their lives, their coaches, their teachers. Even if you have an apathetic student—who we can talk about the word lazy—no learner who has first of all, no learner is lazy. No kid comes out of the womb lazy. They all want to please.

And we don't even like the word lazy. It's a signal for us to get curious about what's going on and not punitive. And that's where we want to have that idea that what should they be doing? My learner should be doing this. Their older sibling was doing this at this age, and they're not.

We're not going to we're going to be careful to not should all over ourselves. And I wish that was my own line, but I stole it from some good friends, so I'm just giving them credit, Elaine and Diane. But if you notice yourself "shoulding" all over yourself a lot, that's really a signal to get curious about what's not happening and what needs to happen.

I'd love to give sort of a baseline of understanding of what executive functioning skills are. First of all, you'll hear a lot of different definitions in the field. There is not consensus in the field about what executive functioning skills are. And also I want to point out that one of the thought leaders of executive functioning skills is a woman named Peg Dawson. And when she came on our podcast, she kept—we had referred to it for years as executive functioning and kind of left it at that. Every time she mentioned executive functioning, she added skills on. And so we asked her about it because it was notable to us. And she said, "These are skills that can be learned and acquired, and we should say it every single time. It's not something inherent, but it's never really explicitly taught."

You also cannot really teach executive functioning skills in isolation, meaning signing your learner up for an EF workshop where they're given the full scale and scope of what it is, and like one day they're going to work on task initiation and one day they're going to work on working memory.

For learners who are 2e, they need to be practicing these skills in the real world, in real life. So that's why it's not a quick fix. It's something that will take persistence and consistency and prioritization from the family, but they are achievable and skills that can be acquired.

So I'm going to just go through them. The first is organization. And some of these I'm not going to go into great detail because I can assume that everybody knows what organization means. The second is metacognition, which is really an awareness of your own thinking. The third is planning and prioritization. And this is really, really tricky for learners who are 2e specifically because they go really deep on one or two things. Sustained attention. And we're really talking about sustaining attention on non-preferred activities. Every client who calls the practice and I have a conversation with will tell me the same story, which is they don't have an attentional problem because they can play video games for hours and hours and hours. That does not mean that there's not attentional issues. That is something that is highly engaging, highly rewarding, gives a lot of dopamine release. And so we're looking for sustained attention on things that aren't as fun, frankly.

Working memory. There's three types of memory. So you have long-term memory, which I always relate to. We all know exactly where we were on 9/11. That's something that is stored in our long-term memory or the birth of your children. You remember extreme detail as the mother about what happened on that day that you gave birth. And then you have short-term memory, which are the things that really aren't important for our brain to remember, like what you had for breakfast. It's not critically important usually unless there's like a feeding issue, but in general it's not important for me to remember what I had for breakfast today.

And then you have the working memory, which is the somewhere in between. So these are those middle-range skills that get built upon or that get assessed by a teacher. So math is a really good example of working memory in action.

We all had to scaffold our learning and learn each step of the process for whatever level of math we were. And we were required to remember what happened before in order to be successful about what's going to happen. And then we forgot it. Most of us, unless you're someone like me who kind of never walked away from it because my learners are constantly learning the same material, so I'm constantly being re-exposed to it.

Then we have flexibility, which is the ability to switch between tasks. We have task initiation, which is a really, really nice engaging lovely way of saying procrastination. Again, we want to make our language not punitive, and that's a word that we hear a lot.

So if you hear you're if I know you're here your learner struggles with task initiation most likely of getting started, and again it's getting started on things that are non-preferred.

Goal-directed persistence, and a really easy way of sort of thinking about that is grit.

Time management—we'll talk more about time blindness tonight, which is the idea that we're not all feeling time correctly and in the same way in the same home.

So if any of you have a husband like mine who likes to wait until the last minute to go to the bathroom, even though I said we're going to leave the house at 9:15 in the morning, that's that's a mismatch on our time sense and our time management and our time awareness.

And then response inhibition, which is the ability to regulate your behavior and your responses. Here's what's really, really fun about executive functioning skills. They are located in the frontal lobe of the brain, which does not fully develop for neurotypical learners until the age of 25. There is a lot of life that is lived before 25 in a lot of states—not in California. People are getting married before 25. We're graduating from school and starting our careers before 25.

And here's what's even more fun. For learners who are 2e or who have some sort of learning difference or medical diagnosis, they tend to be two to three years behind their peers. So when you are wondering why your learner isn't doing something yet—and you see how I added on yet because that makes it a hopeful growth mindset statement—you need to deduct two to three years from their age.

Okay, let's go on. I wanted to share a little bit about what the research has said on giftedness and EF skills. I will abbreviate executive functioning skills to EF skills because I just it's a mouthful every single time. So twice-exceptional students will often show significant information processing deficits and highly uneven achievement patterns. This means they will have strengths in some domains, and they will go all in on that because it's fun, it's easy, it's comfortable for them, and they can go really, really deep.

Then you will have children who are gifted with ADHD who can sustain better attention than their average IQ ADHD peers. So we can channel these strengths—I always say we want to channel the good and avoid the evil. So we can channel these strengths in a really positive way.

And then there's the twice-exceptional paradox, which is they can have extremely high intellectual strengths and understanding verbally with pronounced executive functioning skills deficits. And this is very frustrating often for teachers, for parents, but also it's really frustrating to the learner when their grades are not reflective of their knowledge, and we're going to talk more about that tonight too.

So there is an intersection of twice-exceptional learners with executive functioning skills. So they are consistently inconsistent students. We like to talk about students as a verb—the idea of student-ing, which we'll talk more about tonight. Self-regulation and intellectual reasoning will develop at different rates. EF weaknesses can be masked for a very long time by intellect. And by the way, going back to this, girls can mask them generally longer than boys. And the research is not evenly distributed between male executive functioning skills and female executive functioning skills weaknesses.

So that I'm just sort of laying it out there. They can demonstrate an extremely high commitment to their task if it's of interest and it's in their zone of proximal development and comfort. And there is a mismatch between their understanding and their demonstration of knowledge.

So why do these challenges emerge with students who are gifted? Learners who are gifted overly rely on their intelligence and working memory and never learn compensatory academic strategies like note-taking, studying, calendaring, writing, math skills—any opportunity to show their thinking on the page.

These are the kids who sit. They're paying attention to the teacher if it's a class of high interest, but they're not documenting anything because it has worked for them in the past.

Oftentimes, one of the reasons in my practice we start with learners in fifth grade is because we know that the leap going from elementary school to middle school—and I know we have some people in some different countries, and I'm not 100% familiar with expectations of other countries—but when it goes from one teacher to multiple teachers, the executive functioning skills demands on learners tremendously increases.

I actually think from an executive functioning standpoint, the leap from elementary school to middle school is much more traumatic and dramatic than the leap from high school to college. And these are all skills that are implicitly required. They are dependent upon good executive functioning skills, and they're never explicitly taught, or they will be taught in a study skills class. But like I shared previously, just exposure to the idea is often not enough for learners who are 2e.

I think it's really important to talk about the executive functioning impact on students who are gifted on their self-esteem. They are aware of their own intelligence, and this is a huge part of their identity. They're often told they're very, very smart, and they should be told that if it's the truth of them.

When they begin to falter in school because they lack those compensatory strategies and expectations have sort of gone beyond being able to overly rely on their working memory, their self-esteem gets impacted. Their self-concept gets impacted.

They have a struggle connecting the dots between their learning and their grades. Grades are never ever just about the information that they learned. Studenting is never about the information that is learned. There's no perfect way to assess a student on their knowledge without executive functioning skills playing a part in the assessment. Strategy, test-taking skills, academic skills, time management skills—those are all things that are consistently persistently assessed. And knowledge is just one component of the puzzle.

So some baseline tips for EF skills. If they can do something independently, they need to do it independently. This means if for me, I have a 3-and-a-half-year-old, almost four-year-old. He's completely capable of carrying his backpack in from the car every day from school. Is he doing it yet? Not yet, but we'll get there.

You have to pick your battles as a parent. We have to stop "shoulding" all over ourselves as the adults in the room. We have to only tackle one thing at a time. I think this is one of the trickiest pieces of advice and recommendations I as a board-certified educational therapist can make to parents of 2e kids because there is such a high level of aptitude, and we have to make it match the achievement. But we really can only do one at a time. One step at a time. We always talk about we're at the bottom of the staircase. There's a lot of steps to get to the top of the staircase. And often times parents are talking to me about the top of the staircase things.

We want to use the language of growth mindset. And then I'm going to be transparent. I went over this talk today with my co-host for my podcast, Stephanie P. She's another board-certified ed therapist. She thought I should take this one off, and I said, "I'm keeping it because it is essential for learners who struggle with executive functioning skills and learners who are 2e to talk to strangers."

So we want to encourage kids to call and place an order at a restaurant. We want them to be the one to place an order for their meal. We want them to be the one to facilitate the making of the next dentist appointment. You can be there with them. You can be there with your calendar with them, but we want to start practicing those skills for spontaneous conversations.

So let's talk about EF skills through ages and stages. I give you guys this because I know you're going to ask, but if your learner is not doing things yet, they will get there. But remember, you're on that staircase. And so they might not be doing all the things that we're talking about, but these are some of the beginning steps that you can foster in early elementary school. So we want to see that they're able to follow at least three multi-step directions. We want to work on building their memory. By the way, do it all through gameplay. Totally encourage gameplay.

Executive functioning skills in elementary school are highly teacher-driven. Let me give an example. In first grade, you'll get a packet of homework on Monday. It's in one folder, and it's due on Friday. It's stapled together. It's done for them.And they are told exactly where to—they are invited every Friday, put your homework folder in this basket. Every Friday that happens. So it's a lot of that EF that's happening throughout the day is teacher-driven, and it should be because it's not developmentally appropriate yet for those learners to be doing those skills independently.

One of the things that can be really, really meaningful is talking aloud when you're planning and demonstrate your own thinking about your planning. Routines are incredibly important for setting up expectations. And then we're going to talk a lot about EF systems tonight. And I want to invite everybody to really take a look, even if your learner is older than this, at your own EF systems and what's sort of working for you and what's not.

And then you can begin conversations around time management, planning, timeliness. Learners in elementary school are very used to hearing adults sort of talk about that stuff, but you want to use that language with them. In late elementary school, we really encourage family planning meetings, meaning every Sunday night, everybody is sitting down and talking about what the week is going to look like.

These are three questions we encourage parents to start asking their learners:

1. What's your plan?

2. What do you need?

3. Where do you find that?

   
   

Visual planners are great at this age and stage. They still need help breaking down tasks, but you can start practicing breaking down tasks with them. They are increasing their own self-awareness and self-monitoring during this time and their own time awareness. And you can start really setting very explicit goals with your learner.

In middle school, we really want to see simple, maintainable, foundational systems. So that's a system for managing your time, a system for managing yourself physically, and a system for managing yourself digitally. I am going to dig into each one of those and get very specific with everybody on what that means. But I'm giving you that language now so you can kind of start thinking about it moving forward.

And let me just say this: the online portal is not an EF system. So when your learner is like, "I don't need a calendar because the school just does it for me"—first of all, no, they don't, because we know that each teacher is not using it in the same way.

Some teachers don't use it at all. Some teachers don't update their grades. Or the even more delightful ones, it's on a third-party website. Some teachers are putting in the assignment as being due at 11:59 at night because they don't click the right thing on the back end. And so then your kid thinks it's due at 11:59, and we all know that it's not due at 11:59, right?

We want to focus on preservation of self-esteem. So if you have a learner who you know is 2e, who struggles with executive functioning skills, starting educational therapy intervention or executive functioning skills coaching intervention prior to the start of the academic year, prior to the start of middle school, we can really ward off a lot of things at that point.

And ideally, we want parents moving from being the manager of their executive functioning and the manager of their child to the consultant. And this is an idealized goal, right? So like I said, these learners who struggle with EF will be 2 to 3 years behind their peers. So realistically, you're more likely to look at that transition happening in high school.

But if you have EF intervention, that transition can happen sooner. And we also need to teach parents to step back so that their kid can step forward with the understanding that they probably will fail forward, but they will learn, and we will be there to help support them through that learning because we cannot expect perfection from these learners.

Simple, maintainable, foundational systems. You are going to hear me harp on this all night because it's where you want to start. Especially if your learner has anxiety and if they have weak executive functioning skills, I can nearly guarantee there's a level of anxiety there because if I didn't know where to go, if I didn't know how to find what I needed once I got there, I would be anxious too.

You want to prioritize digital citizenship and how to exist in the digital world. Also, if y'all haven't read Jonathan Haidt's Anxious Generation book, I can't recommend it more. The research in there is pretty stunning. Goal setting is going to be important in those family meetings. Preservation of self-esteem becomes critically important. That transition from manager to consultant can happen in high school as well.

And then we also want to have realistic, honest conversations about what happens post-high school for our learners. We're a big fan in my practice of a gap year. Most families don't want to hear about it because it's not culturally something that happens in the United States. But if you have a learner who struggles with executive functioning skills challenges, a structured gap year program—whether it's service-based or learning-based—can first of all make you a more attractive candidate for colleges, but also will help launch your learner into that adult world and adult environment of college and college learning and college life with a much higher rate of success. So it's just something that I ask for creativity and thinking about.

You guys ready for my favorite slide? This is my favorite slide of the whole thing. And it took us a while to do it. So I want you to be impressed. So here's a simple executive functioning equation: Knowledge + Executive Functioning Skills = Grades. And I'm about to show you how many executive functioning skills are assessed in grades. So when you look at the knowledge component, that's one small component of what is required in order to demonstrate your knowledge.

Often times you're asked to demonstrate your knowledge on paper, which anything that's involving written expression, executive functioning skills are required.

So here are the key executive functioning skills challenges of learners who struggle with EF and learners who are 2E. We see that procrastination. We see a difficulty with managing their time. Do you see how linked that is with procrastination and task initiation? And also, if they have a difficulty managing their time, they're often either overestimating how long something will take and then it feels like too much and they can't get started because they're overwhelmed because they think this project, which you and I know will take an hour, but they feel like it'll take 5 hours and that feels overwhelming. Or there is a bravado, and they think this activity that should take an hour will actually only take 10 minutes, and so then they don't plan enough time, and that's pretty typical of the learner who starts the essay at 10:30, 11:00 at night.

There are emotional regulation challenges, but not always. They frequently don't know where their things are, and they do not know how to go find them.They struggle with transition difficulties also because remember they don't feel time the same way typically, and that with that time blindness. So you know that 3 hours have passed, but it doesn't feel like 3 hours to them.

If you've ever scrolled social media on your phone, we all experience time blindness in that activity, and you look up and you're like, "Oh my, it's 11:00 at night. I got to go to bed." But we weren't paying attention to the clock. And do you notice how on most social media you can't see the clock? It's like a casino. And then they tend to be forgetful.

So what do we do? This is my favorite. And when I'm doing a live talk, somebody always knows exactly what this picture is from. But since it's virtual, I'll just share.

Are people sharing in the chat what it's from? No. Okay. So it's Julie Andrews and The Sound of Music at the start of "Do-Re-Mi." What did she say at the beginning of "Do-Re-Mi"

"Let's start at the very beginning." Thank you guys. Thank you for participating. "A very good place to start."So we got to start with those good foundational system skills. Thank you, Kate. She knew the line, you guys. Kate's my person.

Okay. Good EF systems will mitigate teacher, school, parent, and student frustrations. It will improve family and home life, and it will lower student anxiety. So let's talk through it. Like I shared before, there are three big systems of executive functioning that each person, each learner, each adult needs in some capacity:

1. A system for organizing your time (and I'm going to give you rules around it).

2. A system for physical organization (again, I'll give rules).

3. A system for digital organization, including a portal audit.

   
   

Each learner who comes into my practice is doing each of—in those first four to six sessions, they are developing their foundational systems. And I already know every objection you're going to give me as the parent, they're going to give me as a student. We have an episode of the podcast where we talk about the four main reasons learners don't want a calendar. Some like we know the truth of the matter is that learners overcomplicate their systems, and they're not maintaining their systems. So they're always like looking for the new app that's going to be the key that's going to solve all the problems.

That's not what I'm interested in. I'm interested in boring and repetition.

So let's talk through it. Major rules:

• We want to keep things simple.

• Everything needs to be in one place with only one option.

• We want to keep your systems easy, attainable, maintainable, and fluid across all platforms.

  
  

I will be transparent. We are very tech-forward, and there's not a lot of added benefit to having students write things down manually. So that's the perspective from which I'm coming from. And I know it's different than how we were raised. And then we don't want to overcomplicate things. We want fewer steps. Fewer steps lead to a higher chance of success.

So what I would love to do is I want to invite everybody to think about a physical system for organization that they inherently have in their home. So let's use mail as an example.

I want you guys to take out your phones, take out a piece of paper, and write out how many steps you would have to do in order to mail a letter. I'm going to encourage you to think about making time to go to the mailbox. That's a step. But how finding somebody's address, that would be a step. I want you to get as specific as you can. And then I would love for you to share your ideas in the chat because when we do this virtually, people realize how many steps they actually forgot because they see somebody else's answers.

So let's all use each other. I'm going to give you 3 minutes, and I'll monitor the chat for this time.

Musical theater geek, you and me, Kate, we're like this. Loving seeing these answers. Make sure the postage is correct because none of us know how much it is to mail something, right? Lana, you are getting like extra bonus points for thinking like an ed therapist because I would also think about sealing the envelope. Amanda, you got bonus points too. Okay. I'm loving seeing the answers coming in. Remember, I put it in my—you have to remember to remember to send it, right? You need a plan for sending it. 100%.

I'm going to move on because I want to be respectful of time, but feel free to continue sharing in the chat.

The point of this exercise is actually to show you how many different steps are required for what we look at as a very simple task. So physical organization, I'm going to give you some really nitty-gritty details here because I want you walking away with like this is one thing we can do. And remember, I only want you to pick that one thing because we can't do it all simultaneously.

So one binder with everything in it. I do not like individual notebooks because it violates my fundamental rule of everything in one place. Everything should be in that binder.

Your kid's going to object, and you're going to object, and you're going to say it's going to get too heavy. It's going to get broken. It's going to get disgusting. We can get into the weeds on this, but four times a year we prune binders with our learners. And that's one of the steps of maintaining a physical system for organization.

We want simple dividers. We want to collaborate with teachers who think they want separate spaces for each type of assignment. They don't. What teachers want is for kids to be able to recover what they need when they've asked for it. And usually there can be some push-pull with that. And we want to just teach kids to organize chronologically. Put the most recent thing on top or put the most recent thing in the back. Whatever the rule is, that's the rule. And that's fine.Students of all kinds, of all creeds, of all abilities, for the most part, remember before and after. It's a very simple rule.

Okay? So we want a system that's clean, that's accessible. We want backpacks with no more than three pockets. Your kid who struggles with EF is not going to like this.

And we have a tendency as an adult when our learner struggles with organization to like go to Staples or go to Amazon and buy them all the organizational things, and then they don't use all the organizational things, and we're frustrated. We have a pile of stuff, and then the next year you do the exact same thing. So we want simple, easy without a ton of options.

Okay. Organizing time. Again, everything in one place. We want to pick a system and commit to it. That I cannot tell you—this is a population of learners who will get 80% done with a project and then want to switch topics. We cannot allow this. So once—and the reason is it's not exciting to them anymore. It's not stimulating to them anymore, and they think something else could be more interesting.

We have to teach that resilience of just pushing through when they're that far down in it. And you'll see kids do this with presentations. You'll see them do it with writing, with topics. They'll switch books, and they'll have written 90% of an essay and then they'll decide, "I want to write it on this book." We got to sort of encourage commitment.

We want to frontload their calendar and their organizational system, meaning put everything from the whole school year into the calendar in August. All those dates are significant.

And at the end, I want to—I'll have a way to share with you our calendar checklist of everything that needs to go on your learner's calendar. You want to automate this as much as humanly possible. You want to keep their personal calendar and their school calendar on the same calendar, which is why—well, there's many reasons, but this is one of the reasons—an online portal.

And I'm assuming everybody knows what I mean, but examples of online portals that are used often here in California are Blackboard, Schoology—those types of things. Those school portals are not a calendar, but they can be imported into a calendar.

You want to limit the color-coding because again, this is a population that loves style over substance, and so we want to not let them like go down the rabbit hole of picking too many colors for their calendar because that will become a distraction and that's another thing they have to maintain, and my goal is to reduce the amount of clicks they have to do.

You want to keep the to-do list on the calendar, and you want to teach your learner to put exams and assignments on the day they are due, not the day they are assigned.

This is something that learners who are matriculating from elementary school to middle school who struggle with EF need to be explicitly taught because in elementary school oftentimes we tell them, "Write your homework tonight for tonight," not on the day that it's due.

But going back to my earlier example of a dentist appointment, when you leave the dentist, they're booking you for that next appointment. And if you put it on your calendar on the day that you were there, you're never going. You have to put it on the day that it's due there. This will lead to some fear and anxiety and nervousness on their end that they're going to miss it. But one of the things that we're going to teach these kids to do is to plan and scan their calendars.

We like visual timers. There's a great—let me show this is like my favorite. Can you guys see this? This is—and you can see their—they're baking timers. So you can have—it's upside down. You can have them predict—write what the activity is here and predict how long they think it'll take. It can be a really good transitional tool. And there's only four options on this one in particular. And so each one has its own timer.

You want their class schedule on their calendar. You want them to guess and check as much as possible about that. Every learner signs into session, and they're like, "Rachel, my calendar is updated." Great. Go check it. We have trust but verify trust with these learners because they will be sneaky.

They will upload a Google doc and submit it that is blank. They know it's blank, but it'll be marked as submitted, and they know that we're not smart enough—until now you've heard me say this—to go and check the actual assignment. So trust but verify. We want to teach them backward planning. We want to create clear and identical transition strategies. Again, those think-alouds are critical.

So we love Google Calendar over here. We love—we want to create a rule that everything digitally is in one place. So we keep everything in the Google hub. We want to teach them to deal with their email daily. Now this is something that parents themselves can be better about. If you are one of my lovely people who has 35, 50,000, 100,000 emails that are unread, this is an opportunity for honesty. Thank you for your honesty and vulnerability. This is an opportunity to just make an agreement with yourself that you are never going back to read that email that was sent to you 2 years ago. Archive them all.

There's a rule that you can put into whatever email management system you use. Archive them all and start making daily decisions about what you are doing with each email.

This is—I just spoke to a parent today on the phone, and she said, "I gave you my spam email. Let me give you my real email." And then I said, "Why do you have that?" and she said, "Because I don't want things that I don't want to be subscribed to." Which is exactly what our population does. They want to get the 20% off just like we all do. And I'll sign up for the text message just like everybody else, but I unsubscribe almost immediately unless I'm interested in what they have to say. And what she told me was so interesting. She wanted to keep it separate, but both emails funneled into the same inbox. Why are we creating two opportunities of passwords that she then has to remember?

We had a little conversation about that. We teach learners that they need to make decisions about each email every day and only use one email address. No burner emails. It's too many passwords to remember. And this is something that learners in our practice go through. We create a password list with them. We are walking them all through this.

If you are a Gmail user, I highly recommend you sort your email by unread versus read. It automatically creates a to-do list and task list for you.

We want to have periodic decluttering. We want to make sure you're using the system and the portal that the school has provided.We need to have a clear understanding with all learners of those timestamps that I talked about earlier. And we want to have very clear instructions on what submission and turning it in means. Done is not a thing until it is in the hands of the teacher. So if you go to your kid and say, "Did you do this assignment?" "Yes, it's done." It's not done. You've just completed the work. You need to turn it into the teacher. And that's when you can go and check and make sure it's in the correct spot in their binder, which is already set up beautifully with everything in one place.

Portal audit. This is something about being a student. These things are never going away. I get asked every time I speak, is there is one portal better than the other? No. They all suck in kind of all the same ways, frankly. And so we just have to teach our learners to survive within it because it's not going away. Most jobs have some sort of portal that learners need to be in. They need to learn some good, healthy digital habits. The calendar is updated, and the portal is a backup, which means we are not waiting for the teacher to upload the assignment. You have to confirm information in multiple places in a portal.

Grades do need to be checked, not always by parents, especially if it's a point of contention. We need as therapists—we look at it to get a sense of where they are and to work on self-advocacy if something seems wrong and to help them set up a meeting if they need to have a conversation with the teacher.

I do not recommend telling your learner to set up a meeting if you know they're not going to go to that meeting. I also don't recommend you have your learners set up a meeting without having them write down in a way that they can find it what they need to explicitly ask their teachers. Learners who have EF deficits and weaknesses don't know how to sort of formulate those questions on the spot. If you notice like if you have a kid and you ask them what their favorite TV show is and they're on the spot and they can't think—they don't like answering questions about themselves.Let's not put them in a situation. We have to document it with them.Assignments need to be thoroughly checked by the other therapists on the team because they will be sneaky with us. And you really have to do this especially for learners who think they've done it.

And again, assignments are not done until they've clicked submit. Lots of learners who struggle with EF will upload the assignment but not click submit. And now it's late.

And now because an assignment is late, your grade is impacted. And teachers are not responsible for tracking down student work. And learners act like it's the teacher's job to come to them to talk to them about something. And it is not the teacher's responsibility.

A shared Google Doc is also not enough to submit something. If there's a portal requirement for submission, you have to let your teacher know that something is done.

I really should just rename this slide to like the way kids are sneaky with us.

Okay, so we've gone through these three systems. I'm just sort of checking in on things and checking on time.Okay. So these are the three questions that we encourage everybody to ask their learners once their foundational systems are set up because that's the question that parents ask is like what's my role in all of this, right?

So these are the three questions, and we tell learners and we get agreement that these are the three questions parents can ask, and you can ask for proof on:

1. Is your calendar updated? (And you can say, "Show me"—unless the therapists, if you're working with my practice, unless we tell you not to or not to ask the questions because sometimes we have to do that.)

2. Is everything in its physical home? (Even if what they say is yes, trust but verify—have them check because they'll be like, "Oh, I forgot always.")

3. Is everything in your digital hub? (Meaning, is everything in their Google hub, if that's what you've outlined to be their home base?)

   
   

The reason we like and we encourage Google is because this is a population that has 17 million things on their desktop, and it's all saved like "docx" and "untitled," right? They're not saving anything, and it's not easily—it's hard for them to find what they need.

And frankly, when we see that—because in setting up their digital systems, we're looking at their screen, we're seeing all their things—we see that we generally just kind of throw it all in a folder, and if they need it, they can go find it one day, but usually they don't need it.And now we're creating a rule that everything is in one place in their Google hub.

So I want to go through some case studies, and what I want to encourage—I think we only have time for a couple because I want to leave a good amount of time. I know there's so many questions. I want to leave a good amount of time for that. How can you help a student who finds backward planning and calendar as micromanaging and getting anxious about it?

I'll answer that right now because it's going to come up. The reason these learners are often anxious is because they don't know where anything is, and they don't know when they need to be somewhere, and they don't know what they need once they get there.

This is a population that misses out on opportunities. So understanding that they have a little maybe trauma about missed opportunities—they didn't get the field trip form signed, they couldn't go on the field trip. These are all like those milestone moments that really do impact them. So there is anxiety until you see learners—when they set up their foundational systems, they go from this to this, and you see that anxiety dissipate.

I'm not sure if I 100% answered the question, but I would love to hear now based off what we've learned and what we've talked about today. What would some of the goals, what was some of the interventions, what would be one thing that you would do with Aiden to sort of support how his executive functioning weaknesses are manifesting?

A lot of demand avoidance questions. Megan, I love your answer. She shared, "Have him write down what he needs to get done each day." I would love you to get more specific. Where does he write that down? Also, it doesn't have to be him doing the writing if that's a source of avoidance.

Let me be clear. These systems should be set up in conjunction, in partnership with your learner. Please don't—listen, you know your kids, but if they don't have a hand in setting up these foundational systems, they're not going to maintain it, and you're actually not teaching them what you want to teach them because you want them to be able to do it themselves moving forward.

Okay, so let's look at some of my ideas.

• We want to sort of examine what time of day he's doing the homework.

• We want to help him break down a large task.

• We want to work on time blindness.

  
  

If we were in person, we would have done a great and fun and memorable time activity, but we can't do it virtually. But you I'm going to invite you to do this time blindness activity in your home. You put all devices down, honor system it. You can have one person who has a device, and what I do is I invite everybody in the room to stand up and to sit down when they believe a minute has passed. And the reason it's not our system is because you cannot count to 60 seconds. So every time we do this activity, 80% of the room sits down between 40 seconds and 50 seconds. And usually it can go until about a minute 30, a minute 40. And there's always that one person, and God bless them for standing up there very vulnerably and being the last one to sit.

But timeliness is something you can work on. And the way that you work on it is through guess and check through time estimation. How long do you predict it will take? Okay, you think it'll take you 20 minutes. Go do it. And 20 minutes I'm going to check in. We'll see where you're at. Or you might be done before the timer goes off. This is how you create a stronger sense of time.

I'm going to skip Lily because I think I want to go to the high school student. Oh, I showed you the strategies. Oh, you guys, it was out of order. Okay, let's go back. Okay, you guys do Lily. So I would love to hear sort of what comes up for you when you hear this profile.

A—I'm glad I caught your kid, Linda. It's a highly female profile.

Hi, Amber. I love what you just shared. It kind of violates some of my foundational rules, but I think it's a really, really good start. Okay, I'll share what I think.

• We want to identify the challenges with them.

• When you have a kid who's in middle school or high school, talking to them about it, expressing that this is not a reflection of intelligence. This is actually a different skill set that they have yet to learn. It's really, really critical.

• We want structured and visible after-school routine, which means parents cannot be the only ones to know that they have gymnastics on Tuesday. They have to know that. That has to be accounted for.

• They have to have a well-maintained planner or visual—or sorry, time management system. Like I said, I like a calendar or a Google calendar.

• And we want to take advantage of timers.

  
  

Again, we only want to do one thing at a time. So questions also while we're sort of talking through questions—I'm going to put this feedback form up for us. This is something that REEL and I are sharing, and also an invitation if you want to talk to me more personally. This is how you can do it via my website. We can—it'll take you to schedule a time on my calendar.

Rachel, someone requested if we can please do the high schooler as well. Okay. Okay. Here's the high schooler. I will say tends to not be that dramatically different from a middle schooler, which is why I didn't go there, but we'll do it. Okay. There's lots of people want to see the high school. I'm going to just answer the question about a planner suggestion. We don't give learners a choice in my practice. Everybody does a Google calendar. As you can see, this makes us inherently different as a therapist from coaching.

And coaching, which is what they have on the East Coast, is much about like co-creating the experience and making decisions together. At therapy, at least the way that I practice it, is much more we're giving you skills and strategies. We're going to iterate within those skills and strategies. Sometimes it's like throwing spaghetti at a wall and seeing what sticks. But there are certain things that are—I just don't give a lot of flexibility about.

I love that Tisa—forgive me if I said your name incorrectly—shared that they use Google as a family. I didn't get in the weeds on that, but yes, a Google family calendar is really, really helpful, but we want each person inputting their own events and owning their own events. That's how you give sort of control over and as parents, we're very used to being in charge of their schedule. So that's one of the ways to sort of transition out of that because at a certain point parents don't want to be the manager anymore.

Is it okay for me to start answering questions? I'll put up the other slide for strategies. Is it okay for me to answer questions?

Well, we have them listed in the order they were asked. So we'll ask them of you. Okay, finish the slide and then I'll start.

Yeah. So when you—so the baseline—this is a student who the parent reports has a habit of procrastinating. He waits till the last minute. This is the kid who has an academic emergency like consistently, and we all know there's no such thing as an academic emergency. They struggle with deadlines. One of the main things that a school will do as an accommodation for a learner who struggles with executive functioning skills that I don't like is they will have flexible deadlines. All that teaches is that they can wait to start something. So, and it actually piles up their work. So even if that's an accommodation that's offered for a learner in my practice, we don't live in that space. I've actually had students email their teachers and say, "Please don't be flexible on deadlines with me anymore."

So we want to make sure, first of all, foundational systems is implied in every strategy.

• We want to set up smaller incremental deadlines for them along the way.

• We want to encourage self-monitoring techniques.

• Look, a teenage boy is not likely to journal, but as the ed therapist, we can analyze each task with them and sort of explain to them what skill they are strengthening in that particular activity.

• And we want to incorporate mindfulness as much as possible.

  
  

Again, I will say when a learner is an athlete, you can use that to your advantage often times, especially in time management and time blocking because they're also used to being coached. But the one thing that I don't have here is it usually should not be the parent doing this because it does not lead to family and home life peace. And I always say to parents of a high school student, you have 24 months with them in your home. What do you want those 24 months to look like? And it generally means not arguing about school.

Okay, I'll go ahead and put this back up, and I'm ready.

All right, first question. Do 2e learners tend to be mistaken as ADHD due to boredom in class and lacking of EF? I have several young cases that were prescribed with ADHD meds without acknowledging their 2e traits. So frustrating. Any suggestions? How do we as practitioners talk to parents about this conflict of medical suggestions of meds and ADHD?

So I'll this is this is I think at its core there are two component parts here. Yes, kids get misdiagnosed all the time. So yes, girls will get misdiagnosed with ADHD and it's actually autism, and boys will get misdiagnosed as well. Of course, that's why you want to partner with really thoughtful clinicians. But if you're coming in as the ed therapist, as the teacher, criticizing the report and the results of the report that they just spent a lot of money on or that the school spent a lot of time on is not going to give you the outcome that you're hoping for.

That being said, I think what's really being asked is about prescriptions and medication. Look, every learner who truly has ADHD—and there's three different types of ADHD.

There's inattentive, which is like the girl—well, let me take the gender out of it. Tends to be the kid that's not behavioral. They're paying attention, but they're not paying attention to the right thing. There's like a butterfly, and they're like totally into this butterfly and miss everything else. It goes later as not being diagnosed because it's not behavioral. Then you have hyperactive, which is like the really typical what we all think of—bouncing off the walls, kid can't sit in their chair, needs all sorts of things to keep balance and all that.

And then you have the combined type. I stand on medication—first of all, I don't have a stance on medication because I'm not a medical doctor, but this is what I know to be true: medication will often clear the roads, but it does not mean they don't need executive functioning skills intervention because good EF intervention will teach them how to drive on the road. I'm not 100% sure if I completely answered the question, but I at least addressed component parts of it.

Yes, I think you addressed—I think they want to know are 2e learners sometimes mistaken for other things because of boredom and lack of EF? So sounds like yes.

What would you say to a parent with a late high school or 11th grader who's watching all these things for younger kids and thinking, "Oh, I didn't do any of this stuff when they were younger, and now I feel responsible for their current struggles"? This is the parent asking about their own. They feel guilty that they didn't address it.

Okay, let me tell you this. Skills can be acquired at any age and stage. The brain is pliable. Just because it doesn't fully develop until they're 25 or 28 or 30 with these kids who struggle with EF skills doesn't mean they can't learn these skills. You don't know what you don't know as a parent. So let me just alleviate that guilt now that you know you can do something different. And there's—we have a lot of kids who come into the practice in 11th and 12th grade. We have a lot of college students that come into the practice, and I cannot tell you how many adult learners come into the practice because they are—well, there's a couple of different reasons.

One, they're just learning about this themselves. Their parents didn't know either. And I have never had a call with a family where the parent didn't say to me, "I wish we had done this sooner." And I used to work with kids in kindergarten all the way up. And in kindergarten, they would tell me that, too. So nothing is too late. At what age might children be ready to call and make appointments and such? How does the 2-to-3-year EF lag impact that? And then if so, how is it scaffolded? So it's a really good—it's a really good question. Can you repeat the question for me?

At what age might a child be ready to call and make their own appointments? Because I think you mentioned that. Yeah. I wouldn't have—let me just answer that part. I wouldn't have them call and do it until they've done it in person. That's how I would scaffold it. And so have them do it in person, but I would prep them in advance. I would tell them the typical questions that get asked. What do they ask? They ask us what date. Usually they have all that information.

You can also have them sign in when they go to a doctor's office. You can have them be next to you. And by the way, you can call and make an appointment for yourself, and then your kid can call and make an appointment for themselves. Doesn't have to be done on the same call. And if you're not interested in getting a dentist cleaning at that particular moment, that's fine. Call back and cancel the appointment. There's lots of different ways to sort of iterate, but you can give them the information.

You say, "Look, normally they're going to ask for your insurance information if you're a new client or a new patient. This is where it is. I want you to understand this, and these are the questions that get typically asked," and you stand there with them and do it.

But if they can't order their own food at a restaurant, they're not ready to do that yet to call. So start with like the in-person live step before going to calls. These kids do not want to call and place an order anywhere. If it's not available on DoorDash or Uber Eats, they will just find something else that they can eat because they don't want to talk to a real person.I'm trying to keep these kids in the real world and not the virtual world a little bit.

I've heard that 2e kids often will not get on board with the sort of standard 10 EF options that coaches and ed therapists suggest, the ones that work for 90% of kids. That 2e kids won't do these. What are some of the non-standard suggestions and tips you've seen work or are required for 2e kids? Are they really not that different?

I disagree with the premise of the question. I don't think any client is excited to come in and build a calendar and go through their papers and go through their portal. I don't—none of them love it, but they all see the benefit of it. I will tell you it is to our benefit that we are not the biological parent and that we're guiding them through it. I show them my personal calendar. I encourage my team members to do that as well.

This is how adults function. And for learners who struggle with EF, let me just say this—who have twice-exceptionality specifically, they are incredibly entrepreneurial. They're incredibly creative. They are solving problems in a unique way, and they will make enough money to have an assistant. So frankly, we just got to kind of get them through studenting in a way that's meaningful. I want them to have these foundational skills. It doesn't take the kind of effort that they think it does. And so yeah, all kids do it.

Interesting. We have more questions from the in people, but this actually reminded me of a bunch of questions that came in in the pre-submitted ones, which were—I find a lot of you know teenagers, older kids have strong resistance to a task or fixed beliefs.

"I'm not taking notes because it doesn't help me learn." "I'm never going to use that." "My parents are making me." That kind of—

My favorite is, "My parents say that I have to study math for 60 minutes a night." It's sometimes the requests are not reasonable, but go on with the question. No, I think that that's kind of the question is how do you—there's a big struggle with, "I don't want this, this doesn't help me, I don't need to learn this because it doesn't help me."

And there was another one that was similar, but I think it's a lot of like, "How do you get buy-in?"

Okay, so I get this question a lot because parents will call. I always ask, "Does your kid know we're talking, and is your kid going to have openness around this?" I will tell you if you hire somebody to work with your 2e child who is not dynamic, who is not engaging, who is not funny, who is not into the same things that they are, you're going to have a much harder time. Kids will show up and they will participate if they like who they're working with after they've met them.

One of the ways that I get buy-in, and I'll just be completely transparent, we always meet with everybody in the team. We want both parents in that first meeting once the client is a client in the practice, and we have what we call a getting started session. We go through all the things with the family. We go through what confidentiality looks like. We go through what communication is going to be like. Like we're going to get agreement about all these things.

The parents get off the call, and I say to the kid, "Okay, now you tell me what's actually happening." Because they have a different story than their parents. And then we ask for openness. Look, you're only as the parent offering the solutions that you know worked for you. And that is what can be so tricky for your kid. First of all, teenagers don't want to hear from their parents, right? I still kind of don't want to hear from my mom about stuff, right? That's like a mother-daughter thing. But you can get buy-in if they like who they're working with, and they will see the immediate benefit and the immediate impact.

So if they like who they're working with, we don't have kids who are avoidant of sessions even when they've been avoidant of other things because often times we're the last stop in a lot of ways. They've been through a lot of tutors. They've been to Kumon, they've been to this, they've been to that because parents are going through their resources, right? And not every parent knows about ed therapy. So we're the last stop for a reason. But they have to work with someone dynamic. And you have to ask yourself as a parent, would I want to hang out with them for an hour twice a week?

And if the answer is no, then that's not the person for this student. It's really great if there's a shared interest as well. It's—you're reminding me of the first petal of the DEAR REEL model, which is develop connection. If you don't have that connection, it's very hard to ask people to do unpreferred tasks. And it's not only unpreferred, it's vulnerable. We're in somebody's email, right? Like I see the text messages that are popping up. Like I know we know more about what's going on with these kids than their parents sometimes. And so it's a very intimate relationship. You have to like the person that you're working with.

Yes. Okay. My daughter absolutely hates writing and reading emails. It is seriously stressful for her. Do you have any suggestions for overcoming that? Okay. So written—you've now asked two different questions. Written expression is very different than reading. Parents who are lay parents who are not educators think it's like linked up, and it's actually they're completely different skill sets. It's different parts of the brain that are required.

So let's talk about the reading component. I'm great with having something be read aloud to a student. You have to sort of start with like exposure therapy but also like archiving all the old emails that they have such shame about that they haven't addressed.

The shame is a major component in behavior and particularly in executive functioning skills behavior, so sort of like mitigating that shame. I've seen it all. When I work with an adult learner, for example, one of the first things we do is email, and the shame, and then I tell them, "This is nothing. You should see what I saw the other day." Like, we're used to it. We know. It's nothing embarrassing. This is why you're here.

Now, the written expression piece, that is such a—I could do a whole talk and not get through all the written expression stuff, but any opportunity you cannot have a blank page in front of them, I want that. Any time you can help them interpret a prompt. How many of you have seen your kids' English teacher give like a full-page assignment and like there's not a single question or worse yet they put the assignment on slides and there's like six slides that have all the components of the assignment? It's like they're just doing things in the way that they think, but it's completely overwhelming to a learner.

We have an entire series of the podcast on written expression, on writing. I would encourage you to go listen to that. I know it. You're going to have to scroll back years. We've been podcasting since 2018. You can get it wherever you want, but I know for sure episodes 19, 20, and 21 are executive functioning skills and writing. And then 20 is what to do, and 21 is like part two of that. So I—we give a lot in those. Those are like chunky episodes before we learn to give less in each episode. It's a little scripted too because we were new podcasters, but I would recommend that you go listen to those episodes.

Awesome. Thank you and thank you for creating that resource. How do you help a student with a PDA profile that needs EF skills support? The "must-do three things" stance won't fly. Yeah. So this is where you have to meet the kid where they're at, right? Again, you have to work with somebody that they like. You have to work in a domain that they feel comfortable in. So rather than doing all EF systems all at once, maybe you're just sticking into one. You have to slowly expand their zone of tolerance. If they do not like who they are working with, none of it's going to work. But you also have to start with very small but achievable goals for them. So things might look differently, but they're still starting in systems.

Thank you. You can't push too much. Can't push too much. It's hard to remember as a parent the one thing at a time because someone 20 things and you really want to jump on all of them. So it's—yeah, that's why I said everybody's going to leave here with more questions than answers. They know how to get a hold of you. They know how to get a hold of me.

Ideas for convincing perfectionistic high schoolers to go to sleep on time and leave assignments unfinished if necessary.

Okay. This just happened with a client in the practice. And there's actually a great episode with a perfectionist girl teenager, and the way—and she comes on and sort of talks about it. It's in our student success stories series. I don't know the number offhand. I can look it up, but I don't know it offhand. Okay. Perfectionism is a manifestation of anxiety, and these kids also start late. My main advice when parents ask me about this is to set the boundary because if they know that you mean business and that the deadline is the deadline is the deadline—just like I don't want extended deadlines for this population. I don't think it's meaningful for them. I think it creates more problems than it's worth. If they know they can stay up late because they have been staying up late, they will continue to do that. And so that requires telling them in advance what's going to happen and then you as the parent tolerating it, which is really hard.

So you might want to do that in conjunction with ed therapy. You might want to do that in conjunction with therapy. Whatever sort of resources you have, but if that is the one thing you are addressing right now, you hold your boundary and shut the internet off.

Whatever it is that you have to do—all the research is saying no screens in the bedroom too as well. So if it's not in a public space, you got to have some semblance of control and containment because they won't do it for themselves.If we're looking to our teens to regulate themselves, they're not going to.

It sounds like there's a lot of work for the parents to do, not just the students. This is—and I don't want to take away from how hard it is as the parent, but you cannot do it when they're in crisis. You cannot shock them with it without having had that conversation when everything's like calm. You know, when your kid is in crisis, when they're in the reptilian part of the brain, there's no reasoning with them. They're like my toddler is having tantrums, right? I can't reason with my kids when they're in a tantrum.

But we can talk about it later when it's calm and lighting's low and you know like whatever it needs to be. But the same holds true for our teens, and then you got to stand firm as the parent. And that's why working in conjunction with someone like me who is telling you to do that—like I'm giving you permission—can be really helpful.

Do you have tips for overcoming procrastination and time blindness, especially for non-preferred tasks? We already use visual countdown timers attached to checklists and talk about estimating time it takes to do tasks. Great. I love this educated question. Now we're going to come with outside incentives. So if we think that this is a population that will do something extra without getting paid for it, I don't show up to things without being paid, right? And I'm not necessarily saying give them cash unless that's their like reward currency. A lot of these kids just want internet access. Like it can be a very simple thing, but they have to learn how to earn what it is that they want. And so you got to level it up. And if you can't think of something, we got to have some a look at some stuff. That is a problem. Everyone gets what they want right away.

I mean, look, my son, he wanted—he's about to be four. He wanted this Mack truck like from Cars, and finally it had gotten to the point where I'm like, "No, you've got so many," right?But like he was kept asking and asking, and I said—and he picked one that he wanted off Amazon—I said, "It's not going to come for seven sleeps," was like a week. "I can't wait that long. I can't." Like it's hard. It's hard. So we picked one that came in two days. By the way, it was so hard.

How would your advice differ for an online school? I don't think it does. I really don't think it does. I think every learner—I actually think it's even more critical in a school that is non-traditional or online or non-classroom-based or whatever sort of that they still have a schedule. They still have a routine. There are still expectations of what they need to do and where they need to go. Yes, it's all self-contained, so it's actually easier, but it's also more self-paced. So they still need all these foundational systems in place. It really doesn't change based off what type of academic experience a learner is having.

How do you feel about visual family calendars like the Skylight, for example, or a third grader without their own devices? I think Skylight's great. I think it's too expensive. But I think it's—it's just taking the next step of the family planning meeting. If you just have it up there without conversation, engagement, and showing them what's going on, then it's not going to be meaningful. I like it, but we don't have one yet.

Okay.Yeah. Do you have any must-have books that you recommend? Oh, I know that's hard off the top of your head. Yeah, off the top of my head it's hard. Anything by Ellen Braaten (B-R-A-A-T-E-N), I highly recommend. Anything by Thomas Brown I think is really good. Anything by Peg Dawson tends to be really good. Yeah, I'm going to give those three for now—those three authors. And we did a whole Ellen Braaten month. If you have a learner who struggles with processing or time blindness, you want to scroll back and listen to those Ellen Braaten episodes. She's so brilliant, and she likes Bravo. She talks about Bravo all the time.

I have to go scroll up and find it, but I want to say that—read you something that someone wrote. "I have to say you were really phenomenal. I truly appreciate your kindness, candor, and inclusive word choices. This has been great. It solidified the fact that I need to get outside intervention because we're doing a lot of this and still not seeing success because I have my own EF skills deficits. Thank you so much."

Oh, nice. Thank you for reading that. Thank you. It's like my favorite thing to talk about. My little ones are going to be saying executive functioning skills very early because I will compliment their executive functioning skills and use that language. They're foreign. They're about to be foreign too. I love talking about it. Well, thank you.

By the way, my husband loves when I have an EF fail. It's like his favorite thing. Like they love it when we forget a session because we're human, and these things are going to happen. They love it. Yeah. So funny.

Oh, someone's asking to put these three authors in the chat. Can you spell them out one more time? Maybe Kelly can type them in. Yeah. So Ellen Braaten (B-R-A-A-T-E-N), Thomas Brown, and Peg Dawson. There's so many good books about this right now. And I would also put in the chat The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt (H-A-I-D-T), just because that's what's lighting me up right now. I know it wasn't the topic of this talk about social media and screen time, but I think it's an important read.

And Callie just wanted to point out that it's important to set up—if you're going to do reward systems—to set it up in cooperation with the kid. She found super sad because sometimes they want the rewards so badly, but it ends up being unattainable, and so they get—they feel even more shame. Yeah. And that's also about the parents have a tendency to like overexpect when they're setting up a reward system. And so they'll be like if they do it for two weeks, and like honestly it needs to be if they do it that day. We got to have some quick wins for these kids, and then you stretch it out. But in partnership with your kid. There's a difference between an agreement and an expectation. I'm going to encourage agreements and not expectations.

Well, Rachel, it's 8:30, so I want to thank you so much. We could obviously talk for another few hours, and it sounds like you have many more hours of information on your podcast. Yes.

And so now we know how to find that. So I can't thank you enough. This was super valuable. So many important skills and that are very practical that we can try at home.

So thank you so much for coming.

Thank you everybody for coming.