Executive Function Strategies for Parents

Course Description: This 2-hour course provides strategies to help adults and children overcome executive functioning deficits. As human beings, we have a built-in capacity to accomplish goals and meet challenges through the use of high-level cognitive functions called “executive functioning” skills. These are the skills that help us to decide which activities and tasks we will pay attention to and which ones we will choose to ignore or postpone. Executive skills influence our ability to manage our home and work life in an efficient, productive and structured manner. This is of particular importance to parents whose responsibilities are many. Children growing up in a home where parents have good executive functioning skills, have schedules and regimens that allow them to thrive and develop good executive functioning skills themselves. Parents who do not have well developed executive functioning skills tend to have difficulties with home management tasks and providing the structure, routine and organization so necessary for running a home and raising children. These deficits are often pronounced around the “hot spots” or transitions times that occur in a parent/child’s daily life: mornings, after school homecomings and bedtimes. This course will focus on those executive functions skills that are of particular importance to parents as they oversee the responsibilities of home life and manage those “hot spots. The executive functions of: planning/prioritizing, organization, time management and emotional control. This course offers a wide variety of strategies to help adults overcome such difficulties and function more effectively.