If you’re the caregiver of a smart but scattered student, trying to help them become a self-sufficient young adult may feel like a battle. This program provided adults with science-based strategies for promoting a child's independence by building their executive function skills — the fundamental brain-based abilities needed to get organized, stay focused, and control impulses and emotions. Dawson and Guare offered tips to help identify a student's strengths and weaknesses and enhance their problem-solving skills while avoiding micromanaging, cajoling and ineffective punishments.
With more than 40 years of clinical practice, Dawson and her colleague, licensed psychologist and board-certified behavior analyst, Guare, have worked with thousands of children and teens who struggle at home and in school. Their numerous award-winning books on this topic include “Smart but Scattered: The Revolutionary Executive Functioning Skills Approach to Helping Kids Reach Their Potential” and “Smart But Scattered Teens.”
TAKE-AWAY
“Frontal brain systems, and therefore executive skills, will require approximately 25 years to develop fully. Adolescents cannot rely solely on their own frontal lobes and executive skills to regulate behavior. The solution is to lend them ours, acting as surrogate frontal lobes for our children. By late adolescence, our children must meet one fundamental condition: they must function with a reasonable degree of independence-guide them on their way. Your teen is probably trying hard—to do everything his or her peers are expected to do as they face increasing responsibilities. But it’s a daily struggle when the teen has a deficiency in what are called executive skills, the functions of our brains and thought processes that help us regulate our behavior, set goals and meet them, and balance demands and desires, wants, needs, and have-tos. While motivation can play a significant role in teens’ behavior, it’s important to recognize that some behaviors reflect a skill weakness rather than a lack of motivation. Receiving three pieces of positive feedback for each piece of negative or corrective feedback can produce positive behavior change all by itself.”
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