The letters arrive with the same question buried two paragraphs down, right after an apology for taking up my time. Is this normal for his age, or is it something. A list can’t tell you. What it can do is turn a vague worry into a description precise enough to be useful, because the next person you talk to will want specifics.
10 things parents describe
What I hear most, sorted by the ability doing the work. The three core functions come from Adele Diamond, and planning sits on top of those three rather than beside them.
| What you notice | What it usually involves |
|---|---|
| Loses things constantly: gloves, folders, the reader | Working memory |
| Second half of a two-part instruction disappears | Working memory |
| Finishes homework and never hands it in | Working memory and inhibition |
| Cannot say what happened at school beyond «fine» | Working memory |
| Blurts, interrupts, does the fun task first | Inhibition |
| Waiting a turn still costs visible effort years after it should | Inhibition |
| Starts a project the night before, every time | Planning |
| Cannot picture what Thursday holds | Planning |
| One approach fails and the child runs it again | Flexibility |
| A lost game costs the whole afternoon | Flexibility and inhibition |
Every child does some of this. That is the point of the list.
What this list is not
Not a diagnosis, not a score. Nobody counts ticks and crosses a threshold. Three of these appearing the week after a house move tells you about the move. The same three holding six months across school, home, and friendships tells you something else. That difference matters more than the number of boxes.
When to take it further
Executive function difficulty is closely tied to ADHD, one important component of it rather than a defining feature, and plenty of children carry it without the diagnosis. That’s why no single sign moves a situation out of my territory. Four conditions do.
The difficulty appears everywhere and not in one subject. It has held six months or more. Home, school, and friendships all show it. And ordinary support has produced nothing.
When those line up, the conversation belongs with a pediatrician or the school psychologist, and it goes better if you arrive with a month of assignment logs and a note of what changes when instructions get halved. Specialists move on specifics.
A checklist helps you describe a pattern. It does not name one.
Free
The checklist, formatted to print
Take it to the appointment. If the difficulty shows up mainly in Russian, our lessons for bilingual kids open with an assessment of where your child actually is.
Open the libraryFrequently asked questions
There is no cutoff, and any article offering one has invented it. Duration and spread matter more than count: two signs holding six months across three settings say more than eight over a bad two weeks.
Often, yes. Forgetting instructions, assignments, and belongings points at working memory, one of three core abilities Harvard’s Center on the Developing Child describes as building into a person’s twenties.
Sources
- Center on the Developing Child, Harvard University. (2012, May 20). InBrief: Executive Function. developingchild.harvard.edu
- Diamond, A. (2013). Executive functions. Annual Review of Psychology, 64, 135–168. doi.org
- Willcutt, E. G., Doyle, A. E., Nigg, J. T., Faraone, S. V., & Pennington, B. F. (2005). Validity of the executive function theory of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder: A meta-analytic review. Biological Psychiatry, 57(11), 1336–1346. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
Palme School: Russian for bilingual children · Free materials for parents
