Transcript for:
Glenbard Parents Series Key Insights

Hello everybody, my name is Gilda Ross. I am the Glenbard Student and Community Projects Coordinator. This is the 28th year of the Glenbard Parents Series. And we are so grateful to you for the gift of your time. And I want to thank all of the sponsors that make this possible. The new brochure is out. If you're looking for a hard copy, we're happy to mail you one. Otherwise, you can find it online at glenbardgps.org. But when you go there, you'll see the 50 programs that we have organized this year. We're all about helping families, empower families. inspiring families, engaging families around the issues and the challenges of, and the opportunities of raising teens today. So I'm so glad that you are here. Our ask of you is to please share this resource with others. Now that we are virtual, we welcome families around the country and across the street. So please do share it. Everybody is welcome. You'll notice we have presentations in three languages. Most of them are at noon and at 7 p.m. They deal with families with young children all the way to the 20s and the 30s. So there's something here for everybody. And we welcome everyone. I want to let you know that we'll be going a little longer. We will be ending at 8.15 this evening. We want to take your questions. And let me say how very honored I am to welcome these two great and very important groundbreaking speakers tonight. I have followed their careers and this has been on my wish list and I'm grateful that this is finally finally happening. So I thank them for making the time to join us. We had a great crowd at noon and here we are again at 7 p.m. Glad you could be here. And introducing our speaker. Oh before I do that let me tell you what's coming up. This afternoon we were discussing you The next speaker that's coming on Tuesday, and I want to make you aware of it, Jennifer Wallace is an investigative reporter. She was with recently with 60 Minutes. She has written a very important book, Never Enough, When Achievement Culture Becomes Toxic and What We Can Do About It. And the topic that night is Inspiring Balanced Achievement, Self-Confidence and the Power of Mattering. Tuesday, the 29th at noon at 7 p.m. At noon, she'll be in conversation with Lori Gottlieb, the author of the book, You Should Talk to Someone. At 7 p.m., she'll be in conversation with Julie Leichhardt-Hames, the author of the book, How to Raise an Adult. And then the following week, it is Suicide Awareness Month. Dr. Matthew Nock, who is the chairman of the psychology department at Harvard University. and an authority on suicide and self-destructive behaviors. He will be with us on the 6th at noon at 7 p.m. And then on Thursday of that week, we'll have a program on financial aid. And you don't want to miss the program on Wednesday, September 13th. We are all here a big fan of Lisa DeMoor. I know her newest book, The Emotional Lives of Teenagers, we're calling the program. a playbook to thrive in trying times. It will be at noon and 7 p.m. So you want to be circling your calendar for those events. And yes, the following week, we're busy at GPS. On the 19th, for the first time, we'll welcome Shelley Tigliski. She was recognized as a CNN hero. She'll be talking about her book, Sit Down to Rise Up, The Path to Loving Ourselves, Self-Compassion and Self-Care for Turbulent Times. And now, without further ado, I am going to introduce Tina Saviano. She is our Assistant Director of Student Services, Special Ed, and she'll be doing the introduction. So Tina, take it away. Perfect. Thank you so much, Gilda. It's always so great to see the wonderful speakers you're able to provide to us as educators and our community. So thank you, thank you, thank you. And I myself, being someone who's worked in the field of special education, was super excited to see this parent series. So thank you for allowing me to introduce our two speakers today. So first we have Peg Dawson, Dr. Peg Dawson, who served as the staff psychologist at the Center for Learning and Attention Disorders in Seacoast Mental Health Center in New Hampshire. Wow. It is beautiful over there, isn't it? It is. While she specializes in the assessment of children and adults with learning and attention disorders, Dr. Dawson. is the past president of the New Hampshire Association of School Psychologists, the National Association of School Psychologists, and the International School Psychology Association. Whoa, that's a mouthful. Congratulations on all of that. That's amazing. She is a recipient of the National Association of School Psychologists Lifetime Achievement Award. I just have to interject here as someone who works with our school psychologists. I just want to say thank you so much for all of the hard work that you've done throughout your career. So it really makes a difference to our students and families. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks. Yes. OK. Our next panelist here we have is Dr. Greer is a board certified behavior analyst and neuropsychologist. and the former director of the Center for Learning and Attention Disorders from New Hampshire. Dr. Dawson and Dr. Greer are the co-authors of the famous, best-selling book, Smart But Scattered, the revolutionary executive functioning skills approach to helping kids reach their potential in smart but scattered teams. Wow. So thank you guys both for being there. I have to say, you know, there's not a whole lot of... individuals who are board certified behavior analysts. That is something that we are highly in need of. So we're super excited to hear what you guys have to share with us today. No way. Okay. All right. Let me follow the PowerPoint here. And Dick and I will be sort of going back and forth on this. And I guess I'll start by, well, I want to start by a couple of things. One is... And Dick may have a slightly different take on this, but my interest in executive skills came about after I worked in the schools for about 16 years and then moved into a clinic setting with Dick and was seeing a lot of kids referred for attention problems. And that's how I got to executive skills because working with those kids, I soon realized that the diagnostic criteria for ADHD, which is problems with attention and or problems with hyperactivity, impulsivity, or both. really didn't begin to describe the problems I saw these kids having, because I was seeing huge problems with time management and planning and organization. And I remember talking with Dick about it at the time. He and I both did our doctoral work at UVA, University of Virginia, although we were there at different times. But with his background in neuropsychology, as I was describing these issues, he said, well, Peg, those are executive skills. Well, this was the late 80s, early 90s, and people were not using that term much in those days. So that's what got us interested. We really wanted to understand this whole domain better. you know, what are these skills? How do they develop? What's going on in the brain? How do you, how do they impact school performance? And most importantly, how do you help kids with weak executive skills become more successful students? So that's what led to all our professional writing. But I should also say at the same time I was doing all this professionally, I was raising two kids of my own, as was Dick. And I actually think looking back on, I think a lot of what I've learned about executive skills, particularly in the intervention side, the what do we do about a side has come as much from my experience as a mom, as my experience as a psychologist. My older son was diagnosed with an attention disorder at the age of 14. And I do a lot of parent presentations. And my message to parents all the time is most of these kids turn out fine. Uh, and I can almost see the audience relax at that point when I say that, uh, cause if you're in the early stages of dealing with one of these kids, or even if you're dealing with a teenager with, with these kinds of issues, it can look pretty daunting. You don't know what the future is going to bring, but you know what kids grow up, they mature, their brains mature. And if you use the kinds of strategies, which are described in great detail in our books and which we'll refer to, um, more briefly this evening, these kids really do have a good shot at success. Um, so that's why I enjoy working with them. And so just as a quick intro, here are sort of three key points that I think is a way to introduce executive skills. And point number one is what they are. OK, so they are brain based skills. They're managed out of the frontal lobes of the brain, which is the part of the brain right behind the forehead. And they take a minimum of 25 years to reach full maturation. Why do we call them executive skills? Because they're the skills required to execute tasks. Or my favorite definition came up with by a second grade teacher who took a class I taught at the University of Southern Maine a few years ago. And she was trying to figure out how to explain executive skills to second graders. And what she decided was they're the skills you need to get things done, which I think is probably as good a way of describing these skills as any. So that's point number one, what they are. Point number two, until these skills are fully mature, it's our job as parents, teachers, adults who work with kids to act as surrogate front loops for our kids. And in my experience, we do this pretty naturally when kids are young. And then somewhere around middle school, things can go wrong. And I think one reason for that is by the time kids hit middle school, there's a mismatch between what we're expecting kids to be able to do easily and what their brains are comfortable doing because these skills take so long to develop. We can't act as surrogate front-loaves for kids forever, though, because then we'd have to follow them around for the rest of their lives. So the third point is this. It's also our job as parents, teachers, and adults who work with kids to help kids grow their own executive skills. And so that's what we're going to be talking about tonight. How do you do that? There are a wide variety of models out there. There are a wide variety. Some people maintain there's only one executive skill. We call it the central executive. Key researchers talk about three primary executive skills. Some people like Russ Barkley go as high as 32, 33 different executive skills. We settled on 11 because we started with this question of all the skills that are out there that people are talking about, which ones are the most critical for school success? And so we decided that these 11 skills probably almost cover the waterfront in terms of this. And more recently, I've been dividing them into foundational skills and advanced skills. People seem to... It helps them think about where do they want to put, how to focus things. Foundational skills develop, the earliest signs were in the first years of life. The advanced skills tend to emerge later. They are more complicated skills. Just looking at the names of those skills will tell you that they are more complicated skills. But let's just go through them one at a time. Not to necessarily give you definitions for them, but just sort of hit on. So here's what we focus on when we're thinking about helping kids strengthen each of these skills. So I'll do the first couple and then I'll toss it off to Dick. With response inhibition, the way I think of it is it's the ability to stop and think before you say or do something. And some people maintain it is the most critical skill. If you don't get response inhibition, how are you ever going to get something like planning or time management? The strategy we focus on to support the development of response inhibition is we teach wait and stop, getting kids to think about how to wait for things, getting kids to stop and think before they do something. And that's obviously really important with young children, where astute parents are having kids practice waiting all the time. But I think it's even with teenagers. helping them think about how do I wait? How do I resist temptation? One focus for that is kids and their cell phone use. How do we help kids set aside their cell phones in order to get their homework done or in order to have a more balanced personal life or whatever it is? So that may be a context in which we focus on response inhibition. Working memory. is the ability to hold information in mind while you're performing a complex task. And this is one which the more I've looked at working memory, just in terms of what does the research say, our ability to hold information is limited both in the amount of information we can hold at any one time and how long we can hold it. And so if we're confronted with too much information, then we're going to have to figure out some way to organize it, chunk it, rehearse it, or... or find some other way to remember that information. And one of the strategies we focus on is encouraging people to think about not relying on verbal instruction alone, to whenever possible, pair verbal instructions with a visual or ask kids to create a visual. And maybe, Dick, why don't you talk about offloading at this point? I think that might be helpful in terms of understanding working memory. The other thing I wanted to mention about working memory to people is that there's not only this component of, you know, holding information in memory so that you can manipulate it for short periods of time. The other part of working memory that really turns out to be pretty critical is its storage of events and being able to recall them when we're in new situations. You know, so the, you know, example for adults would be if... If you're used to shopping in the same grocery store, you go into a grocery store or a chain that you've never been in before, what's your initial reaction when you go in there? Typically, people will admit that they're somewhat disoriented, they're somewhat confused. They sort it out. How do they sort it out? They sort it out because most grocery stores have a common set of views that while they may be in different places. By past experience, you know what those are, so that you look up at the signs, you see that the aisles are labeled, you understand that certain categories of things are grouped in certain areas. And so while you may not be as efficient in the new place, at least you can use that kind of past experience. And that ability to call on past experience as a working memory to bring into a current situation and use it to help you problem solve is absolutely critical. You'll see we talk a little bit about metacognition later that it's that skill of being able to recall past experiences plus metacognition, being able to compare a past situation with a current situation and deciding which of the strategies that I used in the past work. Can I bring forward into this situation and which ones do I have to modify so that the situation will work for me? Peg mentioned the term offloading and the notion of offloading is that. We live in an age now where it's almost continuous information overload. And so the likelihood of being able to hold on to that information for any length of time really diminishes. And the notion of offloading is where can you store that information so that you'll know where to retrieve it, but you don't have to be carrying around in your head. I gave the example earlier of... When I grocery shop, I use an app called Cozy. It's basically a way for I can list all of the things that I want to buy at the grocery store. And there's a bunch of other lists that I can use or cues that I can put into that. And so when I'm thinking about what I have to do, that information already exists in my cell phone. I don't have to carry it with me. I don't have to go into the grocery store thinking I've got to remember all of these kinds of events. So it's one of those examples. And we've relied and we believe that kids will rely increasingly on technology as a place to offload information. But there are other simpler ways of offloading information. My wife and I keep our keys and our phones in a basket by the door so that when we go to bed at night, if we're leaving early in the morning or we're going to appointments and stuff like that, at least more often than not. We'll find the keys and the phones so that we can get out of the house quickly in that particular situation. So the question is, can you set up a system and practice it over a period of time using either some sort of technology or something low tech, like just the location as a way to put that information in a place where you don't have to constantly try to remember where it is that you left things before? I think the other thing just to say about offloading, kids often resist taking that extra step of writing stuff down or storing it in technology or anything else because they tell themselves, I don't have to write down my homework. I'll remember it. Or I don't have to study for a test. I was paying attention in class. And if we can explain to them that if they're relying on, their brain is working way harder than it needs to. If they think that storing everything in their brain is the easiest way to do it. Their brain is working less hard and therefore actually life is easier for them if they find these strategies like how to use technology to store stuff or how to write things down. Do you want to take the next one, Dick, emotional control? Sure. So emotional control is just what it says. It's the ability to manage our emotions in stressful or fearful or demanding situations in a way that allows us to get through those situations with kind of a. minimum amount of distress, but also a minimum amount of distraction from being able to solve the problem. And, you know, particularly if you're dealing with teens, you know, one of the real noticeable phenomenon in teens is that there's something of a disconnect between the emotional life of teens and frontal lobes. Frontal lobes really are, and executive skills really are, um, a way to filter and to manage our emotions. But what happens during the teenage years is that the connections that are most efficient and effective from the frontal lobes to the other centers of the brain that are more in charge of managing emotions aren't fully developed yet. And so you tend to get somewhat an exaggeration of emotional responses where kids, at least in emotionally charged situations, have more difficulty calling on their executive skills to be able to manage those. And it shows up in particular in situations when they're with peers, where a lot of what they're concerned about is the reactions of other people, how are other people perceiving them, are they doing the same things that their peers expect and so forth. But it also applies to parent-child relationships in these situations where Kids at this point in adolescence, their primary interest is in being independent, making their own decisions, calling their own shots. And so what has been up until this point, a kind of hierarchical relationship where parents in charge gives kids the directions, that shifts pretty significantly during adolescence. So that if you try to maintain that kind of hierarchical relationship, you get a lot more pushback from kids about it. And that pushback tends to come. in the form of kind of emotional explosions at times. And we were talking earlier today about this, you know, and Gilda asked a question about, you know, how do you manage these kinds of things? And what we talked about was the way that you speak to kids during adolescence makes all the difference in the world, particularly in terms of vocal intonation. You know, my daughter, who's 29 now, was... socially quite perceptive, and she was certainly quite perceptive, you know, about interactions with myself and my wife. The tone of voice that I used to approach her about a particular issue made all the difference in the world. So if I said to her something like, Shan, right at that point, she was ready for a fight, because she knew what was coming next was either some sort of directive or some sort of rec. reprimand. Whereas if I said to her, hey, Shan, and I paused and then asked the question, could we find a time to talk about this? It got a much more receptive response and a much less emotional response. And so if you think about approaching your kids, they expect to be treated with a certain amount of respect, even a certain amount of deference at this point. And They don't necessarily, particularly when it comes to things where there's probably going to be some disagreement to begin with, they don't want to hear it as a directive from you. They want to hear it more as a conversation and as an opportunity for collaboration so that you listen to them as much as they're willing to listen to you. So moving on to flexibility, there's some overlap here because inflexible kids often have trouble managing their emotions. So that that. Same thing about tone of voice would apply here in helping those kids manage situations in which their inflexibility rises to the surface. And those situations come when things don't go the way they thought they were going to go. They had looked forward to something happening and then it fell through or any kind of open ended situation. We talk about behavioral flexibility, which is trouble dealing with. unexpected changes in plans or cognitive flexibility, which you see in the school context in terms of struggling with open-ended tasks like creative writing assignments. And in some cases, it takes thinking through multiple ways of getting to the outcome that you want. So very often when kids get stuck on one sort of one solution, one approach, one outcome that they're anticipating, we may say to them, well, that's great if that works out, but do you have a backup plan? Like what's plan B? And so to get them thinking about that as well. Dick, do you want to say anything about that or do you want to go on to sustained attention? Okay. I'll just-Sustained attention. Okay. So I'll just make some comments about sustained attention. Dick, you can kick in if you want. This is a huge domain. And again, it's where I've spent my life, working and living with people with attention disorders. And so I have a gazillion strategies, which I often recommend. But I generally start initially with parents. And then by the time kids hit adolescence with kids, in terms of asking if they have a task to do that's a non-preferred task like homework or something or a chore or something like that. The question is, how long can you go before you need to take a break? And so to help kids. sort of become aware of the limits of their own attention span, rather than saying, okay, you have to stick to it, you have to plow on through, just talking with them, how long can you go before you need a break? And then let's talk about what that break is, and how long that break's going to be before you get back to work again. That's one of the better ways I know. Do you want to say something about sustained attention? No, we'll come back to it later. No, I don't think so. Okay, let me talk about task initiation, and I'll turn it over to you for the next two or three ones. With task initiation, I'm actually pretty convinced this is the last and hardest skill to reach full maturation. We have an executive skills questionnaire, which we often use with the adult audiences that we work with. And every once in a while, we'll collect the samples and go away to figure out what is on average the stronger or weakest skill. And every time we've done this, when we look at the scores, we find that task initiation on average is the weakest skill. And that's with a group of professional adults, because those are the audiences we work with. If you type the word procrastination, which is the opposite of task initiation, into an academic search engine, you will be hit with over 6,000 citations. And I've read a number of those and learned some interesting things. I found one that gave a developmental timeline for procrastination. And here's what it said. Remember, procrastination is a bad thing. What it said was procrastination increases. until the mid to late 20s and decreases gradually after that. You know, surveys of college students have shown that 86% of college students say that procrastination is a problem for them. And, you know, almost half of them say it affects their grades. So I've done a lot of thinking about how to teach task initiation. And the strategy I suggest won't work in all cases, but it works more often than I think I, than I might've thought it would, is teach kids, have kids make a plan with a start time. And then. prompt them to start the plan at the time they said they were going to start it. And I found as soon as I started doing that with my older son, somewhere around middle school, a lot of the fights went away. If he said, okay, I will start studying for my social studies test at five o'clock this afternoon, five o'clock might come along and he might forget that he'd said that. But if I said, Erin, what did you say you were going to do at five o'clock? And he'd say, oh yeah, study for my social studies test. And we're not fighting about it anymore. So that's one strategy I think that can be very effective. We'll come back to task initiation in a bit when we share other strategies. Do you want to go on to the next or do you want to say anything about task initiation, Dick? I guess the only other thing I want to say about task initiation is it's one of those skills that when somebody is not starting a task, it's relatively easy to default to they're just not motivated to do it. And I've learned. Working with high school kids, I spent, you know, 15 years working in elementary, junior, and senior high schools. And one of the things that I learned, particularly with the high school students that I was working with and coaching, was that more often than not, if they had difficulty starting a task, it wasn't for lack of motivation. It was because there was some difficulty with the task itself. In other words... We'll talk about, I'll mention briefly later on, this notion of goodness of fit. The fit between their skill set and the task wasn't a good one. And that's where some of the other skills came into play, place. Did they have trouble even planning the task? Did they have trouble with organizing the materials? Did they have difficulty with time management in their assumption that since they didn't know what the task was about or how to approach it, it felt like it was going to take forever and therefore... the task just looked aversive from the outset. So I guess it's just a kind of, it's to be careful about your assumptions about task initiation and why somebody isn't doing something. Because we found that in a lot of cases, if we sat down and did some real troubleshooting about the task itself, then oftentimes we were able to get to the reason why kids weren't able to do it and go back and map out the task or provide them with some degree of help or assistance. to be able to get past the parts that were stumbling blocks for them. I also think we make that assumption, not just about task initiation, but with some of these other advanced skills as well. We assume that kids know how to do them when in fact they may not. And I think, I mean, I can think of kids who really don't know how to do the kind of planning that's required to do a long-term project or to plan. an outing over the weekend. And kids who aren't naturally organized often don't have a clue how to organize themselves or to manage their time. So that I think that factors in there as well. Do you want to say something about those three skills also, Dick? Well, I think that the, you know, again, I think what we hear from people is particularly around time management. I mean, people highlight that oftentimes that kids don't manage their time well. And, you know, I mentioned before. that One of the things that we see is that it's an adolescent's best interest to underestimate the time that a non-preferred task will take and overestimate the time that they have to do it. So if you ask the question, you know, what do you have for homework tonight? Well, I got some algebra problems to do. How long is it going to take you to do them? I don't know, half hour, 45 minutes. When are you going to start? I'll start around eight o'clock. That leaves me plenty of time. And in fact. The task is going to take longer and there's not enough time for them to do that plus whatever other homework they go. And that's a typical phenomenon that you see in adolescents, particularly in the case of non-preferred tasks. But I think as Peg said, a lot of these kids, they haven't had a lot of exposure to, you know, prior to in elementary and through late elementary and even through middle school, a lot of the planning and prioritizing is done for them. And It starts to break down a little bit in middle school where they're expected to do more of that, but by the time they hit high school, they're expected to take this on on their own. And so, and again, the assumption that they have these skills, particularly when it comes to, you know, thinking about complex projects, Peg will talk about that, you know, in terms of project organization and so forth, it really is a pretty demanding skill. in the context of a lot of other demands that kids have, and they're not necessarily proficient at it. I mean, you know, my son, you know, my son has an attention disorder. He was diagnosed at six years old with it, and to this day struggles with some aspects of that. His planning skills weren't great. They were certainly better than his organization skills and certainly better than his time management skills. But collectively, those three skills, his struggles in those three skills got him into a lot of difficulty. And even at times now, continue to get him into some difficulty. He's just much better at managing them and understanding what kinds of compensatory techniques he needs to make. So I think it's if you look at what kids are expected to do and. You're wondering why it's not getting done. It's worth it to take a hard look at those three skills in particular to see whether, in fact, they have an idea about how to go about managing this or not. Just real quickly around goal-directed persistence. I often refer to this as the killer skill for middle school parents because so many middle school parents expect their kids to have this skill down by then. And in my experience... most middle school kids either don't have it down or their idea of the goals they want to work on don't line up with what their parents want them to be working on. You know, I don't know how many parents have sat in my office and said, doesn't my kid realize that how he's doing in eighth grade is going to affect what college he gets into in four years? And the short answer to that is, no, they don't. So I'm always preaching patience to parents of kids at the middle school, early high school level. Also encouraging parents to think about ways that they can encourage their kids to set goals and achieve goals without going overboard, without pushing them into something where they're not ready to go there yet. But just and encouraging them to even with short term tasks, following through on short term tasks. Do you want to take metacognition, Dick? Well, let me say something about goal directed persistence. The other. piece about goal-directed persistence is when you think about what it requires, in order to have good goal-directed persistence, planning and prioritization, organization and time management are all critical prerequisite skills for good goal-directed persistence. And so if kids struggle with any of those kinds of areas, then again, it's not because they lack the kind of grit or the fortitude to push themselves through it. In some cases, it really is. It's a weakness in one of these other skills that gets in the way of them being able to have good goal-directed persistence. Metacognition is always a late-developing, for it to be fully developed, it's a late-developing skill. When I think about it, that I think about it early on, because, you know, I spent a lot of my time working with young kids, kindergarten, first grade kids. Medicognition starts off as the capacity to evaluate your own performance. And so if we work on kids being able to do that, you know, we came up with simple checklists for kids to evaluate. I worked with a physical education teacher. And at the beginning of each of his classes, kindergarten classes, interestingly enough, at the beginning of each of his classes, he said, these are the three things that I expect during this. And there were very specific behaviors. And at the end of class, all of the time. He asked kids individually as they were leaving how they thought they did on those three behaviors. And he kept his own records about that, kept simple checklists on those kinds of behaviors. And it turned out to be a very effective way for those kids to start to monitor their performance in the context of what the expectation was in that situation. And so I think even with little kids, we don't think about, you know, if we think about metacognition as involving really complex thinking. Obviously, it does. But it starts off very early as a kind of a self-appraisal and then moves on from there. You know, at its more sophisticated level, as I say, it's the ability to look at a situation, to say to yourself, have I been in these kinds of situations? Do I have these kinds of experiences before? Does this ring true for something I've done in the past? Can I use any of that information in the present or what doesn't apply? And. How is it that I can modify my behavior to fit the demands of the situation now, so that it really, it's a continuation of that ability to monitor your own performance, but as I say, at a much more sophisticated level, because now it involves things like social communication, facial expression, body language, vocal intonation. It's particularly demanding skill in social situations. I know for a lot of the kids that I work with in adolescence, who are even high functioning kids on the autism spectrum, it's a very, very difficult skill for them because they're simply, they lack a high degree of awareness of the impact of their behavior on other kids. So just to reinforce that these skills do take time to develop, I'm going to share a series of MRI scans that were taken by a neuroscientist at UCLA named Paul Thompson. He brought the same kids in year after year, starting at age four. He ended at age 21. I wish he'd gone to age 25, but he didn't. And he just took an MRI scan once a year, created a composite so we can see how the brain changes across that time. And in order to relate this to executive skills, there are a couple of things to understand about these MRI scans. One is the color. So an immature brain is red and orange. A mature brain is blue and purple. And the other is where are executive skills located? So executive skills are managed out of the frontal lobe. So if you look at that right-hand image. That top part of that right-hand image, that's the frontal lobes. And as you look at that, you can see that at age four, the frontal lobes are the least mature part of the brain at that age. Interestingly enough, what's blue is mostly around sensory processing because the sensory processing systems tend to develop earlier. So like vision and touch and things like that. So I'm going to take you pretty quickly to age 21. And I want you to see how late in the process the top, the frontal lobes, which is the top right part of that right-hand image, turns blue. And the other kind of fun thing to watch for is the brain matures from back to front, and since that's a top-down image, you will see the blue start at the bottom of that image and travel up. So let me just walk you through that. So there we are at age 21, and you can see there's a fair amount of purple there, but there's very little purple in the frontal lobes, and there's still quite a bit of green. And that text says the 21 year old brain is mostly mature, but the areas of green show that even at the threshold of legal adulthood, there is still, there's still room for increases in emotional maturity and decision-making skills, which will come in the next few years. And just, I talked earlier about how there are sometimes problems at middle school because our expectations may be off. Let me show you what the middle school brain looks like. I can bring this back. Here we go. Let's go back to 13. So that's the 13-year-old brain. You can see the frontal lobes is not, there's still not much blue there. There's a lot less red and orange, so progress has been made, but it's still that it's still the least mature part of the brain. And so keep that in mind when we're thinking about our expectations for early teens in particular. Okay. Let me give you a quote that really sort of defines our philosophy. I ran across this a few years ago. I was working with a school in Connecticut, and the school principal had integrated a lot of restorative justice, restorative practices into her school, and was really happy with that approach to handling peer mediation, school discipline problems. And so I said, where can I find out more about restorative justice? And she sent me to the website of the International Institute for Restorative Practices, where I found this quote by Ted Wachtel. who at the time was the head of that institute that I think really just sort of captures our philosophy about working with kids. Human beings are happier, more cooperative and productive and more likely to make positive changes in their behavior when those in positions of authority do things with them rather than to them or for them. And as Dick moves into the next segment of our presentation, you will hear that come through pretty loud and clear. So go ahead, Dick. So where do you start with your team? Again, consistent with Wachtell's quote and with our approach, it starts with them. And we think that's particularly important for parents to consider. So what are their expectations and goals? For example, for the school year, what are their short-term expectations? Do they have any? If so, what are they? What subjects are they taking? What do they anticipate or what would they like to get for grades? What extracurricular activities? Are they thinking about participating in? So that gives you a kind of a just a broad view of what the landscape is in their mind. And then long term career, thinking about tech school, they're thinking about college, they're thinking about military service. They're thinking about some sort of apprenticeship. And so it's real important, I think, again, to to to hear, to talk with them and to ask these kinds of questions in an open ended kind of fashion. to hear what it is that they're interested in, just to give you an idea of what their thinking is and what direction they see themselves going in. And then what are your expectations for them? Do your expectations match theirs for the short term? Are you expecting that they're going to get, you know, for example, grades different from what they anticipate? Do you expect, you know, for example, that they're going to take different subjects? Are you expecting that they're going to take... for example, AP classes, and they're not anticipating taking AP classes, or as many as you think it would be good for them to take, and long-term. What are you thinking about, what's kind of your fantasy about where these kids would go, what career, what would they do either both after high school and as a long-term career, and are they aware of what you're thoughts about these are, and are you willing to share these kinds of things with them? And then the question, are you on the same page? You know, do you have expectations that are very different from what they are? And the real critical question, whose choice ultimately is it? And, you know, I think Peg and I have both learned, you know, from our own, working with our own kids, I could, I could speak to this, you know, endlessly about you know, particularly with my son, but both with my son and my daughter, I learned that it was his choice. And, you know, it took me a long time to understand that and to accept it. But clearly, he was right, he made the best choices, you know, for him. Same thing with my daughter, you know, when I think about the kinds of ups and downs that she's had in her career. And now, by the way, she's a nurse practitioner. She's setting up her own practice. And that was a decision that she came to. And so the question is, ultimately, it's going to be their choice one way or another. And when you have that kind of information, can you reach some sort of consensus about what you're kind of... basic expectations are. I don't think it's unreasonable to talk with kids about, you know, about what their performance in school is or some sort of compromise around those kinds of things. But again, ultimately, they're in the driver's seat. And so I think that that's really the kind of message that we have. And not only is it important to understand that, it's important to appreciate it and to encourage them in the things that they want to do. rather than thinking that they should adopt whatever our priorities or expectations for them are. I mentioned before briefly goodness of fit. Do they believe they have the skills to manage school goals on their own? Do you believe that they have the skills? I'll add one other component to that, and that's that. Depending on what their executive skills profile looks like, do they have the executive skills that are a good match for the careers that they go into? You know, I used to use the example when we were training coaches all of the time is that if a kid comes to me and I know that his weakest skills are response inhibition, sustained... attention and task initiation, and this kid wants to be an air traffic controller, I'm a little bit concerned about that. And again, not to the point where I want to say to the kid, you are dreaming, but at least to let them know. And we've, in fact, this is the way we worked with a lot of our high school kids to say, this is what the expectations are. for this particular career, not in a way to discourage them, not in a way to suggest to them that it's the wrong career, more in the way of suggesting, if this is what your expectation is, these are the skills that you're either going to have to work or somehow acquire to be able to get to where you want to do. And then it starts with them. If they want to manage on their own, and I think probably most kids do. Certainly our kids wanted to manage that. They didn't want to hear it from Peg. They didn't want to hear it from me. If they want to manage it on their own, give them a chance to manage it on their own. But again, given that you're the parent in this situation, it's fair to decide on the conditions under which they will manage this on their own. What's the timeframe? For example, how long do they have? to demonstrate that they can do what they said they were going to do and what's their performance look like and propose upfront a kind of if-then plan. So if in fact this doesn't work, where do we go next with this? And lastly, to mutually decide on a plan and what the help option will be. What type of help if it doesn't work out and who's going to provide the help? I think it's... Again, our experience is that in most cases, it's not going to be the parent that's going to be their first choice to provide the help. You know, maybe it's going to be a school counselor. Maybe it's going to be a resource teacher. Maybe it's going to be a paraprofessional. Maybe it's going to be a coach. But it's important to talk about that so that you at least open up the options and they understand that this is not a forever thing and that your attitude about this isn't just laissez-faire. And you're sure. go off on your own and whatever comes out of this comes out of this. Okay. With that in mind, I'm just going to quickly throw out a few strategies, which we found work with kids if they want to try them. And so I'm just going to reinforce what Dick has just said is that the kid is in the driver's seat here. And before I show you specific strategies, my fallback position is a five-minute rule. I do, as I said, I do a lot of parent presentations and these poor parents will come up to me afterwards and say, I have ADD. How can I help my kid when I have these same struggles? Or my life is so busy and so complicated. How can I find time to help my kid? And my answer is find something that you can spend five minutes on, five minutes a day on. And just to give you one quick example, that's how I got my son through high school, the one with ADD. You know, every day when he came home from school, I basically asked him two questions. What do you have to do? When are you going to do it? And that was my thought about how helping him make good decisions about how he was spending his time, what his goals were, and coming up with a plan, basically. And, you know, it took me, I came up with this five-minute rule, and it took me about a year to realize, oh, that's how I got my son through high school, because it really was a five-minute conversation. You know, sometimes it might go on a little longer. If he said he had, you know, 10 math problems to do, I might say, how long do you think that's going to take? If he said, I remember one time he said to me, he had to write two paragraphs about two different scientists. And I said, so when are you planning on doing that? And he said, Mom, I have two study halls tomorrow. And I said to him, Aaron, you told me you'd like to hang out with your friends during study halls. So is that a good plan? And he said, I will write the paragraphs first, and then I will hang out with my friends. He still did it during study hall, but at least we made some decisions about how he was going to spend that study hall. So if you can think of anything where just five minutes a day, you can work on that, whether it's clearing off a desk to work on or spending five minutes planning something, whatever. I want to get through these, so I'm not going to give a lot of examples here. To expand that a little. This is an expansion on that. What do you have to do when you're going to do it? And we found that it is helpful that the parents can sometimes get their kids to make written plans. This sets them up. They make the plan, like say, right when they get home from school. Kids need downtime. They don't want to jump right into homework, at least most don't. But if they have the plan set up, then that sets up in their mind what's going to happen after they've had their downtime. So this is not where they write down the exact assignment. This is where they list the things they have to do. You know, biology, math, English. And for each of those... assignments, then you ask them to identify how long do you think that will take. So now we're working on time estimation. So that's time management. When will you start? That's the plan with the start time. So now we're working on task initiation. And then where will you work? And that actually contributes to planning because if you can visualize working in a specific place, then you may also visualize the steps it takes to carry out that work. And we added that column after reading all the research on visual imagery and mental rehearsal that says if you mentally rehearse carrying out a task before you do it, especially if you use vivid visual imagery, that both makes it easier to do the task and more likely that you'll do it. So when they've answered those four questions, we now have a package. We have math that's going to take 20 minutes that you're going to start doing it right after dinner at seven o'clock and you're going to do it in your bedroom or in the dining room table, whatever it is. And then if you actually ask them to track the start and stop times, that's to check on two different things. Did they start when they said they were going to start it? And did it take, were they right with their time estimates? Dick was talking earlier about how when kids have problems with task initiation, we need to understand why they're not getting started on tasks. And I came up with this list. It started out with 15. I'm up to 17 now, 17 different reasons that kids procrastinate. And each one, you'll need a different strategy for. So Dick talked about not understanding the problem or can't think of how to start the problem. Those are the first two on that list. And obviously, there's a very different solution to that than if what they're talking about is this assignment is pointless. I would get nothing out of doing it. This assignment isn't going to affect my grade. So why bother? I'm too tired. I don't have the energy to do this now. I don't. think I can do it because I've always failed in the past. So why should I try? I mean, all of those are reasons that the kids procrastinate. And depending on the reason, they'll need to be helped to come up with a strategy to overcome that obstacle. The next things I'm going to share, and I think Gilda was going to put this in chat. These are several forms from our, we created a planner, the WorkSmart Academic Planner. We actually created it to go along with our coaching process because we didn't think kids would go out to Staples and buy this on their own or go to Barnes and Noble and buy it on their own. But we thought that working with a coach, that this had a lot of tools in it to help kids both develop executive skills and also develop strategies that they could use to tackle. some academic challenges. So this is a template for studying for tests, which has several components to it, including 18 different ways of studying for a test. And then our typical suggestion is for a test, you know, quiz, you might be able to get away with studying just the night before, but if it's a test, then start studying four days before the test and do a little bit each night. And I mentioned this earlier this afternoon that that if a kid has two hours to study for a test, they are way better off studying for 30 minutes for four nights before a test rather than two hours the night before the test, in large part because sleep consolidates memory. When you sleep, then your mind is still working and is still assimilating and solidifying what you studied. So that's why we suggest you do that. And if kids struggle because studying for testing seems like this huge open-ended task, well, then each time they study for 30 minutes. Choose three different strategies and spend 10 minutes on each. And then evaluate afterwards how it went. Another template we came up with was a template for planning long-term projects, which really just walks the kid through the process of figuring out what topic they wanted to do their project on, helping them make a choice about the best one, identifying the materials or resources they need and where they'll get them and when they'll get them, and basically the step-by-step process of doing the project. I think I may have one more here. Nope, I don't. We have others. So that is a resource you may want to take a look at. And just one final comment before we go to Q&A. Beware of one size fits all. This was something that a woman named Carol Bush, who's one of my favorite coaches, I trained her several years ago. She and I keep in touch. And she sent me this a while back about a kid that she was working with. And it was around planning. And she said, Dad liked planning on the computer and wanted his son to use an online planner. Mom used a whiteboard and thought that was the way to go. But the son, when he did plan, liked using a bit of paper and pencil. He knew why he liked to plan this way. Writing things out helped him to remember, seeing it all on paper enabled him to prioritize. And he liked the act of color coding the priority numbers. And he got great satisfaction from crossing out something that had been completed and turned in. So my guess is Carol helped him articulate the best way that he knew how to plan and maybe even given him strategies for how to talk to his parents when they were suggesting another way of planning. Okay. So. Hopefully the people have some questions and I'll just share. This is one of my favorite New Yorker cartoons. It's called the big book of parent child fights and the table of contents lists chapter one food arguments. That's on page one, chapter 12 miscellaneous battles. And that's on page 9,505. So yeah, we struggle, but okay. So Gilda, where do you want to go with this? Well, I want to just wrap up a little bit, although we were here, as I said, till 815 with. questions, but so much about that developing brain that does not mature until age 25. That's really so key. I love what you said about that we're in this together, guiding them until they have it their own, sitting down and having that conversation with them. What are their goals? What works for them? Where's the disconnect? And I really, you know, I love what you said about really... you know, analyzing, and this is from my own experience, what are, when a child selects a career, how does this match up with any deficits that they might have long-term? I think that sometimes you don't realize until much later in the game when sometimes it's a little too late. So I liked what you said about that example of, well, you know, certainly around when there's a wish, you know, going and using the other resources, these, this is what's required. And specifically on the job, these are the tasks. that will be required for this particular job. Not only what do I have to do to achieve that job? So I found that interesting. Let's go to some questions here. This is from Erica from far away. She's asking about, she wants to work on some executive functioning skills with her younger children. What suggestions do you have to like sort of focus on helping them, maybe even before the game, before too much time goes by? Okay, I have a couple of thoughts about that, and then Dick can throw something in as well. At that age, I generally think about focusing on those foundational skills. So hopefully people will be able to get this PowerPoint. Is that right, Gilda? That is correct. And thank you for that. Yeah. So you can review what those foundational skills are, response, inhibition, task, initiation, sustained attention. Those feed into, many of them feed into the later skills of Planning, time management, goal-directed persistence. So that's a good place to start in terms of just thinking about which skills to focus on. But I think the other place to start is, are there areas where you would really like to see your child strengthen their skills? Is there a problem that's getting in the way where you feel like they may need some additional help or support? And can you... Can you start with those because you and your child will feel better if you handle those problem situations and come up with strategies for that? Dick, I'm sure you have other thoughts on that one. Yeah, I guess one of the things that, again, this goes back to our approach in general, give them choices. But also, if you're going to problem solve with them, problem solve jointly with them. You know, we've been struck. time and time again, where, you know, again, as I said, I worked in elementary school where we were problem solving every day with kids. I was amazed at the number of times where we would sit down and discuss a problem with the kid and ask him or her what they thought about it and what solutions they came up with. And they came up with very practical solutions, sometimes not things that could be implemented, but certainly something that we could take and work into a plan. that they felt like they had real participation in. And that makes all the difference in the world as far as their buy-in to the plan itself is concerned. And not only that, but you put them in the role at that particular point of actually using their own executive skills to plan, to organize, to make decisions. You can build on that kind of skill. So I used to be able to say to kids, you know, remember how we worked on this before? You know, like, what do you think we could do in this particular situation? Is there anything we used in the past that might work for you again? That, you know, as we're rewriting that Smart But Scattered book, the one for young kids now, we've really heavily emphasized the importance of as young as possible. My son, I have a two-year-old granddaughter, and so I watch my son. I interact with her regularly, you know, on FaceTime. And, you know, again, he's very good at this kind of stuff, because that's what he does for a business. But he's very good about giving her choices. But he's also very good about modeling behaviors. And again, that's the other really most powerful thing is that that kind of, if you model those kinds of behaviors for your kids, they will pick them up because they want to be like you. And then the last thing I'd say is that Harvard, the Center for Developing Child at Harvard used a phrase called, or recommended an intervention called serve and return. And basically what serve and return means is watch the things that your child is most interested in, watch the things that they like to do, and engage with them around those kinds of things. So again, they notice that you notice. But not only that, it's a way to build on their skills. You know, we're in the book now, you know, we're putting in information about how to use prompt and fade strategies. And again, we lived and died by these strategies. So, you know, if I want a kid to be able to open a door, well, initially, I might put my hand on top of theirs and open the door. But if I fade that over a period of time, they can become independent. It's those kinds of strategies where you can assist. the kid, but where you already know what your exit strategy is going to be once the kid is on a path to success, to be able for them to be successful. They're much more receptive about those kinds of things. And let me mention that the program on Tuesday, which is now on the Glenbarg Parent Series YouTube channel, was with Rebecca Rowland referencing that Center for Child Development at Harvard. That topic of that program on Tuesday was how to talk to young children. And we went through so many of these. Tina, why don't you go ahead and take a look at the Q&A? And why don't you feel those questions for our speakers? Oh, sure. I just pulled those up. So thanks. So another question that we have is, how can I help my senior who is good at making a plan but not following through? Okay, Dick, you answered that one. Well. I guess one of the questions, you know, this is a question that comes up fairly often with us in some of the coach training, you know, that we do. And the question would be, you know, when somebody makes a plan, it's to take a look at the plan itself, because oftentimes, they're not following through, because the steps of the plan are fairly complicated, complicated, or they're fairly big steps. And so we try to do you know, we referred to it as a kind of, you know, an analysis or an anatomy of the plan to see what it looks like. Is it possible to break down the plan into smaller steps? You know, if the early steps in a plan involve very little effort, then people are willing to engage in those kinds of steps. And so you know, And we haven't talked at all about effortfulness, but it's a pretty big component of the way that we think about this. You know, again, I say this is my daughter's a planner, you know, but over time, she's learned herself that you can make these kinds of grandiose plans, but that's exactly what they are. They're grandiose plans. And so you have to back it down to the point of what's the smallest, easiest step. to get started. Peg, the book, One Small Step Can Change Your Life. I can't remember the guys. There's a book called One Small Step Can Change Your Life. You know, we've recommended that to parents over and over again, because it's the epitome of somebody who has a goal, who has a plan, but the plan is too big. And he breaks that notion down into how can I create a step that's virtually effortless to start. And it takes that one small first step to be able to get started. That's how you get, you know, in a lot of cases, we're talking about a task initiation. It's making that first step that's all the difference in the world, you know, because then you can kind of get going on it. In behavioral psychology, it's referred to as behavioral momentum. But the small step has to be easy. If you keep envisioning, I remember my son Colin said this to me a long time ago. You know, he always envisioned what it would, it took him 11 years to graduate from college. He flunked out of college three different times, by the way. And But what he said to me one time is he said, you know, I always envisioned how great it would be to get this degree and never realized that it was what I did this morning that was much more critical than the feeling that I thought I could capitalize on. Because the feeling was so far in the goal was so far in the future that it's simply not enough of a motivator to get me through this particular situation right now. So baby steps. Again, that's a recommendation you'll see all of the time from us. Start with the smallest, least effortful steps possible. Beautiful. Tina, you want to take another question from the Q&A? Sure. What are some strategies to develop working memory and sustained attention for kids with cognitive impairment? Let's start by talking about what doesn't work. Computer games. The ones that are designed to, I mean, it's a multimillion dollar computer gaming industry out there where there are people who say that if you practice playing games that require working memory, your working memory will improve. And what the research shows over and over again is that your working memory may improve, but primarily in the context of playing the games, it does not generalize. So, and in fact, I... I have a great book, which I'd be happy to recommend by, I can't remember his name, Andrew Watson. And it's actually called Working Memory and Sustained Attention. It's written for classroom teachers. And he makes the point that working memory develops naturally, that there aren't strategies necessarily to enhance working memory. So two things we need to be thinking about with working memory. What does working memory overload look like? So... How can we tell when a kid, when you've thrown too much at the kid, and then you need to adjust so that you're not overloading him? And then second of all, how can we help kids develop strategies to help them remember? Their working memory is probably not going to get any better, but if they have strategies for helping them remember, whether it's rehearsal or writing things down or coming up with mnemonics, I mean, all of those, and even being able to think about, oh, would a mnemonic work here? Would rehearsal work here? Um, would, uh, listening to Spanish vocabulary words while I'm going to sleep at night, would that help? I mean, all of those, I think that's our best shot at, at, um, at improving working memory. Um, Dick, do you have anything else to add? Yeah, I would say for kids with cognitive impairment, you know, the, the, probably the most concrete and effective strategy is rehearsal. Um, you know, and again, I'm not just talking about just talking about verbal rehearsal, you know, the, the, um, When we were asking kids to learn routines, you know, whether those were self-care routines or whether those were, you know, some sort of academic routine, we literally had them walk through the task repeatedly. And it's a way to encode the information. And what's interesting about that is that it fits into this realm of, you know, cognitive rehearsal, is that By doing that, by walking through a task, when you enter that situation again, the cues in that situation prompt the memory. I mean, it's a simple association from behavioral psychology. You pair a routine with a particular setting together that after a while, the setting itself will elicit that routine. And so. As I say, we're working with kids who had cognitive impairments. We use that really reliably. For attention, I'd go back to what Peg said before. Understand what the kid's baseline, you know, for attention is and decide what you're going to use for prompts. I was just looking, you know, before my phone, Peg and I both have in our phone an app called the original beeper app. And basically, it's a random signal. that goes off at short intervals. Yes, it goes off at random, but you can set the intervals. And what you do is ask yourself, was I paying attention? But even if, again, for kids who are cognitively impaired, being able to let them know that when you hear this, are you looking at the material, you know, or are you working on this kind of thing? And then the one other thing that I would say about that is that we very effectively used timers with kids. So even with kids with pretty significant cognitive impairments. If we had a task that we wanted them to do, once we were convinced that they understood the steps of the task, we would create picture strategies for those tasks so that you're not taxing working memory at all. And then we would set timers for them to prove the efficiency of being able to do those kinds of tasks. Beautiful. And there are different kinds of timers. You can use sand timers and you can get sand timers at different lengths. There's something called time timers where... You set the amount of time the kid is going to, the child is going to work and they can, the red gradually shrinks so they can see the time passing to help them, to help them manage their time that way. I'm there. I have had some parents say to me, oh, my kid totally freaks out if I start timing him. Very often kids on the spectrum really resist, you know, being timed. So it won't work for everyone. But, but it can, and for some kids who don't like being timed. A sand timer is a gentler way for them to track time as well. There's a question here. My son wants to be independent and does not want my help and doesn't share anything with me. How can I help him? Okay, Nick, this is your thing. I guess the first question is, how old is the kid? How old is the son? I mean, I assume-Can you tell us how old this child is? Is it a teen? I'm going to guess it's a teen. Okay. And he needs help in terms of academics? I'm going to guess too. Homework, that seems to be the big concern that I'm hearing from Q&A tonight. Yeah, I don't have a simple solution to that. I mean, the bottom line is if your kid doesn't want help or your kid doesn't want- help from you, they're not going to take it. And that's the reality of it. The question is, would he take help from anybody? And so we talked earlier today about sitting down and having a meeting with a parent, a kid, and teacher, a parent, a kid, and a guidance counselor about, and let them propose or let them bring up the issue. But if in fact the kid has no interest simply in doing this at all, then... My default in that particular situation is it's a behavior and consequence kind of an issue. You know, I mean, I made these kinds of bargains with my son, you know, throughout high school. There were things that he wanted. There are things that I needed him to do. And so it was it really was an if then kind of proposition. You know, if you do this and you can't make you can't make outrageous or ridiculous demands. You know, but that's why I say that coming to agreement on some sort of basics is important. But those kinds of situations, kids have things that they value. And so and I'm more than happy with that, you know. But to say also that if we're going to if this is what you're going to get, then this is what I need from you. It's again, that's a kind of a trade or a bargain at that point. But I think it's a fair bargain for kids who are really highly resistant to that kind of stuff. This afternoon, we talked about, there was a question from a parent that they, it was after your important comments, they really felt like they had overstepped, not done a good job, and really needed to do some repair work and apologize. Can you repeat what you said about that if a parent is struggling with that? What now? I've made mistakes. I want to repair that with my child. Yeah, I think that, you know, as we said, as we talked about earlier today, it starts with an apology. And it starts with a kind of unqualified, unequivocal apology. You know, we hear, and I certainly have done this myself before, you know, where I've apologized, but I qualify the apology by saying, you know, I'm really sorry, I said this to you, but it's, it, you might not, at that point, the conversation's over. It's much more effective, you know, just to say to a kid, I'm sorry, I made a mistake. I will do my best not to do it again. What can I do? you know, to kind of demonstrate that to you. Not what can I do to help you? What can I do to demonstrate that I'm really going to try to work on this, you know, with you? And then the idea about corrective comments versus, I won't call them compliments, versus positive comments about kids'behavior. You know, for us, the ratio is, and again, this is something that's straight out of behavioral psychology. You want to see kids'behavior change? For every corrective comment that you make, make three positive comments about their behavior. And it has to be specific about the behavior. If you can establish on a regular basis that ratio, then when they see you, they don't have the expectation immediately that what they're going to hear is some sort of criticism or some sort of directive about what they need to do or what they should have done and didn't do. And just to add to that, a lot of teenagers sort of have a hard time accepting compliments. And very often from their parents, they just sort of brush them off and parents will say, he doesn't react the way I expected him to do when I compliment him. My recommendation, particularly to teenagers, is write them notes. Put it on their pillow. They'll see it at bedtime. I mean, I've had people as adults tell me stories that they could remember a teacher writing to them. or a parent writing to them. So they can be very powerful. And the same with, I mean, I do think apology in person is probably the best way to go. But there may be times when you may need to start by slipping a note under the kid's door saying, man, I just blew it. You know, let me know when we can talk about it. Yeah, both I will say, I mean, even to this day, because it's not like I don't have, you know, conflicts with my kids to this day. If I send a text message to either one of them, and they've certainly done the same, send a text message saying nothing more than, I'm sorry, I shouldn't have said what I said. I'll try to do better. It really does make a difference. You know, you're just reminding me, there is nothing more important than that relationship with your child, right? And so that if that's your key, and that's your top priority. And we do what you've suggested about leaning in to where they're at and making them feel seen and safe. We'll be halfway there or more so. Just a minute ago, we talked about the mission of this whole series is to remind caregivers about loving the child in front of you with all of their flaws, just as they are, not as we dreamt about, expected or hoped for. And so you've really helped us work. work on that mission. So I'm so grateful to you. Once again, just an absolute pleasure spending the day with you. And thanks to the many people that have stayed with us and this long, long program tonight. Thank you, Tina. Thank you, Jerrica. Thank you, Dr. Dawson. Thank you, Dr. Guards. What a pleasure to spend this time with you today. Have a great evening. This is where we go hug the kids. So we'll do that right now. All right. Good night, everybody. Thank you. Great. Take care. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Let's look at those foundational skills again. I think, you know, that's really that, you know, so much of that's what's brought us here. When you look at the foundational skills, what do you think? Work through each one and tell me if you can, what's the biggest mistake that parents make around those foundational skills? What do we do wrong when trying to help our kids? Or just say a word or another example, because that is so, so key. Okay. Actually, I prefer, and Dick, you can jump in here too. I'd prefer to throw out, you know, here's the strategy we focus on for each of them wherever we can. So response, you can negate that if you want to make it, here's what we do wrong. Because response and ambition, I think helping kids understand the value of waiting for things. So, you know, with younger kids, we talk about teach, wait, and stop. But I think that conversation is worth having with teenagers as well. And particularly, you know, I think what's really tricky for teenagers is the attraction of the cell phone. So talking with kids about how do you sequester the cell phone? How do you how do you carve out time to do your work in such a way that you're not continually distracted by your cell phones? So that's where the response inhibition piece comes in. Do you want to say anything more about that, Dick? No, I think it covers a bit. Yeah. With working memory, I think the biggest mistake, and now I'm changing my rules here, the biggest mistake people make is assuming that kids can remember stuff. I mean, working memory capacity, first of all, it can hold on to only a small amount of information for a very short period of time. So my usual piece of advice is never rely on verbal instructions. Always pair verbal with visual or cue kids, write this down or talk to kids about how are you going to remember it. I know this is hard for you. Let me just go through the rest. And then, Dick, you can add to emotion. Oh, exactly. I'd rather have you take emotional control. What would you say there, Dick? In terms of? What either, what the biggest mistake parents make or what your one piece of advice would be? You know, when it comes to teens, my one piece of advice would be your tone of voice. You know, I, you know, give an example. You know, like I, you know, again, if you've got teen kids, you've lived this over and over again. I can say to my daughter, one of two things. My daughter's name is Shan. I could say, I could start the conversation off by saying Shan. And immediately she knew what was coming and it didn't make any difference what was coming. She didn't want to hear it. Whereas if I started the conversation off with, hey, Cheyenne, it completely changes the nature and the tone of the conversation. And that's where that issue about communication and that the shift from a hierarchical relationship to a collaborative relationship really, really is important. That kids want to be approached as if, you know, they are on. an equal footing with you. They certainly kids understand they're not on an equal footing, but when it comes to these kinds of conversational things, and especially around, you know, potential conflict issues, I couldn't say enough about conversational tone as being the first and most important. The second one is regardless of what your tone is, you know, with the, even if you take on, um, like if I said, Hey, Shan, If the next thing out of my mouth is a directive, then again, it's not likely to be heard. It goes back to what Peg was talking about before. They don't necessarily want to be told what to do. So to approach that in a problem-solving way to say, hey, Shan, could we talk about or could we work out something for this? Because this is what I'm having trouble with. And at least in terms of emotional control, that mitigated a lot of the issues that. that you can run into with a teen around those kinds of issues. And again, these kids, they're highly emotional. They have a hair trigger when it comes to a parent, basically what they feel is threatening their autonomy. And building off of that, moving on to flexibility, that tone of voice is probably as important with that one as well. Because, I mean, parents can be inflexible and kids can be inflexible. And when both are being inflexible, that's a problem. And so sometimes I think it starts with the parents sort of recognizing, well, I think I'm being a little inflexible here. Can we talk about this and make, as Dick said earlier, maybe come to some compromise? So I think that's when acknowledging that both sides need to be flexible about things. The other thing that I often encourage parents to get kids to think about if they're inflexible, what happens with inflexible kids is they think there's one right answer, one pathway forward, one way anything's going to turn out. They plan a sleepover for the weekend and they assume it's going to happen. And then the weekend comes and suddenly they can't do that and they fall apart. So when parents, if they know their kids well enough to know that that might happen, they might say, boy, that'd be great if that works out. Do you have plan B? You know, what's your backup? plan and just getting them to think about a backup plan. With sustained attention, what I, the advice I give in general, and it starts with parents, but by teenagers, it can move to kids is, is have, help them gauge how long their attention span is. How long can you go before you need a break? And then building in. those breaks at that time, parents often have the idea that kids need to start their homework and stick with it until they get it done. Well, that is probably not an, not an efficient way to work because if you're pushing yourself to get something done, um, you're, you're probably not focusing on it and getting angry at whatever. So how long can you go before you need a break? And let's talk about how long the break's going to be. And then the task initiation, again, I think that's that plan with a start time. The more we can get them focused on that and agreeing on a start time. The other thing I'd say about task initiation goes back to what Peg was talking about before and something that we've seen over and over again. You can't assume that procrastination is is. indicative of lack of motivation. You know, I think that's really critical. I can't tell you the number of high school kids that I worked with who, when we did, when it really came down to figuring out why they weren't doing tasks or why they couldn't get started on tasks, as often as not, it was they didn't know where to start or they really didn't understand what the task was. And we've seen example after example of this. I don't know if you've ever... If as a parent you've ever had the opportunity to read through the rubrics that teachers give to students about plans or about projects or about tests and so forth like that, in a lot of cases the rubrics are confusing or they're woefully inadequate in terms of what really is necessary. And so Don't start off with the assumption that this is a motivational issue. Really dig down to find out what it is. And one of the ways to look at that is, are there recurring tasks where, you know, oftentimes, I'll say this for kids that I worked with in high school, open-ended writing tasks were basically an automatic stop for them, dead stop for them, because they simply didn't have the skill to be able to. either organize the material or retrieve material to write about and so forth. And it took a lot more work to sort through that and to get teachers assistance with how to help kids with that than we would have anticipated initially. I am so enjoying your back and forth around these things. May I ask you to do the same around advanced skills? Just, you know, just what you've done is so perfect. Just a little bit. expanding on that. So starting with planning and prioritizing, what do you think is most important to know? And let me answer this with all the advanced skills is that, and then we can elaborate or break it down as needed. But I think with a lot of the advanced skills, the mistakes people make is assuming kids know how to do this. It goes back to what Dick was saying in terms of motivation. They're just choosing not to do it. But I would say with all of these, planning, organization, time management, all three of those, kids don't know how to do that, in part because when they're younger, we do that for them. I mean, we don't tell a seven-year-old, you can go to bed whenever you want, just make sure you get enough sleep. So I think that's a big piece there is teasing out and then helping them. And it's also with organization. And let me just say one other thing about organization, because I found that, and I check this with my audiences all the time. When I ask my audiences who in here thinks of themselves as being pretty organized, usually about 40% of the audience raises their hand. And then I say, how far back do you remember being that way? And they say, oh, as far back as I can remember. And I think there are distinct differences between people who are naturally organized and people who are naturally disorganized. I happen to fall into that latter category. And so... I think it's very hard for people who are naturally organized to understand those of us who are disorganized that it's not just a question of my mom sent me to my room once a week to clean my room. And I hadn't a clue how to do that. And so it's trying to get into the mindset of the kid and saying, what would help you or what could we do to help you? And again, I... What do you think about that, Dick, in terms of planning, organization, time management? You know, I think you're right about the planning piece. I mean, the assumption that all kids have these skills. You know, I mean, if you take a single, you know, if I go back to task initiation for a second, and now I'm in the category of planning an organization, I say to a kid, how do you approach this task? oftentimes you get nothing but a blank stare. They don't have a clue about how to approach the task. And so no sense of prioritization, but no sense of even where to retrieve the information. And that certainly is part of planning. The other thing I'll say about time management is that In adolescence in particular, and the way that the teen brain is constructed, they're naturally inclined to underestimate the amount of time that a task, particularly a non-preferred task, is going to take and overestimate the amount of time that they actually have to be able to do any task. You know, so it's not an at all uncommon example, you know, to ask a kid, you know. What do you have for homework tonight? I got algebra. How long is it going to take you to do? Probably 45 minutes. What time are you going to start? You know, I'll start around eight o'clock or I'll start around nine o'clock or I'll start around 10 o'clock. And then to find out, you know, they get up the next morning in a panic because their homework's not done. And so that issue about time management goes back to what Peg was talking about before of making a plan. Not only does it facilitate planning and organization. But it builds in an element of acquiring a time, a sense of time management and time estimation over time that really is valuable. You know, we use that same template that Peg's talking about. We use the modified template like that to introduce coaching to a high school, to a group of high school teachers and specialists who used it with kids. And it turned out to be a very effective. intervention for the kids around those issues of planning, around the issue of organization, in particular around the issue of time management. You were talking about this one, right, Dick? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. When it comes to goal-directed persistence, again, that's goal-directed persistence starts with planning. When you think about it, what starts actually quite a ways before that. You know, the skill, if you don't have good response inhibition, goal-directed persistence isn't even on the table. You know, that's just a given. So the earlier you start with kids about, you know, about wait and stop and save and those kinds of things, the more they understand that issue of there's a delay between where I am now and where I want to get to and how is it that I'm going to manage. from where I am now to where I'm ultimately trying to get to. And so it's an advanced skill in that sense, because it requires all of these other things. It requires planning, requires organization, requires time management. And so it really is the culmination of a lot of those kinds of skills. I'll just say about metacognition that we've always had a little bit of difficulty with the, with the, the notion about you know, the definition of metacognition is thinking about thinking. I mean, it doesn't, it certainly never made a lot of sense to me when I was a philosophy major. And it doesn't make a lot of sense to parents. When it comes to kids, I think the more productive way to think about metacognition is the ability to appraise your own performance. And we've been able to bring that down so that I mean, kindergarten kids, and I don't have a lot of experience working in preschool, so I couldn't speak to preschools, but certainly in kindergarten, we were able to give kids concrete descriptors of their behavior and have them decide whether they met that particular behavior or not. And so you get very early on, you can help kids to learn to develop that self-appraisal skill. In high school, in middle school and high school, it becomes particularly important. important because if they can't judge their performance or in the case of social relationships, if they can't judge the impact of their behavior on other people, particularly their peers, it's going to get them into some major difficulty. And in a lot of cases lead to a lot of anxiety or even depression for kids. I've heard you both talk about when you talk about anxiety, the role modeling. that's so key here. Would you say something about that? What do you mean? The role of the parents in role modeling, this and anxiety and other things. Is that clear? How the role modeling that we as parents do around our own planning, our own anxiety? Okay. Yeah. I think that that does, that makes a lot of sense. I mean, I suppose the best way to look at it is that, you know, if you're frenetic, if you're, you know, disorganized, if your kids see all of that, you know, and they've probably seen it for some time now, they, you know, for better or worse, they'll model that kind of behavior. And I'm not suggesting that, I mean, there were certainly kids, you know, like disorganized organization is. by far my weakest skills. My daughter was, my, my daughter was hyper organized. So clearly that didn't have much of an impact on her. It's a little bit different story with my son, but I think that the, if you could present, if you could present yourself as a way of being able to manage these things, then, and, and in a way that that's calm, or even if you're upset, you know, to be able to demonstrate. a way to be able to manage that it has a very, very powerful impact on the emotional level of kids. It gets back to that issue, for example, of tone of voice. If you can approach a conflict situation with your kid and not lose it, you know, not get upset, not be really angry or demanding or any of those kinds of things about that, it plays a lot. Not only does it play a lot better, But it's a much more powerful model for them about how to manage conflict in their own lives. Yeah, one other thing I'd say about modeling, I think about this a lot around goal-directed persistence. Because I see, I often talk about this as being the killer skill for middle school parents, because they expect their kids to have goal-directed persistence by this age. And in many cases, they don't. Or even if they do, it's their own goals that they're willing to persist on, and they're not particularly interested in making the honor roll or whatever. So I... Often what I say to parents, because this is what got me through those years with my two sons, when I felt like they didn't have any goals at all during the middle school years. And I just kept thinking, you know what, they have two parents who have tremendous goal-directed persistence. And at the point when they've discovered their passion or they have their plan forward or something, that will kick in. And in fact, my younger son at one point said that to me, you know, in his 20s. And I was talking to him about how he'd gotten promoted at work. And someone else had, and I said, Isaac, what's going on that you got this promotion? He said, well, I got this work ethic. And I said, where did you get that? And he said, duh, from you. And interestingly enough, the other thing he said, which may come up in your next week discussion with Jennifer Wallace, he said chores, chores was where he got a work ethic. So, and I know Jennifer talked about it in the podcast I listened to, and she may, you know, she may bring it up next week. So. That's how you learn responsibility in some cases. You know, I heard the same podcast about Jennifer, who's our speaker on Tuesday. And I liked what you said about when they walk in the door, what do you have to do? How long do you think it'll take, this partnership? I took away something she said about when they walk in the door, too, about maybe not asking about what was the grade on the test, but asking how was lunch today? And so right away, I'm thinking of what you said about tone of voice. Your tone of voice is certainly going to be at a different place when you're talking about how is your lunch. And sort of leaning into the fact that you are there for them. We are going to figure this out together. Let's get into some of these questions, which are great. If a person has ADD, do the executive skills ever fully develop? Or do they just need to develop strategies to be organized in their lives as adults? You want to take that, Dick? The short answer, and again, I have a bias. My son's had an attention disorder that was diagnosed when he was very young. And no, he still struggles. He'd be the first person to admit that he still struggles with those kinds of skills. So I don't think there's any way to... completely, you know, in cases of, you know, what I call, you know, mild ADD or mild ADHD, I think people, you know, a lot of kids, you know, seem to get past that. But for kids for whom it's a significant problem, it's probably some parts of it are always going to be a struggle. The real question is, and it comes down to this issue of metacognition, number one, do they recognize it? Number two, are they able to develop? you know, compensatory strategies. In the book that we wrote on young adults, my son writes chapter and verse about those kinds of issues, about how they played out when he was in high school, about, well, actually starting. about how they played out when he was in elementary school. You know, the opening line of the book is, when I was six in first grade, I forgot to push in my chair. And when we decided to write the book, he opened with that line, which told me, and he had a very vivid recollection of that, you know, talking about it. And so I think he was always aware of that. And in a lot of ways, that served him well, because he's been able to develop any number of compensatory strategies around those kinds of situations. But I think for an awful lot of people that have moderate to more significant ADHD, it's a persistent problem. Thank you. Thank you. So people thanking you for their time. And now the next question, when the parents grade expectations differ from the teens, in this case, the teen is trying to lower the bar. How do you navigate through that as far as maximum effort? I'm going to let you handle that one too. You know, I guess I would, I guess I'd go back to. something that Jennifer Wallace talked about, you know, in part, and that's an issue. Well, and also a question that we put in the slide earlier, whose choice is it? Whose life is it? And it's not to say, it's not to say that, I mean, I certainly had certain expectations for my kids'grades, but those expectations were based on what they said they wanted to do. And I think when parents and kids differ about grades, part of the question is, what's driving the parent expectations about higher grades? Is it the phenomenon that Jennifer Wallace feels about when achievement culture becomes toxic? And is it wanting to ensure that not just that your kids have good opportunities, but they have the best possible opportunities available? And that's why in that slide about can you come to some sort of a consensus or compromise, I think it's a reasonable consideration to do that again. But also that early question, if... I had a young man that I coached come to me and say in his junior year, he wanted to be a marine biologist. And so we pulled up, you know, told me the schools that he was interested in. We pulled up the schools and we pulled up at that time, you know, SATs were still required by everybody. We pulled up what the average grade point average of admitted students were. And I just gave him that information. He didn't need to hear it from me. You know. He was carrying a C minus average in school at that point. And so I didn't want to say to him, this is never going to happen, you know, because I don't I don't want to do that. But at the same time, I wanted to give him the information and say, here it is. You know, you decide what you want to do with this. Interestingly enough, he went to. He did marginally better in high school after that, but went to community college, improved his grades significantly, and then ultimately end up in a four-year college as a marine biology major. So, you know, I think that, I mean, again, even though it looked to me like he didn't have a chance in the world of doing this, I didn't want to put him off from it, nor did I want to make that decision. I wish I had an easier answer for people, but I really do think that... that if you've got an idea about what your kids should be getting for grades, what's it based on? And how does it measure up against what their particular goals are in terms of where they're going after high school? Yeah, interestingly enough, my older son told me well into his 20s, so after he graduated from high school and college, he said, yeah, my goal throughout high school and college was to maintain a B minus average. And And in fact, that's what he did. If you look at his high school transcript, he had a B minus average. He said C's would be embarrassing. I was hanging out with smart friends. I didn't want C's. But he also said something which, and I was one of those students who had to make the honor roll, who would have wondered what my class rank is. I spent my senior years in exchange students, so it wasn't an issue, but I would have wondered that. So I was very grade driven. And when I listened to my son describe what his rationale was, he said, I would have had to given up. give up the rest of my life to be that kind of student. And that I didn't want to do that. And, you know, looking back, it didn't hold him back. And I actually think he had a healthier approach to school than I did. So they're leaning into that to what they're where they're at. And having them feel seen and heard is beautiful. Some more questions. What tasks are involved with keeping track of belongings? My son started middle school last week, and he's struggling to remember to gather his notebooks. his pencils, his sweatshirts, et cetera, after each class. So that's basically working memory. I mean, that's having to remember. And as I said earlier, there are limits to working memory. So the easiest way around that is to create a routine. So, I mean, again, kids at that age do not want to use checklists. You might be able to get them to put something on the inside of his notebook where no one else sees it. Or you might get him to rehearse. He might be able to come up with an acronym for the five things he has to remember. But the more it can become routinized, then the easier it will be for him to remember everything. I also have had kids that they use apps. If they've got phones, there are really good apps, both reminder apps and checklist apps. That, that, um... that are available to them. Common Sense Media lists a whole host of those kinds of things that are available and safe for kids. And the interesting thing about that is that it respects the autonomy of the kid, takes advantage of their notion or their knowledge of technology, but really puts it in their hands. And it also capitalizes on something called offloading. I mean, I use, when I'm going to the grocery store, when my wife is going to the grocery store, we use an app called Cozy, because there isn't any way in the world I'm going to remember all of these kinds of things. And that works very well for me. But it means rather than having to hold things in working memory, I can dump all of that into the app, and then it's gone. And whatever I need my working memory for that I think is probably more important than groceries, I'm able to do that. That notion of offloading applies in a variety of different situations. We keep our keys and our phones in a basket by the door when we go to bed at night. If people search the notion of offloading and working memory, you'll see all kinds of good suggestions about how to offload information. And in a time when kids are already overwhelmed with information, It's silly to expect them to hold this information online, whatever other tool is available. We've looked at technology as a really, I think, effective transition from parents being the prompter, parents being the reminder, to kids being able to use something on their own that frees them up from having to listen to parents either remind or nag them about this kind of stuff. And it really does make them feel more independent. Very good. Very good. What do you, what suggestions do you have for high school students who are resistant to even trying something like the time management? They refuse to complete it or behave like it's not happening. Should we write it down for them if we can get them to verbally engage? I'll let you do that, Peg. Okay. So again, this comes back to, are we trying to impose our solutions onto kids? And so, Yeah, I think it has to start with what will work for you. And sometimes we may not be happy with the answers, but we might be able to, and I think Dick alluded to this earlier, we might be able to say, okay, let's try this out for a couple of weeks and see how it works. So if the kid says, I'm not going to fill out this time estimate or whatever, if we're working on time estimation, I'm not going to do that. And then you agree that, okay, so as long as the homework gets done before 10 o'clock at night, we don't have to worry about that. So let's see how that goes. And after a couple of weeks, you can look at the data and say. Um, so how did that go for you? And do you think it might be helpful to, to tweak this a little? Um, useful, but I guess the other thing I would say, and Dick and I talked about this a couple of days ago in terms of what to bring up. And that is that, that a lot, the, a lot of the strategies that you think will work where you're for your kids would work for your kids. They just don't want to hear it from you. And as the parent, because, you know, primary developmental task of adolescence is to become independent. And that means becoming independent from parents. So we will, we will frequently recommend that parents, um, reach out to hire a coach to, because kids are more willing to listen to an adult outside the home at some ages than they are willing to listen to their parents. Um, and so it may be possible, uh, to get. to get a kid to, to agree to work with a coach. I did have one time I saw a kid where his parents asked me for a name of a coach. And I said, does your kid want to work with a coach? And they said, no, he's not, he doesn't want to do that at all. So I met with the kid and I said, you know, your parents are a little worried about your grades. What kind of grades would you like to be earning? He said he was eighth grade. So I like to be earning A's and B's. And I said, okay, so those aren't the grades you're earning now. Your parents say that a couple of things affect grades, homework completion and test scores. Your parents are thinking that homework's a problem. He said, no, homework's not that big a deal. I get it in most of the time. It's studying for tests that I have a problem with. And so I said, you know, I've got a great strategy for studying for tests. I don't think it's one you could learn on your own. Your mom said she's willing to help you or your resource room. This kid had a resource room teacher whom he liked. Or your resource room teacher may be willing to work with you. Which of those might, I gave him choices every step of the way. The kids said, oh, definitely the resource room teacher. And so what we agreed on was that when his first progress report came out halfway through the marking period, if he was on target to reach his goals, I would not give his parents the name of a coach. And at the end of the marking period, we'd look at the report card again. If he was still on target, I still wouldn't give his parents the name of the coach. So he was actually working. To avoid working with a coach, of course, the irony of that is his resource group teacher was his coach. And he was willing to work with her. I contacted her. So there are ways to find ways to help kids where you, the parent, are not the direct agent of that support. And sometimes kids are willing to deal with that. Yeah, I think that the other option there is that an option that we've used before is because it can put parents in a real tough position. physician, go to the school and talk with them, you know, with the kid, you know, and, you know, the, the, I know that we've had schools that were willing before that if kids, you know, for example, kids weren't getting homework done on a routine basis, teachers were more than happy to, you know, to have them go to assigned study periods that were homework periods, or in some cases, stay after school. I mean, we ran a program at one of the schools that I worked at where people, that's basically what happened. If your work wasn't completed for, you know, for that particular day, then you didn't go, they didn't send you to detention. Detention in a lot of cases, I mean, is a waste of time. But you could see as soon as you had the task completed. But we always did this with the caveat that make sure it's a task the kids can do to begin with. you know, and again, is the task a good match for the kid, or are there some other skills? But those kinds of interventions worked well. It makes the school the agent. Not only that, it capitalizes on something that kids, from a consequence perspective, that kids don't want to give up, and that's their own time. Right, sure. Yeah. And so I know Glenbar, for example, has after-school tutoring. It's called STRIBE, and many of the schools do. Yes, you're absolutely right. I'm glad you mentioned that. I like this question. How does gaming influence executive functioning? Okay, that's really complicated. Because it depends on the gaming. It depends on how it's being used. There are games out there which really strengthen executive skills. Go ahead, Dick. But say what the caveat to that is. You know, when you say really strengthen executive skills, are you talking about across the board in every situation? Oh, no, within the context of playing the games. Yeah, right. But I think there are some, and I mean, there are video games. There's a multimillion dollar gaming industry out there that says it can strengthen executive skills by playing their games. I was thinking about more of the kinds of games that kids choose to play that require problem solving and that require interaction with other kids. A lot of online games have group efforts. So that's what I was saying. I'm glad you brought that up because I was not. thinking of the games designed to teach executive skills. But I think that the other thing, you know, we just, my son and I just finished writing a tech chapter for the new book. And, you know, there's some really fascinating, as Peg said, there were games out there that, you know, improve motor control and actually improve attention in the context primarily of those games. But I think that the other thing to think about is that, and this isn't just true for, well, let me, I could ask, we could put the question to the audience. If you're trying to get online, when you turn your computer and trying to get online, how long is it before you decide that there's some sort of malfunction in your connection? Very long. 10, 15, 20 seconds. I mean, if I try to sign on to my internet provider, if I try to sign on, for example, if I open up Google Chrome and Google doesn't open, it's not very long before I think that there's a problem. Gilda, you'll probably remember this. Maybe other people do. Do you remember AOL? Where you could stick the phone in a cradle and you'd come back an hour later. And if you're online, you consider yourself fortunate. So the impact that that's had on both adults and kids, I saw an estimate from a research study that was done that said our attention span over this past generation has decreased by half based on our utilization and access to technology alone. We've become acclimated to instantaneous. And so from that perspective, it probably has been detrimental, not just for kids, but for all of us. Yeah, right. Thank you. Thank you. How can a parent rebuild trust when they have been known to have the wrong tone of voice and always bringing up the negative characteristics or behavior in their student? How were you able to repair the relationship? How can you repair the relationship with the child then? Apologize. Yeah, I was going to say, yeah. Here's the thing about apologies. Make it make it unequivocal. This is not, Shane, I know I yelled at you, but it's the but that kills off any effectiveness of the apology. You know, if I went to my daughter or my son or if I go to another kid because, you know, again, working with. high school kids, it's easy to step over a boundary that they don't like. You know, to say them flat out, can I talk to you? I made a mistake. I shouldn't have said it. It was a bad thing to do. I'm sorry for that. That's the opening. And then after that, the second part of what you asked is that, and this goes to something that, you know, we've talked to parents over and over again. For every corrective comment that you make, the ratio ought to be three positive comments. So you've got to notice more of what the good qualities are than what the bad qualities are. Because otherwise, even from a behavioral perspective, if your kid sees you coming, automatically they associate you with criticism. And it really does take a while to undo that. And it really does take a lot of effort to do that. But as I say, starting with an apology is the best way to go. No less questions here. Do you have any advice when a 10-year-old kid has lots of ideas for projects and will eagerly create a plan to complete them, but then gets bored and abandons them early on and wants to move on to the next thing? So I'll answer first and then Dick can give his answer, maybe completely different from mine. To my mind, that's typical 10-year-old behavior. And I'm not sure because they're still at an age where they're exploring a wide variety of interests, etc. And this is spoken by someone who started a quilt when my oldest son was in his first year of life and it's still half finished in my... in my chest off of my bedroom. So take that with a grain of salt, but I worry about pushing kids to finish stuff if they're still at that exploration stage. And I, to me, the 10 year old is, is the, is the key there. Although I worry at any age, because we all get bored and do something else. But Dick, do you have a different answer to that one? No, I, I agree. When it comes to projects, I guess the one thing that I would say is that I wonder if that leaks into other things where kids decide to do something and then walk away from it before they've given it a chance. Parents raise that issue all of the time about kids say they want to play a musical instrument. Kids say they want to do art. Kids say they want to try a particular sport. and then turn around and walk away. And I think the fair thing is, if kids have, this applies less to a project, although I'll give you a project example in a second, but it applies less to projects than it does to those kinds of things. I think it's fair to say to kids in advance, this is what it involves. You know, for example, this is the amount of practice it's going to require. This is what your teacher is going to expect. This is what your coach is going to expect. And if they decide still, because oftentimes they'll hear that, but they won't hear it. But to say to them that then you can try it, but this is what the expectation is. And you keep the expectation small so that you don't eliminate the possibility of bailing out, but you create an expectation in advance. about that, you know, obviously, particularly if it involves money. When it comes to other things, my daughter was notorious for this, you know, not so much when she, well, she might have been doing it when she was 10, but certainly by 11 or 12, she'd come, she'd spitball a lot of ideas. I'm going to work for the State Department and go overseas. Okay. And so, you know, like, We used to just say, wow, that's a fascinating idea. They have a really interesting career. Let's go to the State Department website and see what a career involves. And I did that with her over and over and over again. And by the time she gets to the second or third page of the State Department requirements and the expectations and all of those kinds of things, it's gone by the boards. So I don't think there's any harm in expecting. exploring those kinds of things with kids. And again, I'm trying to, in the teen book, my son used a particular phrase, but basically it was the idea that defer to the experts rather than you saying, you know, like, do you understand what this is going to take to do it? Just put the information out there and let them chase it and let them decide if they want to chase it or not. Kids are great about urban myths. you know, too. Did you know Verizon is giving away 10 free phones if you sign up for a plan? Yeah. I can't tell you the number of times I've heard those stories from kids. You know, the easiest thing to do is call Verizon. Yeah, right. Call them. Well, you know, you gave us, I really feel like you've helped us build our confidence around these issues. Let us know what's normal and what we can really... what expectations we should have of our kids. I have so enjoyed this interchange back and forth between these two amazing experts. I know I'm hearing already so many thank yous from people who are emailing me. We're gonna be back again at 7 p.m. Central. We're gonna go until 8.15 this evening. If your question wasn't answered, we're gonna be putting together a blog and we'll have some of that information about some of you have asked about what are the amazing books. So all that information will be there and more. So grateful. I know I'm speaking for the hundreds of people that were listening this afternoon. So I thank you and I look forward to seeing you this evening.