As a speech-language pathologist, I was trained in many popular approaches, and a lot of them lean on one idea: make it fun. Keep it stimulating. Keep the child engaged. There is a time and place for fun. But the more I worked in schools with children with ADHD, the more uneasy I felt.
I was constantly battling to get my students to buy in to things like writing a paragraph or working on syntax. For many of them, fun meant iPads and video games, and I could not compete with that. An ADHD brain looking for dopamine is not going to choose a sentence-building game over a screen designed to hold its attention.
I could try everything to make a task fun, and at the end of the day, life still asks us to do boring things. We brush our teeth. We wait in line at the DMV. We do our taxes. No amount of games will make those exciting, and no one will be there to turn them into a game for our children forever.
Teaching kids to tolerate boring tasks
Learning more about executive function changed how I saw my job. For these students to learn, the first step wasn’t disguising the boring or challenging parts. It was teaching them how to tolerate them. This is a very crucial step in building executive function, learning how to persist through things that don’t give instant gratification.
That led me to think about where children build that skill. From my perspective, executive function is built through lived experience like your daily routines and your daily chores. For many neurodivergent children, modern life offers fewer chances to practice this skill because of the amenities modern life offers to us. Children spend much of their day sitting, either observing or doing things that deliver quick dopamine, like video games. Neither one asks them to stay with something slow, effortful, or a little boring.
What I learned in Togo, West Africa
Part of what shaped my thinking was time spent in Togo, West Africa, where I was learning from the indigenous people. What I noticed there was how many chances children had, over an ordinary day, to practice [attention, impulse control, and a sense of time]. They helped with real tasks, waited their turn, and stayed with things that weren’t exciting. None of it was a lesson. It was just daily life.
I’m not saying we should all move to the village. Most of us can’t, and many wouldn’t want to. But it showed me what the ingredients are, and that we can bring them back into our own homes.
Building executive function in daily routines
So my goal is to help families see the practice that’s already hiding in their daily routines, and to add language to it so children can build grit and perseverance through what they say and do. This approach also fits families from many cultures, because it starts with their own routines rather than trying to fit into a mold.
Try this week: Just simply notice if your child is resistant to doing difficult or boring tasks. If this an area they struggle with just make a mental note that you will need to build their stamina for doing these types of tasks. More in later posts.