“As essential as our personal skills may be, none of us are born with the skills that enable us to control impulses, make decisions and plans, and/or remain pinpoint focused.

What we are born with, is the potential to develop these specific capacities… or not to develop them… dependent upon our own personal experiences through early life. This includes infancy, the entire measure of our childhood, and well through our adolescent years. Yes, our genes provide those blueprints, but it is our early environments that we live in and that our children live in that will eventually have been created, structured, honed, and leaves behind those lasting signatures on our lives and our genes. What we master is known as Executive Function.

Executive function simply means to be able to “execute” or carry out any sort of task or function… in order to get things done.  “Function” is the action, role, or process that we use to accomplish these things: thus, Executive Function.

Granted, the influence and understanding of how or whether our children’s individual genetic potential is expressed through brain circuits that underlie the executive function capacities is a vast undertaking. These essential skills are developed through practice, practice, and more practice. They are strengthened and sharpened by the experiences through which they are both applied and refined. In the end, providing the essential support that children need in order to establish, build and retain these particular skills come to them at home, in child care, and in other settings where they experience regularly the simple structure of society and its responsibilities.

The ability for our children to be able to focus, to grasp, and to work a range of simple to complex information in their mind is essential. The skills to work through filtering out distractions, and switching gears and directions, much like driving or even being the air traffic controller in a busy airport, is the hallmark of a fully developed executive function control that we hope our children will eventually command.”