Executive Function – People with A.D.H.D. often have poor executive functioning or executive skills. Executive skills are sets of inter-locked skills allowing a person to plan and organize their thoughts and activities. This is associated with frontal lobe functioning. A person with less executive skill means they are not as flexible in their thinking as others and may have trouble shifting from task to task, or organizing tasks on a timeline (temporal). Executive skills enable a person to use attention (choose what they pay attention to), attend to information, and sustain or divide their attention as needed. We use executive skills to organize work, set goals and sub-goals, decide what steps to take, keep track of how we succeed or fail and re-assess our plans. This is self-monitoring or self-awareness.

Executive skills also allow us to keep a set, meaning once we start a task, we can keep going without losing track of what we intended to do, even when interrupted. People develop executive skills as they mature. Children with weak executive skills show more issues at school as they move into higher grades, because they need to plan more for different kinds of workloads. 

Weak executive function may not show up obviously early in school, because children are not expected to organize themselves. As homework is longer and more complex with more steps to track (think of a term project), students are expected to complete these more complicated assignments with less and less help from teachers. The student must now keep track of their assignments in all classes, with differing due dates, differing materials, while ensuring all steps are completed on time. Students with weak executive skills can forget any or all steps. Researchers have identified weak executive function as an important feature of A.D.H.D.

We assess executive functioning in all evaluations Complete our New Patient Inquiry Form for more about an assessment.