How Challenges at School May Signify Good Executive Functioning

The emotional dynamics of a child’s home life will shape their cognitive and social development. As such, executive functioning is a process of adaptation largely guided by the social environment of our families. These early experiences create templates of thinking, feeling and behaving which guide how we move through the rest of the world. A child who must adapt to a dysfunctional family system often exhibits poor behavior at school because it has proven useful or protective at home. For example, if a child is reprimanded for expressing herself at home, she will learn that she is safest when acting in ways that are quiet and reserved. While this behavior is adaptive at home, a teacher might label it as withdrawn or antisocial in a classroom setting. Similarly, if a child’s role was to relieve family tensions by being the center of attention and making everyone laugh, teachers will likely find this behavior to be disruptive and distracting in the classroom. While it is clear to see how either student (withdrawn or disruptive)  may be problematic in school, this behavior should not be mistaken for defiance or even a brain deficit. To the contrary, it is the result of necessary and adaptive EF responses to parental control or difficult home environments. In these cases we can avoid misunderstandings and misdiagnosis by identifying the origin of the behavior and, when appropriate, offer alternate strategies that are better adapted to the school environment. 

Let’s consider the development of a child’s executive functioning as their brains and minds adapt to an insecure parent who regulates their own anxiety through excessive control. These parents are often intolerant of alternative opinions and ways of doing things, finding their child’s differences of opinions as rejections. Through countless interactions with their parent’s rigid defenses, the child learns that their ideas, interests, and autonomy trigger negative emotions and rejection from the parent. They learn that their survival depends upon their compliance and continued dependence on the parent, creating the adaptation in the child of avoiding their own thoughts, feelings, and desires. 

The child’s normal attempts at autonomy or individuation will be met with the parent’s emotional dysregulation, criticism and rejection. Due to the child’s dependence on their parents and family, they will conform their thinking, feeling and behavior to conform to the parent’s psychological needs. On the surface, it looks as if the child lacks the intelligence and EF to be competent and autonomous, when they have actually been quite successful in adapting to the invisible emotional environment that their teacher and therapists never see. When their parents search for answers to their children’s failures at school, they are told by professionals that the culprit is problems with attention and executive functioning. Of course, they are usually blind to the psychological drama and would be unable to accept responsibility. This directs the solutions to be focused on medication and forced discipline for their supposed neurological problems.

The diagnostic labels, medication, and failure at school trigger shame, erode self-confidence, and reinforce the need to rely on the parent. Because they lack boundaries, assertiveness, and a sense of their own power, this cycle perpetuates and creates more evidence for their lack of proper EF. The child’s stellar emotional awareness of the parent and their successful adaptation to their parent’s unconscious world is never recognized for the high-level of adaptational executive functioning it represents.

Children are not developmentally capable of uncovering the source and remedy for their symptoms without the support of an adult. This is because the processes we’ve described are unconscious coping mechanisms that children lack the cognitive ability to identify and verbalize. Successful treatment relies on curious and compassionate educators and mental health professionals to consider how the EF challenges they exhibit at school may actually just be a mismatch of what is required of them in their home environments. This provides a foundation to understand the child and find effective strategies to enhance their ability to thrive and learn at school.