How to Teach Your Child Executive Function Skills

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Executive function shapes your child’s ability to plan, focus, and self-regulate–and it’s built in everyday moments. Here is how your Babywise routine already lays the groundwork, plus age-by-age tips to strengthen it further.

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If you have spent any time in parenting circles lately, you have probably heard the term “executive function” thrown around — especially in relation to school-aged children. It sounds clinical and a little intimidating. What does that even mean? Do you need a degree to understand it? How do you even teach it?

But here is the good news. If you are already following a Babywise routine, you are very naturally building executive function skills in your child every single day. In this post, we will discuss what executive function actually is, why it matters for long-term success, and how you can be intentional about strengthening these skills at every age and stage.

Table of Contents

  • What Is Executive Function
  • Why Executive Function Skills Matter
  • The Babywise Connection: You Are Already Doing This
  • Teaching Executive Function Skills By Age
  • Practical Strategies That Work at Any Age
  • Common Pitfalls to Avoid

What Is Executive Function

Executive function is the set of mental skills that lests your child plan ahead, control impulses, manage emotions, hold information in their head while they work with it, and shift gears when plans change. Think of it as the brain’s air traffic control system. It isn’t one single skill, but a whole cluster of them working together, usually broken down into a few key areas.

  • Working memory is the ability to hold and use information in the moment, like remembering the three steps of a morning routine without being reminded of each one.
  • Impulse control, or inhibitory control, is what allows a child to wait their turn, resist grabbing a sibling’s toy, or stop and think before reacting.
  • Cognitive flexibility is the ability to switch between tasks or adjust to a change in plans without falling apart.
  • Planning and organization are what let an older child break a big task, like a school project, into smaller, manageable steps.

None of us are born with these skills fully developed. They mature slowly, over the years. Most of the processing for these skills happens in the prefrontal cortex, which isn’t fully developed until about age 25. That means executive function is a skill set we are actively teaching our children for basically their entire childhood (and perhaps trying to guide them through in early adulthood).

Why Executive Function Skills Matter

When you first start to think about these skills, you can feel a lot of pressure. One more thing to worry about! And it feels kind of big. But this isn’t about just adding one more thing to your plate. It helps give you a lot of “why” behind many of the things I recommend you do as a Babywise parent. These skills enable our kids to be capable, independent adults someday. They matter.

And they matter now, whatever age your child is. Strong executive function is linked to better academic performance, healthier relationships, and even long-term physical health. A child who can regulate impulses and plan ahead is a child who can make good decisions under pressure. Researchers have found that executive function skills in early childhood predict things like school readiness and social competence just as strongly as IQ does, sometimes more so. This is a skill set that pays dividends for the rest of your child’s life, whether they are trying to sit through a boring class in high school or manage a household budget as an adult.

The Babywise Connection: You Are Already Doing This

Here is the part that will ease some of your stress about this. The eat/wake/sleep cycle, the predictable daily schedule and flow, independent playtime, setting expectations that your child be patient and wait — all of these things that you are working on, have worked on, or will be working on have executive function training in disguise.

When you put your baby in independent playtime, you are teaching that little brain to self-entertain, problem-solve, and tolerate a little boredom without immediately needing rescue.

>>>Read: Independent Playtime: The Ultimate Overview

When your toddler moves into roomtime, that skill deepens even further because now there is more space, more temptations, and more opportunity to practice self-control. When you avoid baby-proofing every item in your house, your child is working on self-control.

When you require your child to do chores, you are helping develop executive function skills.

A predictable daily rhythm also does something subtle but powerful for executive function: it reduces the mental load your child has to carry. When a child knows what comes next, their brain doesn’t have to spend energy figuring out the unknown, so it has more bandwidth left over for the harder work of self-regulation. This is one of the quieter benefits of a Babywise schedule that doesn’t get talked about enough.

Teaching Executive Function Skills By Age

Here are ideas for teaching executive function skills at different ages.

Babies and Toddlers

With babies, executive function starts with the basics of self-soothing and tolerating brief delays. When you don’t rush in the first moment your baby fusses for a moment during playtime or when you let your toddler wait a minute for a snack instead of producing it instantly, you are building the very first layers of impulse control.

You will also start independent playtime as soon as you can, even with a baby. Another great thing to do is to NOT baby-proof every shelf in your house.

>>>Read: Tips for Baby-Proofing Your Home

Toddlers are also ready for very simple choices, like choosing between two shirts that you present or choosing what book to read at story time. Offering controlled choices lets a toddler practice decision-making in a low-stakes way, which is an early form of planning.

BUT you must make sure you require the child to actually live with the choice. When they choose the red shirt, don’t switch to blue an hour later. Have them learn to live with the consequence they choose.

So, we want to:

  • Teach self-soothing skills
  • Have independent playtime
  • Avoid baby-proofing too much
  • Allow choices between two items (and require they live with the choice)
  • Let the child have delayed gratification when they ask for things

Preschoolers

Preschool is when working memory really starts to come online for a child. This is a great age to introduce simple, multi-step instructions, like asking your child to put their shoes on, grab their water bottle, and meet you at the door. Give the instruction once and resist the urge to repeat it. It feels slower in the moment, but you are building a muscle.

This is also the age when chores start to matter more than just helping around the house. A simple job like putting away toys or setting the table teaches a preschooler to follow a sequence from start to finish, which is planning and organization in its earliest form.

>>>Read: A Beginner’s Guide to Teaching Kids To Do Chores

So, we want to:

  • Continue with what we did for babies and toddlers- increasing decision-making options
  • Give multi-step instructions to follow
  • Have daily chores

School-Aged Kids

Once your child starts school, the demands on executive function increase dramatically. Suddenly there is homework to track, a backpack to pack, and social situations to navigate. This is a wonderful age to hand over more ownership of routines and responsibilities. Instead of reminding your child of every step of the morning, try a checklist or morning routine cards so they can take ownership of their own morning routine.

>>>Read: Printable Morning Routine Cards for Kids

Allow your child to have ownership and responsibility for bringing things to school like their homework and their library book. Let it be their job. Much better to learn by experiencing forgetting a library book and developing that executive function skill.

>>>Read: Should You Bail Your Child Out?

Chores continue to be one of the best executive function tools we have, because they require a child to remember what needs to be done, plan how to do it, and follow through without a parent standing over their shoulder the whole time.

So, we want to:

  • Give ownership of prepping the backpack for school to our child
  • Give ownership of getting ready for the day over to our child
  • Continue to have chores
  • Allow increased freedoms as your child demonstrates the ability to handle them

Tweens and Teens

As kids move into the tween and teen years, executive function work shifts toward longer-term planning. Your child might be managing a school project over many weeks, budgeting an allowance, or juggling a sport schedule with homework and home responsibilities.

This is the age to step back and let natural consequences do some of the teaching. If your tween forgets their homework because they didn’t pack their backpack the night before, that lived experience teaches planning far more effectively than a lecture ever will.

Independence in chores also continues to matter here. You might hand over a whole domain, not just one task. So they might be in charge of the whole family room, not just dusting.

It is also good to hand over more agency in their schedule. Rather than mapping out the after-school flow, have things that are required before certain fun things or privileges happen. Maybe you don’t say “First, we do homework, then chores, then piano practice, then you can play video games.” Maybe you just say, “Once homework, chores, and piano practice are complete, you are free to play video games (or go hang out with a friend)” but let them choose the order and even the timing. Do not give in and let them go hang out with the friend before the required tasks are done. They won’t put it off again.

>>>Read: Why Daily Block Schedules are Great for Your Older Kids

So, we want to:

  • Allow for natural consequences; we don’t save them from their actions and choices
  • Increase responsibility at home
  • Allow for more control over their routine
  • Increase freedoms

Practical Strategies That Work at Any Age

A few strategies show up again and again in the research on executive function, and they map beautifully onto what most of us are already trying to do as parents.

  • Visual schedules and checklists take the burden of remembering off your child’s working memory and put it on paper instead, which frees up mental energy for the actual task.
  • Narrating your own thinking out loud, like saying “I need to leave in ten minutes, so I am going to load the dishwasher now since I have time so I don’t have to later,” models planning in a way that sinks in over time.
  • Games that require waiting, taking turns, or following multi-step rules, from Simon Says with little ones to strategy board games with older kids, are basically executive function workouts disguised as fun.
  • Giving your child room to struggle a little before you jump in to help builds the problem-solving stamina that executive function depends on.

Common Pitfalls to Avoid

The biggest pitfall I see is over-scaffolding. It is so tempting to just do the thinking for your child because it is faster and less frustrating in the moment. But every time we swoop in and finish the task, pack a bag, or make a decision the child was capable of making, we take away a rep that they needed.

If you struggle with this (most of us do!), use my strategy of either walking away or making yourself busy with something else nearby. Clean something, read something, fold something…just be busy so you don’t jump in too soon.

Another pitfall is inconsistency. Executive function thrives on predictable structure, so a routine that changes constantly or expectations that shift depending on your mood that day actually makes this harder for your child to develop. This doesn’t mean you need to be rigid, but it does mean consistency is doing more work than we sometimes give it credit for.

Finally, watch out for setting expectations that outpace your child’s developmental stage. A four-year-old cannot plan a week ahead, and a seven-year-old cannot manage a long-term project without support. Meeting your child where they actually are, rather than where you wish they were, keeps the whole process encouraging rather than discouraging.

Conclusion

Executive function can sound like one more overwhelming parenting buzzword, but at its heart, it is simply the ability to think before acting, plan ahead, and follow through. Those are skills we can nurture in small, everyday moments. If you are already doing independent playtime, holding a predictable schedule, and handing your child age-appropriate chores, you have a real head start. The rest is just being intentional about it as your child grows, and trusting that these small daily investments add up to a child who can manage their own life with confidence.

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