As I help my
children to learn to manage their daily routines, schoolwork, and social life,
I have heard the child development term “executive function” and attended seminars
on helping children develop their “executive function”. Suggestions include check lists, post-it
notes around the house, agenda books for organization, a 5-point scale to
regulate behaviors and emotion, alternative approaches, flexibility, etc. It is all rather challenging for children
under 16 years old in today’s busy world.
Experts say the frontal and prefrontal cortex won’t be fully developed
until 22 to 25 years old. Meanwhile, we
as parents need to be their surrogates and executive officers.
Being a
young child and a teenager’s executive officer is certainly not an easy
task. I hope my kids will have strong executive
function skills and manage their life effectively. Today I read that bilingual ability may help develop
executive function. That’s worth noting.
“Over the past decade, Ellen Bialystok, a distinguished research professor
of psychology at York University in Toronto, has shown that bilingual children
develop crucial skills in addition to their double vocabularies, learning
different ways to solve logic problems or to handle multitasking, skills that
are often considered part of the brain’s so-called executive function.
These higher-level cognitive abilities are
localized to the frontal and prefrontal cortex in the brain. “Overwhelmingly,
children who are bilingual from early on have precocious development of
executive function,” Dr. Bialystok said.
Dr. Kuhl calls bilingual babies “more
cognitively flexible” than monolingual infants…”
