For the next installment of our 6-part series: Time Management Skills to Help You & Your Child Today, we’re going to focus on goal-directed persistence and sustained attention, which in simpler words means skills that help you to stay focused.  These skills are essential for students to stay on topic, especially during long work periods, and to finish a long-term goal. 

With so many distractions around them – screens big and small, multitasking multiple subjects, extracurricular clubs and sports, etc. – students tend to have trouble keeping their attention focused on what they’re working on, even if they don’t have a diagnosis of ADHD.

I can relate! Wondering if you can too? Do you notice, as I do, that you’ll often have a variety of unfinished tasks going at once as a way to distract yourself from doing the items you dislike doing? I notice (in myself and my students) that we struggle to finish one project before we’re pulled into another. It takes a concerted effort (and much practice!) to stick with one task to completion. It’s increasingly difficult to stay focused in our busy technological age, so these are skills we all need to practice and strengthen. 

So, let’s dive into our fancy-schmancy-sounding terms and how they can help your child (and even you) with your time management. 

Goal Directed Persistence

We see goal-directed persistence appear often in sports, academic achievement, and personal development, for example, being better at keeping in touch with friends. You have a goal, and in order to ensure that you see that goal through from start to finish, not only do you need systems in place to support you, but you also need to exercise consistent determination and focus throughout.

For example, if your daughter’s softball team wants to compete for the championship this season, everyone on her team needs to show up to every practice and give their all during every practice. Any shortcomings on the field need to be improved, both individually and with the team as a whole.

Perhaps your daughter is not the best batter. She’ll need to work every week to improve those skills specifically, in addition to regular practice.  She might even need to spend some time going to the batting cages or working with a pitcher/trainer.

These extra steps require persistence until the goal is achieved. Visually documenting these goals, i.e. keeping track of her progress on a whiteboard, on her bedroom wall can help to keep her consistently focused on her progress, as the championship game approaches. 

Sustained Attention

It’s entirely possible to go through the motions of working toward your goal without moving the needle any closer to the end result you desire. To prevent you (or your child) from just going through the motions of studying (without any real understanding of the material), you’ll want to study in a way that not only works with your learning style, but also makes it more likely you’ll be better equipped to recall the information later.  This is where sustained attention comes in…making sure you keep your eyes on the prize and are working in ways that sustain and enrich your progress towards a specific goal.

For example, let’s say your son is studying for an important chemistry exam that’s happening tomorrow. We can all agree it’s not the greatest idea for him to be texting with a friend simultaneously. It would be best for him to be creating flashcards with the vocabulary and asking you (or a friend) to quiz him, i.e. engaged in only one task that has him actively engaged with the material. 

Or if he’s studying with a peer, each of the students has to work to ensure the conversation stays focused on the subject matter, not what happened in school that day or their weekend plans. In other words, keeping the task in mind and finding ways to stay focused and appropriately absorb the material for later retrieval, perhaps by writing test questions for each other.

Timers are an effective tool to utilize in these types of situations. For example, you could employ the Pomodoro Technique. Set the timer for 25 minutes of study. When the timer goes off, it’s time for a 5-minute break, stretch, quick text, or to get a snack. Then, when that 5-minute timer goes off, it’s back to the books. It also helps to be in a place that’s conducive to studying, where there are no distractions like TV, video games or other loud conversations. You want to be somewhere comfortable, however, not so comfortable that you could zone out or take a nap. 😉

I hope you found these new terms helpful so that you and your child can start thinking about how to better focus on the task at hand and achieve your short and long-term goals. 

What systems and tools have you used in the past to help you or your child stay focused on their goals? What questions do you have about how to fine-tune these practices? 

Be sure to let me know how it goes by posting a comment in our Facebook community, My Learning Link. You’ll also connect with other like-minded parents and educators who support children who struggle with learning. You can access helpful videos and posts, share resources, and participate in live Q&As inside this group. The goal is to support you as you work with your children and students.

If you haven’t already, click here to request to join now. 

See you next week for another edition of this six-part series: Time Management Skills to Help You & Your Child Today.

In my private practice, I commonly see children and teens struggling with time management skills, whether they have been diagnosed with ADHD or not. I encourage parents to put more thought into this area. Not only for their children, but also for themselves. We have all had experiences at some point in life – either at work or at home – that are more than we know how to handle. These essential life skills make managing your home, career, and family a little easier. 

In the first installment of our 6-part series on time management, we discussed metacognition – ‘thinking about your thinking.’ This week, we’re going to explore flexibility and response inhibition. 

I know those sound like formal (and probably dull) terms, but bear with me, and you’ll see how integral they are to our everyday lives. 

One quick note before we begin: Different professionals define these skills and/or brain functions in different ways, and this is how I have chosen to organize them. You may be used to seeing them worded differently, but I think they’ll still look familiar!

Now, when I say “flexibility”, I’m not talking about physical flexibility. Though if you have stellar yoga skills, I envy you! 😉 I’m talking about mental flexibility.

Here are a few examples:

• When you’re working on a problem, and you’re not seeing the results you want, can you make adjustments?


• When you’re getting results but they’re not up to your standards, are you open to experimenting with your process to yield a better outcome?  


• When you’re working with another person, and you’re at a stalemate, are you willing to make compromises to complete the project?


• If plans change at the last minute, can you go with the flow and still make use of the newfound free time, or do you waste it? 
  

I’m sure, even as an adult, you can relate to at least one of these examples in your own life. Flexibility is not always innate; some students need to practice it. 

Some people prefer to be on a rigid, regimented schedule, where things happen at a certain time.

But when they don’t happen at that pre-assigned time, in the pre-assigned way, it can be very difficult for them to manage that situation. It’s a very real, stressful situation for them. 

This is why working on our mental flexibility doesn’t just improve our ability to learn and grow, but it also aids our mental health. I recommend coming back to the breathing exercise we discussed in Part 1 when these situations occur, to help calm chaotic thoughts. Also, please support your child in making a clear decision on how to adapt to and move on from an uncomfortable situation.  

As parents, you can model this positive behavior for your child.

Most parents are already pretty adept at flexibility because we know that most things don’t turn out the way we originally planned and often think of alternative plans ahead of time, just in case. 

So, if you are one of those people who can easily maneuver and pivot when plans change, demonstrate these skills for your child in a very explicit way. 

Here are the steps:

1. Acknowledge your child’s feelings of disappointment or frustration when plans change unexpectedly. 


2. Discuss how they can be flexible in their thinking to figure out how to move forward productively, such as rescheduling. 


3. Determine an alternative plan to use the time you now have.  Try to use the time wisely, but also in a way that makes it fun for your child, especially because they just had to do all that heavy lifting with mental flexibility.   
   

For example, let’s say a baseball game was canceled.  Here’s a potential way to help your child work through this disappointment:   

“Wow, we were supposed to have a baseball game today, but the other team didn’t show up. So, that game’s not happening. It’s being postponed to tomorrow though, so we don’t have to worry about it. 

We’ve got a couple of hours that would’ve been spent on this baseball game. What are we gonna do with that time? What can we do to feel good about the fact that the baseball game that we were really looking forward to is not going to happen? 

You know, you’ve got that science project you’re working on? Maybe you could take a half an hour of the time, and use it for your science project. And then you’ve got an hour and a half of free time tonight where we can play a game or read a book. How does that sound?”

This process teaches your child how to practice flexibility in the moment.

When you explicitly bring their attention to how often you use the same skills on a regular basis, they will begin to understand that plans often change, and that’s okay. In fact, it’s sometimes a very welcome gift! In time, this practice can help soften their emotional distress in these situations, because they know it’s par for the course and that they have learned how to handle it. 

This leads straight into response inhibition, which, as you might guess, is very connected to flexibility. 

Let’s be real, often our initial response to a sudden change of plans or obstacle is, “Oh [expletive]! I was counting on this. Why isn’t it happening? Why isn’t the world working the way I expected it to today?” 

We all wish we could stomp our feet and throw a fit sometimes, but it’s not always appropriate to respond in that way, at least in the presence of other people. So, response inhibition is the ability to stay aware of our surroundings and understand which responses are appropriate when and where. This also means being able to hold back the responses that are not appropriate for the setting. 

Children often struggle with this skill in the classroom setting.

And it can open them up to punishment from their teachers or judgments from other children. So, if your child is struggling in this area, it is important to keep modeling for them that in the school environment, when things don’t go the way they expect, they hold back certain responses. 

This involves finding alternative ways for them to manage those emotions. It may mean excusing themselves to get to the bathroom to release their emotions.  This, of course, is a plan set up with the teacher in advance. Or maybe you offer your student a safe outlet like the counselor’s office or the nurse’s office as a place to just vent. 

The most important part is that the child is thoughtful about their triggers, and they know that they are, in fact, holding an inappropriate response back until they’re in a more appropriate setting. This skill is important to develop over time, and it takes a great deal of practice. 

One final note:

It’s unrealistic to expect the moon and the sun from a child who is young and still learning how to manage their emotions. However, conversations about our emotions and beginning to understand our responses can and should happen with very young children in age-appropriate language. 

Can you spot areas of flexibility and response inhibition with yourself or your child? What questions do you still have about how to better utilize these skills? 

Be sure to let me know how it goes by posting a comment in our Facebook community, My Learning Link. You’ll also connect with other like-minded parents and educators who support children who struggle with learning. You can access helpful videos and posts, share resources, and participate in live Q&As inside this group. The goal is to support you as you work with your children and students.

If you haven’t already, click here to request to join now. 

See you next week for another edition of this six-part series: Time Management Skills to Help You & Your Child Today. 

In my private practice, I meet many students who struggle with executive functioning skills. I often find that they have trouble with time management, in particular. In this post, we’re going to focus specifically on transitioning between tasks. This challenge shows up in a variety of different contexts depending on the age and grade of the student.

With younger students, this may look like making sure homework is in the child’s backpack to ensure assignments make it home and/or back to school.

For middle-schoolers, the process of moving from classroom to classroom needs to be overcome. 

For high school students, who are asked to be more independent and take care of all of their belongings, most often utilizing a locker, move from one side of the campus to the other in record speed. 

In each example, there is a critical point, when children need to shift from task to task.  In an effort to help teach students (of any age) to transition more fluidly, I want to offer a quick but effective technique to help make that transition less chaotic and more structured. 

The concept of metacognition is an umbrella of sorts for all of the executive functioning and time management skills. Metacognition is defined as “awareness and understanding of one’s own thought processes.” In other words, thinking about your thinking. A common example to help you begin to understand this concept would be the development of the awareness that you have trouble remembering names of people and then reminding yourself to repeat their name aloud a few times when you first meet them to help you commit their name to memory.

I’ve included an illustration above from Mary D. Skalar. Her program, Seeing My Time, is excellent and I use it myself in my private practice with my students.

As you can see from the illustration, metacognition is cyclical, and it’s possible to spiral into an unending repeating pattern of thoughts once you dive in. This can create a difficult moment for a student and for the teachers or parents supporting them. So, I want to introduce a brief technique to help the student stop what they’re doing, take a moment to process what’s actually right in front of them, and make a thoughtful choice about it.

Here are the three simple steps:

1. Stop everything.
2. Take a deep breath.
3. Take stock of the situation to make a thoughtful decision.

For example, you’re in the car after school and about to go into the house. All the kids are ready to run in and do a variety of tasks, like changing clothes, getting a snack, watching TV, etc. Before you get out of the car, utilize this technique as a family.

Ask everyone to stop what they’re doing, and take a deep breath together…maybe even two or three, if needed.

Then bring consciousness to the moment by having each of your children make a decision about what will be the first thing they do when they get into the house.

Is it going to be taking off their shoes?  Hanging up their backpack? Going to their room and changing their clothes? The task does not matter as much as making a thoughtful decision about what to do first.

You can utilize this technique whenever your students or children are struggling to mentally shift gears.  For example, the children are at home now. They have gotten a snack, changed clothes, had a break. Now it’s time to start homework. So, everyone stops, takes a breath, and then you all shift into homework mode. You’re making a thoughtful decision to now go begin the homework phase of the evening.  What is the first assignment each child will tackle?

If you receive a little bit of pushback, and your kids aren’t ready yet to shift focus, it’s okay to have a little bit of negotiation: “How much more time do you need on your break? Five more minutes? Awesome. We’re going to set the timer,  so when this timer goes off, that’s going to be our stopping point.”

Practice with this metacognition exercise ensures students are actively engaging with the cognitive process of stopping and making a definitive, thoughtful choice about what’s next, not just letting their brain run wild with the next impulsive thought.

Now that you have an introduction to the concept of metacognition, my challenge for you this week is to try this technique this evening with your children or today in your classroom, if you’re a teacher.

Be sure to let me know how it goes by posting a comment in our Facebook community, My Learning Link. You’ll also connect with other like-minded parents and educators who support children who struggle with learning. You can access helpful videos and posts, share resources, and participate in live Q&As inside this group. The goal is to support you as you work with your children and students.

If you haven’t already, click here to request to join now.

Parents are really frustrated with their children’s homework.  I’m hearing lots of complaints about how much family time it consumes and the lack of value they see in the work completed.  So in an effort to eliminate frustration and to help minimize the amount of time spent on homework, I put together a video with some suggestions.  Watch the video below to get these tips.

Choose a routine time in your day that is set aside only for homework.

The trick is to make sure that everyone knows about it & sticks to the routine! If there is a rare day without homework, keep this time set for learning something new. You can read together, play a new card game, or even watch a short documentary.

Use a physical timer to track the hours set aside for these tasks.

You can use a device like a phone or tablet, an “egg” timer, or even an hourglass.

Getting stuck on reading comprehension? Start at the end!

There’s nothing wrong with reading the questions you’ll need to answer before you start to read the material! It can help students keep an eye out for what they’ll need to know, and it can even help with the knowledge they already have! (Tip: use sticky notes along the way when you find an answer so you can easily find your spot when it comes time for the questions!)

If you notice your child is struggling, let their teacher know.

This can be the first step to helping your student get the support that they need to succeed.

If you’d like to continue to receive more information like this, please be sure to click here and sign up for my newsletter. And if you have comments or ideas to share regarding homework, please let me know on social media!