Executive Functioning: More Than a Buzzword
A recent PureWow article exploring the intersection of executive functioning and the “mental load” facing mothers has reignited a familiar debate: has executive functioning become just another parenting buzzword? The piece highlights a striking statistic—mothers manage 71 percent of household mental load tasks and 79 percent of repetitive daily responsibilities like childcare and cleaning. From a neurological perspective, the prefrontal cortex, the brain region responsible for executive functioning, bears the weight of every forgotten permission slip, every coordinated carpool, every meal planned under pressure. The term may feel trendy, but the science behind executive functioning skills in children has been accumulating for decades.
Adele Diamond, a neuroscientist at the University of British Columbia, defines executive functions as the cognitive processes that enable us to plan, focus attention, remember instructions, and juggle multiple tasks simultaneously (Diamond, 2013). These processes—working memory, cognitive flexibility, and inhibitory control—operate as the brain’s command center. When these skills falter, academic performance, social relationships, and emotional regulation all suffer.
Beyond the Buzzword: Four Decades of Executive Functioning Research
Executive function research did not emerge from a parenting blog. Miyake and colleagues published landmark findings in 2000 demonstrating that executive functions, while related, operate as distinct cognitive processes with unique contributions to complex tasks (Miyake et al., 2000). Blair and Razza (2007) showed that executive function in preschoolers predicted both math and literacy ability in kindergarten—independent of general intelligence. The National Institutes of Health, the American Psychological Association, and major research universities have invested heavily in understanding how these cognitive skills develop and how deficits manifest across the lifespan.
Dismissing executive functioning as a “craze” overlooks a critical reality: these skills underpin virtually every aspect of academic and personal success. A student who cannot hold information in working memory while solving a multi-step math problem will struggle regardless of intelligence. A teenager who lacks inhibitory control will make impulsive decisions despite understanding the consequences. The vocabulary may be gaining mainstream traction, but the phenomenon has shaped developmental psychology for over forty years.
Executive Functioning for Children and Academic Success: Why Parents Should Care
The PureWow article inadvertently illustrates a profound point. Mothers exhausting their own executive function capacities on household management face a secondary challenge: modeling and teaching those same skills to their children. When a parent’s prefrontal cortex operates under chronic overload, opportunities to coach children through organizational challenges, emotional regulation, and long-term planning diminish. The problem compounds across generations.
Research from the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University confirms that executive functioning skills in children are not innate but built through practice and scaffolded experience, particularly during early childhood and adolescence. Children who receive deliberate coaching in planning, prioritization, and self-monitoring develop measurably stronger cognitive control systems than peers who do not (Center on the Developing Child, 2011). These skills prove especially critical during the transition to college, where external structures vanish and self-regulation becomes essential.
How to Strengthen Your Child’s Executive Function Skills
At Novella Prep, we work with students whose academic struggles trace directly back to underdeveloped executive function skills—not lack of intelligence, motivation, or opportunity. Strengthening these skills requires deliberate practice: breaking complex assignments into manageable steps, using external tools like planners and checklists to offload working memory, and building routines that reduce the cognitive cost of daily decisions.
Parents who feel skeptical about the executive function conversation should consider a simple reframe. Every time a child remembers a multi-step instruction, resists a distraction during homework, or adjusts a study strategy after a poor test grade, executive functioning is at work. The term may sound clinical, but the skills represent something deeply practical—the cognitive foundation upon which learning, achievement, and independence rest. Calling executive functioning a craze misses the point entirely. Recognizing and strengthening these skills offers families one of the most evidence-based paths to lasting academic and personal success.
References
Blair, C., & Razza, R. P. (2007). Relating effortful control, executive function, and false belief understanding to emerging math and literacy ability in kindergarten. Child Development, 78(2), 647–663.
Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University. (2011). Building the brain’s “air traffic control” system: How early experiences shape the development of executive function.
Diamond, A. (2013). Executive functions. Annual Review of Psychology, 64, 135–168.
Miyake, A., Friedman, N. P., Emerson, M. J., et al. (2000). The unity and diversity of executive functions. Cognitive Psychology, 41(1), 49–100.
PureWow. (2025). When executive functioning meets the mental load for moms.