Smart but Scattered
The Revolutionary "Executive Skills" Approach to Helping Kids Reach Their Potential

The main idea of the book is that children who don't turn in assignments, don't clean their rooms, lose their belongings, etc., often do so because they suffer from executive skills deficits. Consequently, telling them to try harder, yelling at them, punishing them, and so on simply won't work: the......more

At what point do you take something off your "currently reading" list and mark it "read"? I finally decided to after not picking this up for over a year! My pediatrician highly recommended it, but it wasn't as helpful to me as I'd hoped. I'm pretty organized and logical myself, but *I* felt scattered......more

The two most useful takeaways from this book were 1) A breakdown of specific types of executive skills—response inhibition, working memory, etc.— and 2) the concept that if your kid has not yet developed an executive function, you have to be their “scaffolding” and provide support until they do deve......more

Parenting is a project, and you're just not given all the skills you need to do the job. Complicating that? The fact that as those kids get older, they start needing help developing some particularly sophisticated (executive) skills. What's worse? We're not all rocking five-star perfection ourselves......more

As a typical parent of a teen, I try to get any help available so that my kids and I can survive this period relatively unscathed. And I, as many parents surely believe, seem to find greater potential in my kids than their achievements have to show so far (by that I don't mean that they should play......more