Transcript
A (0:00)
Welcome back to the Thriving Kids podcast from the Child Mind Institute, a nonprofit dedicated to transforming the lives of children and families experiencing mental health and learning disorders. I'm your host, Dr. Dave Anderson. This is the second episode in our series on the transition from high school to college. In part one, we focused on why this transition can feel so difficult, even for capable, motivated students. In this episode, you'll hear our clinicians dig into what's happening beneath the surface when students struggle with organization, time management, follow through, and procrastination. We'll talk about executive functioning, why these skills are still developing during the college years, and how stress and avoidance can quietly get in the way of academic success. Understanding these patterns can help students and families respond with more clarity and less frustration. I'll hand it back to my colleagues, Dr. David Friedlander, Dr. Adam Zamora, and Dr. Morgan Eldridge to continue the conversation.
B (0:54)
I'd love to kind of dig deeper into what's happening behind the scenes when students are struggling with things like organization, time management, focus, and to start with you, Adam, I know you specialize in executive functioning. Can you help explain to us what executive functioning actually means? Because I know we hear this term a lot and why it's so central to student success in college?
C (1:22)
Sure. So executive functioning is a term that's used to describe a whole set of cognitive processes that help us to manage our responsibilities, engage in goal directed behavior, things like task initiation, following through on something from start to finish, planning ahead, organizing and breaking down tasks, thinking flexibly instead of having like a rigid one way of doing things, keeping our impulses in check, keeping all the steps of our tasks in our head so we don't forget about them, monitoring our progress and our work accuracy, regulating our attention and our emotions. These processes all fit under the executive functioning umbrella as students progress through school learning, ideally transitions with brain development. So when you're in early elementary school, a lot of learning is basically just you're taught a concept, you memorize it, you apply it, you're taught a concept, you memorize it, you apply it, and those concepts build upon each other and you have like this nice foundation of tools you can tap into for problem solving. And then when you get to middle school and high school, school starts to tap more into these EF skills, these executive functioning skills. It's a lot about integrating and regulating our thinking processes and applying them in like an effortful way to engage in a task. So students who have executive functioning challenges, it's not so much that they can't do the task, it's that the sustained effort that is required to envision all the steps that are that are needed in order to complete the task, that effortful and applied thinking is harder for somebody with executive functioning challenges. And EF skills are managed by our prefrontal cortex, which is the last part of our brains to fully develop. So when students are going to college, you know, our prefrontal cortex is usually not fully developed until we're about 25. And some people it might be fully developed a little earlier and some people a little later. So you have these young adults who are entering college with a variety of prefrontal cortex development. Some are more comfortable utilizing their skills than others. And certainly if you have something like adhd, for example, that impacts your, your executive functioning skills, that can have an even bigger effect on your success. And by the time you reach college, ultimately, like a lot of success can be supported by intellect, by logic, by reasoning. That's why you got there in the first place. But college success really relies upon our ability to properly prioritize things, manage our time effectively, make use of of all that unstructured time that you have, make decisions and reflect upon them after the fact. Keeping track of what to do when, and sometimes just getting started on something is the hardest part. And once you can get that out of the way, everything else can maybe take place. But it's executive functioning skills are essential, essential for college success.