Zelazo – parents

Parents, I think, can play an important role in cultivating these kinds of skills. The ability to stop, and pay attention to what you’re doing and consider the context. And consider what it is that one is doing in light of a broader range of considerations. 

And that, that process of reflection is sometimes referred to as psychological distancing from a situation. So that one doesn’t approach it in a more concrete and immediate fashion but considers it in relation to other things. One thing that I think is important for parents to keep in mind, is the, the relatively slow rate at which executive function develops over the course of childhood. It emerges early, in infancy, but it clearly continues to develop until at least early adulthood. And so we’ve looked at performance on particular measures from three to 85 years of age and you find an age-related increase, peaking at about 25 years of age, and then starting, rather precipitously, to decline over the course of adulthood.  

Keeping in mind the relatively slow growth of executive function, parents, I think, might be encouraged to be patient with their children at particular times. Though it’s quite a normal developmental phenomenon for children to, for example, be told what to do in a particular situation and you know they heard you, and they can even tell you right back what it is that they’re supposed to be doing, but when they’re in that situation, keeping the relevant information in mind and bringing it to bear on one’s behaviour, in the face of distractions, and habits, and impulses, and so forth, is really challenging for young children. And so, so what looks like willful disobedience, is often just difficulty actually translating what one knows into behaviour.