Everyday Teaching Autism Resources

I have heard that one of my best friends landed a job as Executive Functions Coach. I went, “what a fancy job”. She works with a teenager at home after school helping with completing her homework, simple chores assigned by her parents, etc.

What are Executive Functioning Skills?

Executive Function is essentially the skills required to perform or execute a task. Executive functioning skills are part of everything we do on a daily basis to manage our behavior. These skills are often performed together. Therefore, a weakness or a deficit in one skill area may really affect the overall ability to execute or perform/complete a task. It’s best to understand executive functions as skills.

Executive Functioning Skills

Depending upon who you talk to, we hear 7, 10, or 11 different skills under executive functions. They are:

As going down the list, the skill becomes much more complicated and requires multip steps. Hard to master. However, as the human brain especially the prefrontal cortex develops ever since a baby, each one of these skills comes to us naturally. We are gradually competent with many of these executive functioning skills. Additionally, if he or she got to have more opportunities to practice certain skills, these come to strengths.

In order to execute many daily life tasks, school work, and maintain friendships, we should be able to use these skills competently. However, many children/adults diagnosed with autism or ADHD struggle in their daily lives due to a lack of some or most of these skills.

There are ways to improve specific executive functioning skills. First, we have to assess where he or she is struggling with the most and set a plan or strategies to support that area. Picking up the familiar and simple routines may help strategize the plan to support these skills.