“Supporting Children’s School Readiness” by Jelena Obradović

By Karla Kane, journalist and former Bing parent

Educators, parents, and caregivers hear a lot about executive functioning these days. We know it’s important, but why? What exactly is it? And how does it relate to academic readiness?

Professor Jelena Obradović, from the Developmental and Psychological Sciences program at Stanford Graduate School of Education and the SPARK Lab (Stanford Project on Adaptation and Resilience in Kids), addressed these questions and more in May at the 2024 Bing Distinguished Lecture.

What are executive functions?

As children ages 3 to 6 reach developmental milestones, such as gaining greater independence and agency, they are met with increased expectations regarding following rules, regulating behavior, managing emotions, and forming and maintaining relationships. It’s a lot—and it takes executive function skills.

So, what are these executive functions, or “EFs”?

EFs are cognitive skills that help children control their attention and behavior, Obradović explained. She divided these skills into three categories: inhibitory control, working memory, and cognitive flexibility.

Inhibitory control is the EF that develops earliest and involves suppressing impulsive behaviors and resisting distracting temptations. It’s necessary for meeting many family and school expectations and engaging in prosocial interactions.

Researchers have studied this response-inhibition skill using a peg tap task, in which children, instructed to tap pegs in a different pattern from the assessor leading the task, must consciously stop themselves from imitating them.

Perhaps you recall a psychological experiment involving inhibitory control (which originally involved Bing students) that became known as the “marshmallow test.” It examined delayed gratification by offering children a higher-value reward if they could wait for it. “Response inhibition requires you to stop yourself from doing something you would otherwise want to do,” said Obradović. However, there are other factors, such as cultural context, that should be considered. For example, Obradović described a study by Yuko Munakata, a psychology professor at UC Davis. Munakata’s study was conducted in Japan and the U.S. and revealed that while American children are not used to waiting to eat and struggle to delay gratification with food, Japanese children find it easier. However, Japanese children are not socialized to wait to open gifts, while the American children in the study demonstrated less difficulty in that situation. A task is not an accurate measurement of cognitive effort, Obradović said, if it doesn’t challenge a culturally ingrained response.

So, how do researchers determine what is culturally specific versus what is universal? Obradović, alongside other scholars, is working on Stanford’s Global Executive Function Initiative (https://gefi.stanford.edu/) to better measure development of EFs and how that impacts learning across the globe. The initiative has piloted a survey for caregivers and teachers on everyday behaviors, such as children waiting their turn, stopping a behavior or activity when asked, ignoring irrelevant stimuli, sustaining and regaining attention, and answering questions without losing focus.

The second EF component, working memory, refers to the ability to hold, update, and manipulate verbal and nonverbal information. We use working memory in many ways, from completing multistep tasks and following lengthy instructions to performing mental calculations, weighing options, remembering physical directions, and communicating information in an organized way. Methods for assessing working memory, Obradović said, include asking children to repeat a series of digits or words backward or to press buttons in an opposite or reverse order.

The third category of EF Obradović discussed is cognitive flexibility, which is developmentally the most advanced. It allows us to shift our attention between competing rules and mental states, to disengage and move on to new tasks, to solve problems in different ways, and to contemplate and discuss multiple viewpoints. Bilingualism, Obradović added, promotes these skills, and bilingual children exhibit this type of flexibility as they switch between languages with ease.

Obradović described a cognitive flexibility assessment game in which children are instructed to press a button when they see a heart. Later, they are instructed to push an opposite button when a flower appears, which challenges them to shift gears. Then, they are presented with a mixed trial, in which they must react to both hearts and flowers using the appropriate buttons.

Together, Obradović said, these EFs support life skills such as planning and organizing, starting and staying on tasks, pursuing goals and monitoring progress and mistakes, adapting to change, and regulating our emotional responses.

What does executive functioning have to do with school readiness?

Executive functioning, said Obradović, supports competencies in many cognitive areas, such as school readiness, classroom engagement, cooperation, and numeracy and literacy skills; socioemotional areas including emotional regulation, mental health, and relationships with family, teachers, and peers; and in the pursuit of goal-directed behaviors in general.

She pointed out that EFs can be particularly important during the transition to kindergarten. Citing a longitudinal study of more than 300 East Bay children from the start of kindergarten to early first grade, Obradović said that children who struggled with impulsivity and inattention at the beginning of the school year had a worse relationship with their teacher at the end of the year, and impulsivity and inattention in kindergarten predicted more conflict in the future. What’s more, children who enter school with these issues tend to enjoy it less, as developing positive relationships with peers and teachers is very important for fostering engagement.

Obradović also discussed the relationship between EFs and facing adversity, noting that stronger EF skills predict better adaptation and fewer mental health issues. EFs can also promote coping with stressors by helping children view situations from multiple angles and focus their attention on a solution (and/or help them stop fixating on negative thoughts). She also noted that the area of the brain tied to EFs, the prefrontal cortex, continues developing well into adulthood. “It’s a really protracted developmental trajectory,” she said.

Caregivers can nurture these skills by exposing children to educational materials and experiences that challenge them cognitively. They can also provide scaffolding—demonstrating, instructing, encouraging, and questioning—“probably all the good stuff that the teachers at Bing do,” Obradović said.

She shared the results of a study in rural Pakistan in which 1,400 families with children aged 0 to 2 were divided into four groups: a control group, a group given nutritional intervention, a group given parental intervention including coaching on play and communication, and a group given both types of intervention. The children were assessed at age 4. The study found that parental intervention had a direct effect on executive functioning.

Good nutrition in early childhood and living with an older sibling also help to promote EFs (Obradović said a study on the impact of siblings is underway in the Palo Alto area).

The importance of co-regulation

Caregiver-child co-regulation in early childhood affects self-regulation and development of EFs. When children are very young, Obradović said that caregivers help them regulate their emotions; around kindergarten age, children begin to regulate themselves more as their EF skills are further developed.

In a study at Stanford, children aged 4 to 6 and their parents were invited to participate in four tasks designed to elicit limit-setting, scaffolding, and cooperation behaviors. Researchers then observed the play session and used four categories to code parental behavioral states: positive control (actively engaged and scaffolding), observing and following the child’s lead, disengaged, and upset/angry/frustrated. They coded the children’s states as active/on task, passively on task, disengaged, or dysregulated/defiant, and analyzed the co-regulation of parents and children. The research team was interested in whether positive measures of parent-child co-regulation predict teacher reports of classroom self-regulation skills and found that they do. They also hypothesized that over-engaged parenting (positive control while the child is actively engaged) may correspond negatively to self-regulation skills in children.

Indeed, parental over-engagement when a child is actively on task was shown to negatively relate to children’s EF task performance and observed self-regulation. It’s therefore important, Obradović explained, to sometimes step back and follow children’s leads rather than attempt to make everything a “teachable moment.” As a mother of two, she confessed she has struggled with this impulse herself.

How do executive functions relate to stress, adversity, and basic physical needs?

The brain’s prefrontal cortex, the site of EF development, also has numerous receptors for stress. Obradović cited research showing that children who endure chronic risk and adversity (e.g., living in poverty for an extended period) are more likely to perform poorly on EF task tests. Stress within the family impacts sleep and cortisol levels, both of which affect cognition. Obradović and her team, curious to see how hunger, fatigue, and sickness might predict academic performance, partnered with the San Francisco Unified School District to study kindergarteners for three years. They found that feeling hungry, tired, and/or sick in class predicted weaker early literacy, cognitive, motor, and socioemotional skills and that inequality factors linked to issues like food insecurity might help explain some of the racial and ethnic disparities in kindergarten readiness. Obradović said that their work also shows that “these health concerns predict academic achievement at the end of kindergarten year.”

What does this mean for policy and practice? The inequities must be addressed, but it’s also important to emphasize to educators that if a child is hungry or not feeling well, their behavior will not be optimal. “It’s not about them being defiant or not following rules or not wanting to sit still,” Obradović said. “These things are part of a larger system of inequalities.” Children struggling with these basic health concerns may need appropriate behavioral support.

Having studied children’s physiological responses as they encounter stress (either chronic or temporary), Obradović and her colleagues found that those with stronger EF skills regulate better after stressful evaluative challenges. We often hear that taking a deep breath can help ease stress. Obradović and her team wondered if a simple deep-breathing exercise could in fact induce momentary changes in children’s physiological responses. They recruited more than 300 children and had them sit quietly for one minute to measure their baseline stress physiology. Then the children watched a brief video—a control video or one that guided them through a deep-breathing exercise (video available at https://bit.ly/deep-breathing-for-children). The researchers found that even a short period of deep breathing lowered the arousal response.

Supporting EF skills at home

How can families better nurture emerging EFs and self-regulation? Creating opportunities to support burgeoning EF skills doesn’t require expensive toys or fancy camps and classes, Obradović said. Everyday cognitively stimulating experiences include pretend play, sports and board games, singing, dancing, art, conversations, storytelling, and even doing chores. These activities can offer children the chance to practice holding information in their minds, understand appropriate behaviors, and adapt to changes. Obradović pointed out that when we think about emotional regulation, we think about calming down when feeling angry or upset, but experiencing positive emotions such as excitement and joy also exercises self-regulation skills. And just as with the airplane safety announcement about putting on your own oxygen mask before assisting others, caregivers should model self-regulation for their children by being attuned to their own needs as well.

Predictable routines with clear and consistent expectations can help ease the cognitive burden for children while EFs are emerging. Over time, Obradović said, caregivers can offer fewer reminders and instructions as a way to build independence, agency, and self-confidence. “It’s really a play of balancing the supports and scaffolding with opportunities to do it on their own,” she said.

As part of the post-lecture Q&A session, Obradović emphasized that supporting executive function development is not about analyzing every single parenting choice or agonizing over perceived mistakes but rather knowing that “every day has a thousand opportunities to do something right and a thousand opportunities to do something better.” 

Watch the lecture video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bPg0It0EzpA&t=3s