Organization and the Executive Assistant in Your Child's Brain

Among the many perks your child was granted upon his entry into this world was free use of a full-time executive assistant: you. You organized his toys, managed his social schedule, got him to doctors' appointments on time, and made sure he always had everything he needed when he needed it. As preschool rolled around, some small expectations may have been put in place for your child to use his own organizational skills — the time management of getting his shoes on before leaving for school, or the planned thinking required in gathering all the Legos he needed for his latest masterpiece — but for the most part, your role remained unchanged.

If you are reading this book, it is likely that your role as executive assistant continues to remain unchanged (or at least has changed less than you would like it to). The difference is that as your child got older, there were more expectations for her to develop organizational skills on her own — to use the executive assistant in her brain, rather than the one yelling reminders from the kitchen. And as your child's classmates slowly developed increasing independence in response to each of the demands placed on them, your child began to fall further behind. And you became more concerned, more frustrated, and more convinced that there was something different going on with your child.

The three of us are all parents, and so those feelings of concern and frustration are things we can easily relate to. But it was that third response — the idea that something developmentally different was happening here — that sparked our interest as clinical psychologists. We, along with our colleagues at the Child Study Center at the New York University (NYU) Langone Medical Center, kept encountering kids who followed a similar pattern. These kids forgot to write down their assignments; lost their papers, coats, and lunchboxes; took hours to finish homework; and saved long-term work until the last minute. They weren't any different from their peers in their academic abilities — in fact, some were among the brightest we'd seen in our practice — but their grades usually didn't match their potential. And while many had been labeled lazy or lacking in work ethic, it was clear this wasn't the case. Most found organizing so difficult that they were putting in twice the effort for half the results. As clinicians charged with helping kids become their best selves, we wanted to find a way to help these students and their families. As researchers, we wanted to understand precisely what these difficulties were, why they occurred, and how to develop and test the best way to strengthen organizational skills in these children.

Thus began the Organizational Skills Training (OST) research program at the Child Study Center over 15 years ago, under the leadership of Dr. Howard Abikoff, a world-renowned clinical researcher who had spent the prior 30 years studying attention and behavior control problems. Each of us has been involved in various facets of the program over the past 15-plus years: Dr. Gallagher as a major collaborator in developing ways to measure organizational skills, creating the treatments upon which this book is based, and training therapists to implement the treatment; Dr. Spira as a clinician in the research trials and a coauthor of the manual for therapists; and Dr. Rosenblatt as a research clinician helping to adapt the elementary school treatment for use with middle schoolers. We have also all spent many hours working with children, teens, and their families in the Child Study Center clinical offices, using the lessons learned from the research program to help them develop skills in organization, time management, and planning.

These lessons, distilled and refined from our years of research and clinical work, are presented in this book. We'll talk more about the development of our program, the OST program, in a bit. But first let's start where the research program started all those years ago: taking a close look at what we know (and don't know) about the development of organizational skills in children.

How Organizational Skills Develop

When your child was in preschool, you may have been the major organizational force in your child's life, but at least you weren't alone. You could commiserate with other parents at the playground about the challenges of remembering to pack for show-and-tell on Thursdays, or tracking down a gluten-free, dairy-free, nut-free cupcake mix for the holiday party. But as children age, the expectation is for them to take more of these responsibilities onto their own shoulders. As your child moves through the grades, first-day-of-school instructions might look something like this:

* Third grade: "For this year, you will get a list of the homework assignments at the start of the week. We'll put that list in your take-home folder, along with any handouts you need. Announcements will be e-mailed home."

* Fifth grade: "We'll start using a planner this year. You will use your planner to write down your assignments, test dates, and due dates for projects. Today I'll teach you how to use your planner, and then every day from now on I will tell you what your assignment is and remind you to record it."

* Seventh grade:

* Social Studies: "Today's assignment is to read Chapter 1 and answer the questions at the end of the chapter. Every other day you will find your homework listed in the box on the whiteboard."

* Math: "I've set up a class website. Check under the 'Section 3' tab every day to find your homework."

At home, a similar pattern of growing independence is typically taking place. Even the most organized young children rely on their parents for quite a lot: carefully scheduling playdates, extracurricular activities, doctors' appointments, and school obligations; packing lunchboxes and backpacks; and keeping drawers and closets stocked with weather-appropriate clothes and at least moderately organized toys. When children are very young (generally about seven years old or...