Published by: ADDitude
Written by: Ryan Wexelblatt

A 7-year-old with ADHD has the executive functioning skills of a 4- or 5-year-old. A 13-year-old’s EF age is between 10 and 11. Your expectations for your child need to align with their EF age, and your strategies for scaffolding probably need to change accordingly. Executive functioning is a term used to describe the processes that happen in the pre-frontal cortex of the brain — its operating system. Anybody who has ADHD has lagging executive function skills. Sometimes it can appear that they do not if they are really motivated and learn how to compensate early, but essentially ADHD is lagging executive function skills. Click here to read the rest of the story.