How Do I Help My Disorganized Teen?

The Ask Lisa Podcast does not constitute medical advice and is not a substitute for professional mental health advice, diagnosis or treatment. If you have concerns about your child’s well-being, consult a physician or mental health professional.

The following transcript has been automatically generated by an AI system and should be used for informational purposes only. We cannot guarantee the accuracy, completeness, or timeliness of the information provided.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Friends, welcome to season seven of the Ask Lisa Podcast. I can’t believe I get to say that, that we have been together over so many years tackling all of the challenges that come with raising tweens and teens. As we launch season seven, we got some big changes to share. First, I’m going to widen the lens of what we talk about on this podcast. We’re going to keep focusing on the challenges that come with raising adolescents, but we’re also going to focus on what it feels like for the parent or caregiver who is raising that young person. You know I know that being a parent stirs up a lot of feelings and these feelings are important and we want to address them and addressing them is going to make us that much more able to focus on what our kids need from us. Another change is that after six seasons together, my co-host Reena Ninan is moving on to a new chapter and new projects of her own.

Over the last six seasons, Reena has been not only an incredible co-host, but also she’s a dear friend and I have loved talking with her, not just about the questions you’ve sent our way, but also about raising our own teenagers and being parents ourselves. I am so grateful for all of the work we got to do together and for having her in my life. And I know that whatever she does next is going to have that Reena magic.

Now, going forward, your questions will continue to be the focus of the podcast, but now each week I’m going to answer your questions with a colleague who’s an expert in the area of the question. So the way I want you to think about the Ask Lisa podcast going forward, it’s kind of like the Avengers if the Avengers were focused on adolescent mental health. To kick off the season, I have a question from a parent about executive functioning at the start of the school year, both the parents’ executive functioning and the kids.

To tackle this question, I am joined by Dr. Tori Cordiano. She is one of the leading experts in the country on questions related to executive functioning, ADHD, learning disorders, and anxiety. I will also tell you, she’s my work wife. Tori and I have shared our practice suite for decades now. She is brilliant. She is funny. I absolutely adore her and you’re going to want to learn more about her. When you have a minute, hop on over to her website, drtoricordiano.com to see all that she has to offer. We’ll also put the link to her website in the show notes. Thanks so much for being back with us for season seven. Here we go.

All right, Tori. We got quite the letter to get us started as the school year gets underway for everybody. You ready?

Dr. Tori Cordiano:
All right, let’s do it.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
All right.

Dear Lisa, I’ve listened to your show for two years, but never thought I’d be the one writing in, but here we are, only one week into the school year and I feel totally overwhelmed. My 14-year-old just started ninth grade. He’s smart, funny and kind and cannot keep track of his own life. His backpack is already a black hole.

I love that.

And anything that requires planning ahead seems sure to fall apart. And in the flood of emails from his new high school, both my son and I missed the message saying that he needed to pick up a practice shirt for soccer. He showed up at the first practice as the only kid in a regular t-shirt. He was embarrassed and I felt terrible. At the end of last year, the guidance counselor used the phrase poor executive functioning. I wasn’t surprised to hear that, but I’m pretty uncomfortable because I feel like I’m seeing myself in him. I feel like I’m constantly dropping balls at home and at work and watching him struggle makes me wonder if this is actually my fault. I know from my own research that he needs help building systems, planners, checklists, reminders, but I’m not great at any of that myself. So how do I help him with something I’m struggling with and how do I know what’s normal for his age versus something that I should consider having evaluated? Thank you for your help.
All right, Tori, you do so much work with families around executive functioning and school and all of these things. What’s your first response to this letter? Where do you start?

Dr. Tori Cordiano:
Well, first of all, getting to the first week of the school year and starting to feel like this, I mean, congrats. You got through all the beginning, filling out the paperwork, getting the school supplies. Let’s just first start with this back to school period. And there are certain periods, December, May, August that are absolutely bananas for parents. So even parents with fantastic executive functioning skills struggle during this time of year. It’s hard because it’s hard. It’s not hard because you’re doing it wrong.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Okay. I really appreciate that. Also personally, I don’t know if you feel like this, my school district is still pretty good about this, but even still I’m like, I’m going to fake my own death to not get so many emails from the school district. It’s overwhelming. Overwhelming.

Dr. Tori Cordiano:
Yep. Ours this year went to all three schools because I have kids at three different schools in the district, all three schools in one app. It has changed my life for the better. It’s incredible.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
So your kids, what grade levels? You’ve got 10th grade?

Dr. Tori Cordiano:
So fourth, eighth, and tenth.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Fourth, eighth, and tenth.

Dr. Tori Cordiano:
So elementary, middle and high school.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Fourth grade girl, eigh grade girl, tenth grade boy. And so your district is sending them all in one app and you’re liking that?

Dr. Tori Cordiano:
Yes. For the first time. Yes.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Okay. Okay. You’ve kind of put this in context. Everybody’s feeling it right now. And yet this family is saying, “We got a message from the teachers last year that our kid is struggling.”
So even with the whole scope of a school year, the adults who spend all sorts of time with eighth grade kiddos and this kid was in eighth grade last year are saying, “All right, your boy may be having some trouble.” So where do we start with that?

Dr. Tori Cordiano:
Yeah. Yeah. So if we think about executive functions and what that even means –

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Yeah, what does it mean? People use it all the time.

Dr. Tori Cordiano:
We are talking about a set of behaviors, processes that are orchestrated mostly by the prefrontal cortex of the brain. So front part of the brain. Our brain’s generally developed sort of back to front. This is the last part of the brain to fully develop. It will not be fully cooked until this kid is in his mid 20s. So he’s got another decade of growth when it comes to executive functioning skills.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
So this is around two of expectation lowering. Starting the school year is bananas, eighth grade, ninth grade boy –

Dr. Tori Cordiano:
We actually expect no high schooler graduating high school to have their executive functioning skills fully wrapped up. Developmentally, that’s not where the brain is at 18.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Do you think people know that?

Dr. Tori Cordiano:
I don’t. I don’t. I think middle school people expect that it’s kind of a hot mess and there’s a lot of brain growth. There’s a lot of balls that can get dropped. But I think people expect by 10th, 11th, certainly 12th grade that kids have this wrapped up and are on top of it. And certainly they make a ton of growth and some kids are a little bit further along than others, but no 18 year old has reached their peak capacity of executive functioning development.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Okay. I think that’s hugely helpful to hear. And then I think the next question I have is like, okay, but then what about the college process? I think the reason we want to pretend like this should all be wrapped up is that for a lot of families, what they need and want from their kids in terms of their ability to manage the demands of high school, it sounds like it’s not a great match with normal development.

Dr. Tori Cordiano:
Yes, absolutely. We’re throwing a lot at them. Many of them are in their junior year when they’re really starting that college process. For many kids, it’s the hardest year of high school. And then they are now taking on this part-time job of college application process. So it’s developmentally a little bit of a mismatch.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Okay. Understatement. It’s developmentally really off course. Okay. So we have this ninth grader and what I hear you saying is yes, he may have more executive functioning challenges than most because you and I both know by the time an adult at school flags something, usually –

Dr. Tori Cordiano:
It’s been on their radar.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Yeah. But now he’s in the big leagues, right? I think that that’s the other thing that happens. And I can say this as a mom, you can have stuff that you’re like middle school, not that big a deal. Ninth grade, if this kid can’t find anything in his backpack, the ramifications, the stakes have changed.

Dr. Tori Cordiano:
The stakes are higher once you hit high school. Yes.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
So what to do?

Dr. Tori Cordiano:
Yeah. So when we think about the goal here, the goal over the course of high school is that we are developing – those kids or developing those executive functioning skills. We are gradually handing over the reins for more of this, but I have yet to meet a family, including my own, where this is a smooth linear process. It’s very much like, okay, I think you’ve got this. Oh wait, you don’t have this at all. Let’s go back to the drawing board. So expecting it to be a bumpy process. When we think about where we’re starting, this kid may be starting with needing more support, needing more scaffolding that can come from parents. If it’s really difficult for parents on their own executive functioning, it can also come from other adults in this student’s life.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Okay. So with this letter where the writer is saying, “I’m not great at this.” If they were in your office, what would your first recommendation be?

Dr. Tori Cordiano:
Yeah. So before I get to recommendations, I validate that for parents and just pause there for a moment because I think for many parents it brings up some big kind of scary questions like did I make my kid this way?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Yeah, she’s asking that.

Dr. Tori Cordiano:
Yeah. Is this going to be his forever? How is he going to succeed? What’s this going to look like when he’s 18? So just to have a chance to kind of acknowledge that those questions are there for a lot of parents.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
And what do you say? I mean, and this person’s also telling us, and he had this super awkward, and I can totally picture this for a ninth grade boy, end of the world moment where I’m in the wrong t-shirt at the first soccer practice and she feels terrible about it. How do you help parents who, before you get to the recommendations, who are just feeling bad about this?

Dr. Tori Cordiano:
Yes. Yeah. So I think we’re kind of holding two things. We’re holding it for him, this in that moment felt like the end of the world and acknowledging that was his reality and that there’s guilt there, which is a normal reaction. And then also putting it into the grand scope of things. When we think about natural consequences and we hear this term a lot, this is the very definition of natural consequences. The natural consequence for not knowing that you were supposed to pick up the shirt is that you don’t have the shirt at practice and it is hard and it is painful and it gives us a chance to go back to the drawing board and figure out how to make fewer of those things happen in the future.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Okay. That is so kind actually among other things. But what I really hear you saying is take these moments and turn them into fuel for this is why we’re going to set up these systems. You’re uncomfortable about this. Of course you are. Nobody’s minimizing that. You don’t want to feel this way. Here is how we try to minimize that. But not disconnecting those two things, really linking them up.

Dr. Tori Cordiano:
Yes. Yeah.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Okay.

Dr. Tori Cordiano:
We don’t want to just move past that. We can actually acknowledge the feelings and then have a game plan for moving forward.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Cool. Cool. Okay. Then what happens?

Dr. Tori Cordiano:
Okay. So then I think about, and I think about this shifting over the course of high school, but we need systems that are simple enough that they can be sustained. And we think about a system as sort of like division of labor, whose job is going to be what with a really big safety net in place for kids. So it might be thinking about whose job is it going to be to check the Google Classroom, if that’s where the announcements live or the app for the soccer team, if that’s where you find out about the practice shirt, if it’s going to be the son’s job to do that. We also probably want to have a safety net in place where a parent is also checking in on that and making sure that nothing major is falling through the cracks.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Okay. And what you’re describing, I know I’m doing. So my younger daughter’s in the 10th grade and she’s running cross country. So I get communications by email from her coaches and then I also get communications from the school. Knock on all the wood in the world. So far her executive functioning seems to be pretty solid and yet I will still yell from the kitchen, “Did you get this email too?” And wait till I get a confirmation. Sometimes I will cut and paste the content into a text to her saying, “Assuming you saw this,” am I on the right track or where could this go wrong?

Dr. Tori Cordiano:
And you have the luxury of a daughter who doesn’t seem to have big executive functioning challenges. So the sort of kind of in the moment system of like, “Hey, did you get this? Did you add it to the calendar?” Is working. For many families, they’re going to need more of that and some more consistent way of addressing it.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Okay. So I can get away with this, but other families, stuff would still fall through the cracks.

Dr. Tori Cordiano:
Yeah.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
So what should it look like?

Dr. Tori Cordiano:
Okay. So I think we think about two things here. The first is how to have a system in place where you are regularly kind of checking in with your child about this. And in an ideal world, this could be on Sunday afternoons when kiddos doing homework and you have a moment to do this. It might not always happen at a set time, but if it’s on your radar that before the week picks up, we need to do a five minute check-in to make sure everything’s kind of accounted for.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Okay. And something that does come up in this letter is if it requires planning ahead, it’s dead in the water, right? So what you’re describing, is it the kind of thing where it’s Sunday afternoon at 3:00 PM, we sit down and we look at the week to come and what is on the horizon and what needs to happen? Is it that kind of thing?

Dr. Tori Cordiano:
Well, it can be, but here’s the second part. So the two things, right? That’s all well and good until there’s a soccer game at 2:00 PM on a Sunday and all of a sudden the 3:0 PM check-in time is long gone and it never happened. So the other part about this, and this is sort of the safety net, and this can be for parents too, is that you might do something like set an alarm on your phone for 6:00 PM on Sunday. It happens every single Sunday and it’s weekly check-in. And if it already happened at three o’clock, great, you turn that alarm off until the next week. But if it hasn’t happened or it’s gotten away from you, here’s this little reminder that, oh, we need to do this before the week takes off.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Okay. So you have it really in two places in the calendar.

Dr. Tori Cordiano:
Yes.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Theoretically, it’s happening at three and at six, you check to make sure it really happened, but you don’t try to remember at six.

Dr. Tori Cordiano:
No.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
You put it –

Dr. Tori Cordiano:
I wouldn’t be able to remember at six on a Sunday night.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
No.

No. No. We’re barely managing at that time of day. But it gets at something. So you and I have consulted to schools forever and have had conversations about how like, how do you become a psychologist without having spent tons of times consulting at a school because you see so much and learn so much? And what it reminds me of are the conversations we’ve had over time where you realize that the kids who are, I’ll just say disorganized, because I think that’s often how we’ve talked about executive functioning, that sometimes there are kids who notice that other kids are organized and sometimes I’ve gotten the sense that some of them are like, “I hope the organization fairy someday sprinkles glitter on me.” And you and I are both like, “No, dude, there’s no organization fairy.”

Dr. Tori Cordiano:
It’s not coming.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
The kids who seem to be organized or who are organized, it’s not that they’re remembering all of these things, it’s that they have checklists and they have planners and they have to-do lists and they have reminders.

Dr. Tori Cordiano:
Yep.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
It feels like sometimes that gap is when we forget to close for kids.

Dr. Tori Cordiano:
Yes, right. Yep. That we really need to name that this is not a switch that just flicks on for people and that there are a lot of things that can get in the way of this. So if you have a parent who has strong executive functioning and a kid who has kind of generally strong executive functioning and they mostly have the luxury of only having really to worry about school and their sport, they’re not holding down a job after school, they’re not taking care of younger siblings, they’re not managing a medical condition. There’s all of these factors that can complicate it. And the more of those complicating factors, the more we need to name that we need good, easy systems to support executive functioning skills that are heavily under construction.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Okay. Okay. So as we talk it through, I’m like, this is getting better and worse. Worse in that you are bringing to light. There’s so much that is working against this kid, normal development. He may be on the more executive functioning still under construction side than his classmates. There are in so many families, so many other factors that are complicating the basics. I mean, even if we just go to the basics, my experience when my kid’s in season for sport versus not –

Dr. Tori Cordiano:
Oh, it’s so different.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Sports alone, you’re like, “Holy moly,” right? “We need a personal secretary to manage all of this and we’re pretty good at it.”

Dr. Tori Cordiano:
Yes.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
But it’s getting better in that what I think we’re saying is facing it directly, leaning into actually the cool technology that are increasingly available. This has changed in the time we’ve been practicing.

Dr. Tori Cordiano:
This is a place that has really helped people with ADHD, people with executive functioning challenges. Yeah.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Okay. So what are your technological favorites? What are the things you see really working for people?

Dr. Tori Cordiano:
So I really start with the basics, the things that don’t require paying for an extra app or buying something extra. So there’s two things that I lean on really heavily in my own family and start with, with families. And those are just the clock feature on your phone or the alarm timer feature on your phone. Actually three things, the snooze email feature and a visual timer.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Take them through us one by one. So what do you do with the clock feature?

Dr. Tori Cordiano:
Yeah. So the clock feature, this is the alarm setting. I have many alarms that set before 9:00 AM today. I literally had six alarms set on my phone for different things. That works for me. That would not work for everybody.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Give me a for instance of a couple of those. What some of the alarms that went off this morning?

Dr. Tori Cordiano:
So one of those was actually for soccer, making sure that we had the right carpool for my son’s soccer game this afternoon. I knew it was going to be a busy morning, we’re, you know, beginning of the school year, so I needed to set that alarm so I remembered to text the other moms who are doing that work because our kids are not driving yet.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
And we’re just going to put an asterisk on the moms things. We will come back to that on a future podcast.

Dr. Tori Cordiano:
Yeah. So that piece of it, that’s a really easy one. It’s free. People have it on their phone. It’s not hard to remember to do that. You can set it on a recurring basis for things that you need to remember regularly.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Well, and let me ask you that. When did you set this alarm?

Dr. Tori Cordiano:
Yeah.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Is this a recurring one or was this a one-off?

Dr. Tori Cordiano:
So that’s a one-off because there’s a game today that we need to think about. I have other ones that are recurring. That one happened last night because I do a little sort of, before I put my phone away for the night, a little sort of check-in of what does the day hold? What am I likely to not remember? That is the question that I ask myself.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Okay.
I know we have two more things, but I actually want to go back to what you just said. What am I likely not to remember?

Dr. Tori Cordiano:
Yeah.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
You and I both know as psychologists, there’s something extra happening there. What is it?

Dr. Tori Cordiano:
Yeah. So there’s habits and routine and the things that happen without you really even having to think about them every day. It’s unlikely that my kid’s going to walk out the door without her backpack because I will see that. It’s in the room before we leave our house. It’s unlikely that she’s going to walk out without that happening. It happens every single day. But if there’s something that is happening less often, it’s a game, it’s a different situation, it’s not likely that I’m going to remember to address that in the rush of a busy morning.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
And you are using, I mean, we call it metacognition where you’re observing your own thinking and thinking this is something that will definitely high likelihood of falling through the cracks. Not everybody’s metacognition is the same, right? Whether you’re looking at a bunch of eight ninth graders, when you’re looking at a bunch of middle-aged people, are there metacognition tricks for people who are like, “Yeah, I can’t do that piece of the puzzle.”

Dr. Tori Cordiano:
Yeah. I think actually having that sort of end of the day kind of looking ahead to the next day and just doing, you can look ahead at the full week, but for many people, if you’re on Sunday night, Friday is like five lifetimes from now. So really being able to just look at the next day and what do I need to remember that I’m not likely to remember on my own.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Okay. So just blocking time for it.

Dr. Tori Cordiano:
Yeah.
Making it part of the kind of nightly routine. Yeah.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
I love that. Okay. So first that the second thing you said was.

Dr. Tori Cordiano:
So I said the snooze email feature?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Yeah. I live and die by the snooze email feature.

Dr. Tori Cordiano:
Yes.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Yes.

Dr. Tori Cordiano:
So this is a really helpful one, especially if you have a lot of kid emails coming in about things like mark this date, it’s happening in October. I can’t think about October right now. So that email will be snoozed. It will come up again in three weeks. You can do it on your phone, you can do it on an actual computer, but it’s a really easy way that you are not banking on your memory to go back and find that email when you need it.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Yeah. No, I snooze stuff every single day and I’ll snooze stuff out six months.

Dr. Tori Cordiano:
Yes.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
I mean, snooze to me is the greatest thing ever. Okay. And then the third thing.

Dr. Tori Cordiano:
The last one is the visual timer. So a visual timer is very helpful for people who struggle with executive functioning because you may have heard this idea of time blindness. So people with ADHD may struggle with this, people who struggle with executive functioning, where there’s just not a great sense of either how long things may take or how much time has passed when you’re doing something. So having a visual representation of the time going by is really helpful.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
All right. So then tell me, on that last one, what would it look like for a kid to be using that? When a kid’s in the middle of using that, what does it look like and why?

Dr. Tori Cordiano:
Yep. So two places where it can be really helpful. One is if you are working, like you’re doing homework or studying and you have a decent amount and you’re going to be taking a break.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Okay.

Dr. Tori Cordiano:
So let’s say you’re studying for a midterm, you know it’s going to take you more than a half hour to study. We know in terms of how brains work, that deep cognitive work, you can’t really be as effective beyond about a half hour or so. So setting that visual timer tells you, okay, this is how much time I have left until I’m taking my quick break. The other way that you may use it is let’s say you have to leave for soccer practice at four o’clock. Your kid gets off the bus at 2:30. They have a certain amount of time to kind of relax, get a snack, do homework, whatever it is, but they need to have that kind of visual representation of like, oh, I did have 45 minutes. Now I only have 10.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Okay.

Dr. Tori Cordiano:
It’s hard to remember to just look at the clock or to rely on just the clock for that. Some people need that visual representation.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Okay. So the ticking down as a way to sort of put a little pressure on their understanding of time.

Dr. Tori Cordiano:
Yeah.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Okay. So all of this sounds great. All of this makes tons of sense. The thing I think about is something actually I heard Angela Duckworth say about our devices, which is the way she said it was, “We don’t usually put the ice cream next to the broccoli.” And I think about how smart that is. And if I’m raising a kid where distraction is a problem, where attention is still coming along, talk me through how I deal with the fact that the tool I’m hoping will help keep that kid on track is the exact same tool that can derail them the most. What do adults do under those conditions?

Dr. Tori Cordiano:
Yeah.
Well, let’s take kids out of the question for a second and talk about adults too. Me picking up my phone to set said alarm and then all of a sudden I’m deep in my email.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
I respond to the first text I see. No, this is my whole life, is like, “I need to send that person a text. I open my text, ‘Oh, I didn’t see these three.’” And my whole life is, “What did I come here to do my whole life?”

Dr. Tori Cordiano:
So the fact that we expect adults to do this and now we’re expecting kids to do it with an underdeveloped prefrontal cortex, it’s kind of stacked against them.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Okay help.

Dr. Tori Cordiano:
So I think something like when I say a visual timer, I actually have and use this kind of, it’s called the Time Timer. There’s many of these now. You can find a lot of them, but there’s no technology required. It requires a battery to keep it going.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
So, it’s a device.

Dr. Tori Cordiano:
It .ooks like a little alarm clock.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Almost like a kitchen clock or something.

Dr. Tori Cordiano:
It’s exactly that. So low tech. There’s nothing you can get distracted by on this thing.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Okay. That feels really key.

Dr. Tori Cordiano:
Yeah.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
That feels really key. All right. What about the other problem, which is I can’t remember the text I meant to send once I see the other three texts that just came in. What do I do?

Dr. Tori Cordiano:
Yeah. So I think even for, and this is helpful even for parents and for adults to kind of remind yourself, okay, and you can say this out loud, right? And this is a helpful way to make sure you don’t get pulled into your phone when you’re actually mid conversation with your kid to say, “I’m going to pick up my phone to set this alarm.”

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Oh.

Dr. Tori Cordiano:
So you say it out loud, I’ve done this by myself.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
I talk to myself constantly alone. Yes.

Dr. Tori Cordiano:
Exactly.
“So I’m going to pick up my phone to send this text.”
“I’m going to pick up my phone to set this alarm.”
It’s a way of kind of priming yourself that I have one job on this device that I can get lost in my phone.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Whatever I find on my phone, I came to do something else.

Dr. Tori Cordiano:
Yes.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Okay. That’s fantastic.
All right. While we’re doing our true confessions here, a conversation you and I have had is about how there can be real unevenness in executive functioning. So I love things super tidy. I live to keep things tidy. I never make the bed. Could not care less if the bed ever gets made. My husband happens to make the bed and ever made. I’m agnostic on this, which feels very out of sync with everything else I do.
I adore you, you know that. I also know that lending you a book is a dicey proposition.

Dr. Tori Cordiano:
Oh, Lisa.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
You’re not –

Dr. Tori Cordiano:
Not the books. I mean, it’s gone.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
It’s gone.
Whereas I would trust you with my life.

Dr. Tori Cordiano:
Don’t trust me with your books.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
But not with books.
What is that about? Why is it so uneven?

Dr. Tori Cordiano:
Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So I think a couple of things. First, we have limited bandwidth, right?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Oh Lord. Yes, I do.

Dr. Tori Cordiano:
And if we think about executive functioning, it’s like impulse control. We don’t have an unlimited amount of this and it goes down as it is taxed, right? So there are things that are more important in your day than your bed. I’m sorry. There are things more important than me returning your books to you. So the things that require the most attention are going to get it. So that’s part of it.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
So like stakes.

Dr. Tori Cordiano:
Yes, absolutely.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Some of it is the stakes.

Dr. Tori Cordiano:
Yeah.
The second is sort of the same thing, the things that we care about the most, right? And it’s not that I don’t care about giving you your books back, but if it’s something that has to do with our job or picking up our kid from somewhere, we’re going to make sure that that is a priority.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Okay.

Dr. Tori Cordiano:
Yeah.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
No, and you know I’ll ask again. It’s not a big deal.
Okay. So here’s the question that I think feels to me the hardest question because that makes so much sense, right? You got to care about it. The stakes have to feel high. You and I have cared for plenty of families where they have a ninth grader who does not care about school and the stakes do not feel important because that young person is 14, which means that they may still be operating in a very concrete way neurologically. They are letting a lot of things drop. The family may be pretty panicked, but there isn’t a sense of caring and there isn’t a sense of stakes. What do you do then to get them to bump up their executive functioning so they’re not dropping so many balls?

Dr. Tori Cordiano:
Right. Yeah. So I think there’s a couple of things. The first is there’s something that this kid cares about, right? And even if we think about something like playing on the soccer team, there’s a minimum GPA. There’s a minimum, you can’t miss too many practices. If the stakes are there tying it to what they actually do care about, if they care about having more independence with their friends or being able to do things on the weekends, that comes with some sense of meeting responsibilities during the school week. And this is a conversation that we have not in the heat of the moment when they’ve forgotten to study for the test that’s tomorrow. This is a later conversation when everybody has cooled down a little bit.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Okay. So not, “You’re off the soccer team till your grades are better.”

Dr. Tori Cordiano:
Yes. Right.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
But, “You care about soccer.”

Dr. Tori Cordiano:
Yeah.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
“We care that you do not shoot yourself in the foot academically as a ninth grader. If you want to keep playing soccer, here are the things that we want to see happen and here are all of the structures we’re going to put around you to try to help make it happen.”

Dr. Tori Cordiano:
Yes. Yeah. And for some kids, there are other steps that need to be taken, right? So if these executive functioning concerns are getting much bigger, the solutions we’re talking about really aren’t doing the job, they’re having trouble in school managing, they may need to be assessed for something like ADHD that could be the root of some of these executive functioning concerns.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Okay. And that’s a question in the letter. Where is the line between rising ninth graders still sort of pulling it together and I need to get a referral and get this kid evaluated? How do families know?

Dr. Tori Cordiano:
Yeah. So I think we want to get feedback from a couple of places. It sounds like the school in middle school shared a little bit of information about executive functioning. Once the school year is underway, this is a parent who’s really going to want to check in during those October conferences and to get a sense, the nice thing about high school is that they have different teachers. So you’re not just getting one teacher’s input, you’re having teachers who see them in subjects that they care about less and more, people that know them maybe a little bit better or not as well. So we’re getting more input. And we’re also seeing if these relatively simple systems that we’re talking about aren’t even touching the problem and it’s getting worse and it’s starting to impact them in places that they really even do care about. So things like soccer or getting back to their friends, then it may be time to get more information.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Excellent. Excellent. Okay. Thinking about this letter, thinking about the start of the school year, thinking about everybody trying to get to October where the systems and routines have had a chance to firm up a little bit. What’s the big takeaway here?

Dr. Tori Cordiano:
Yeah. Yeah. So I think I have a couple takeaways actually.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Great.

Dr. Tori Cordiano:
The first is we do want to keep in mind typical development here is really messy. So putting that in the scope of we don’t expect kids to have this wrapped up, but if we see them really struggling beyond what we see their peers are struggling with or what developmentally is typical, it is worth trying to get curious about why and to do some things to address it. We don’t want to just throw up our hands and say, “Well, 14, 15 years old, this is what we expect.”

The second takeaway I would say is, and you and I see this a lot, there are kids for whom if we look at their schedule, nobody is able to manage the amount that they have going on. So if they’re taking high level classes and they’re on two teams and they’re in three clubs and they’re having a job, we have to make sure that actually the schedule is sane enough that they have a chance at managing.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Okay. Thank you so much.

Dr. Tori Cordiano:
Thank you. This was really fun.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
For my Parenting to Go today, what I want us to think about is that we have to schedule for the kid we have. Okay, so here’s what I’ve learned over the years. Every kid has their own capacity for transitioning quickly or not so quickly. Need for rest, how much they need and how often, and also what constitutes rest is different for every kid. So some kids truly, they rest while they’re at sports practice. They can quickly transition from sports practice to their homework, from homework to bedtime. Those kids can be pretty tightly scheduled and they do well with it and they have plenty of time to recover and plenty of time to have the energy they need for the things they’re doing. Other kids, not so much. They may transition very slowly. They may need a lot of lead time between one thing and the next, or they may need more recovery.

They may need more rest. They may not be go, go, go kids, which is fine. Or what constitutes rest for them is different than what might be rest for their sibling or rest for your neighbor’s kid. They may be a kid who needs to putz around the house for a while before turning to the next thing, or they may be a kid who just wants to read or daydream before being onto the next thing they’re supposed to do. The bottom line is we have to work with the kid we got. We get to work with the kid we’ve got. Some kids are going to be able to move very quickly from thing to thing and have a busy schedule. Other kids, that’s not how they’re built and that’s just fine, but we want to honor that in how we think about what we ask of them in any given day or week.

Join me next week for an incredible conversation with my colleague, Dr. Kelly Bhatnagar. Dr. Bhatnagar is an expert in adolescent eating disorders, so much so that she just wrapped up being the head of the Academy of Eating Disorders, and she is going to sit down with me to tackle a letter from a parent who is worried about how their teen is eating. See you next week.

Thanks for joining us. Be sure to subscribe to the Ask Lisa podcast so you get episodes just as soon as they drop and send us your questions to [email protected]. And now a word from our lawyers.

The information provided on this podcast is for educational purposes only and does not constitute or substitute for professional psychological treatment, therapy, medical advice, or other professional intervention. Views expressed by guests are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Dr. Lisa Damour or Ask Lisa. If you have concerns about your child’s wellbeing or your own, please consult a physician or mental health professional. If you or someone you know is in crisis, contact the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline by calling or texting 988. For additional resources, visit drlisadamour.com.