The New Must-Have for Overwhelmed Kids: An Executive Function Coach

Soon after her son started middle school, Kay Nash, head of talent at a Washington, D.C., law firm, started worrying about his organizational skills and study habits. He’d been diagnosed with ADHD and anxiety in third grade. A combination of medication and school support had helped him navigate elementary school, but he still struggled. Suddenly, she saw more work in more subjects, more projects and more homework coming down the pike.

“I didn’t want to be micromanaging schoolwork, yelling about deadlines and yelling about how important it is to get good grades,” Nash recalls. “I wanted a positive and encouraging relationship with my child.”

She wanted to find someone to help him get organized and, more important, to teach him the life skills needed to organize himself for the future. Nash found what she was looking for in the growing new field of executive function, or EF, coaches.

Executive function skills fall under three big headings: working, or short-term, memory; inhibitory control, which involves putting urges and impulses on hold; and cognitive flexibility, the ability to plan, reason, solve problems and manage multiple tasks. In practical terms, EF might coaches show students how to break down assignments and projects into bite-sized pieces and estimate the time each will take; establish a daily schedule, with time for study, exercise, socializing and sleep; and develop a plan to avoid getting distracted by technology and social media.

Psychologists in schools and private practice report seeing a flood of requests from parents for executive function help for their kids, and experienced EF coaches are struggling to meet demand.

Five years ago, says Brandon Slade, founder of the Denver-area coaching firm Untapped Learning, demand was predominantly for students with learning differences. Today it is coming from all sides: neurotypical students across the country, universities, school districts and businesses. “So many students….are struggling today with problem-solving and basic executive function tasks like managing procrastination,” he said.

The rise in demand for student EF coaches coincides with a rise in ADHD diagnoses and mental health problems in young people. Technology is fragmenting kids’ attention, and student life has become far more demanding. Juggling school, sports, extracurriculars, volunteering and college admissions requires careful time management.

“The number of choices available to a young person has increased so substantially,” says Grant Leibersberger, founder and principal of Boston-based Focus Collegiate, which offers EF coaching to kids with learning differences who are going to traditional colleges. “Their brains aren’t wired for all these choices so early on.”

Developing executive function skills has long been key to supporting kids with ADHD, Autism Spectrum Disorder or other learning differences. But what was once a specialty is becoming more mainstream. In 2023, the International Classification of Disease (ICD-10), the system physicians use to code and classify diagnoses and procedures for insurance claims, added frontal lobe and executive function deficit to its list of medical issues.

Lauren Eckert, founder of Life Solved Coaching, an EF coaching business started in 2013, said her clients used to be 95% kids with ADHD. Now it’s mostly children with multiple diagnoses—ADHD and anxiety and depression, for example—who struggle with day-to-day organization and task-setting. Some just need help managing stress, transitions or messy life events.

Danielle Passno, the assistant head of school at The Browning School, an all-boys K-12 school in New York City, says she’s seen a dramatic drop in executive function skills. “These skills are being lost,” she said. “We need to directly teach them.”

In recent years, when Passno would observe classes, she would watch kids using laptops switch between Spotify and email and social media and class tasks. “It was staggering,” she said. Students are bombarded by distractions all day: According to a 2023 report from Common Sense Media, on a typical day, over half of students aged 11 to 17 received 237 or more phone notifications.

In the last four years, Passno and her team have built an EF curriculum. In most cases in middle school, students at Browning no longer take notes on a computer, only in their notebooks, and use color-coded planners to help them stay organized. All Browning teachers are trained to teach the Cornell Notes method, which shows kids how to focus on recording key ideas and creating bullet points to explain them. The system encourages students to summarize their thoughts and takeaways at the end of a class. 

Leibersberger sees an evolution in the diagnostic language for these issues. Kids who used to be described as having “behavior” issues or maybe ADHD are now said to have EF challenges. “Executive function coaching is a response to help a young person without the young person being stigmatized,” he says.

Some psychologists say the problem isn’t so much kids’ executive function skills as adults’ expectations. “We tend to overestimate—and kids do too—how much kids can plan multiple-steps projects or plan for the future,” says Phyllis Fagell, a therapist and school counselor in Bethesda, Md., and the author of “Middle School Superpowers.” “No one is born with” executive function skills, she says. “They are skills kids need to acquire along the way.”

“We’ve taken away the in vivo ways that we learn executive functioning skills the best, like having part-time jobs, helping around the house, having to walk yourself to school every day or babysit,” says Ellen Braaten, associate professor of psychology at Harvard Medical School.

A related culprit, psychologists say, is overscheduling. Kids have no time to practice making decisions about how to spend their time. Unable to make decisions, kids and parents both feel stress—and look for help. “Everyone’s nerves are a little more frayed,” says Fagell.

Only a small percentage of parents can afford the steep price tag for executive skills coaching. Prices range from $125 to $225 an hour, and coaching is rarely covered by insurance, so most payments are out of pocket. That makes it another driver of inequality, on top of high-price tutors and college admissions consultants.

EF coaching is increasingly in demand in the workplace too. Kay Nash says she feels guilty at times for outsourcing support for her son’s needs, but in her job as head of talent at a law firm, she even sees successful young people struggling with these skills—and asking for help.

“I have really highly intellectual, talented people who just need the fine-tuning on some of these skills in order to optimize their own careers,” she said. “That helped me have empathy for my son and also a willingness to engage coaching support outside of the traditional middle or high school box.”

Jenny Anderson’s new book, “The Disengaged Teen: Helping Kids Learn Better, Feel Better and Live Better,” co-authored with Rebecca Winthrop, will be published by Crown in January.