Curriculum

Executive function and Self-Regulation

Executive function and self-regulation skills are the mental processes that enable us to plan, focus attention, remember instructions, and juggle multiple tasks successfully.  Just as an air traffic control system at a busy airport safely manages the arrival and departures of many aircrafts on many runways, the brain needs this skill set to filter distractions, prioritise tasks, set and achieve goals, and control impulses.  Executive function includes the child’s ability to hold information in the mind, focus their attention, regulate their behaviour, and plan what to do next.  These abilities contribute to the child’s growing ability to self-regulate, focus their thinking, monitor what they are doing and adapt, regulate strong feelings, be patient for what they want, bounce back when things get difficult (resilience). 

When children have opportunities to develop executive function and self-regulation skills, the child is set up to cope with the demands of a busy world.  These skills are crucial for learning and development.  They also enable positive behaviour and allow for the child to make healthy choices.  When children are not given the time, space, and words to label and talk through their feelings, they consequently communicate their feelings of fear, anxiety and embarrassment and frustration in ways that do them more harm than good.  This is where aggressive and defensive behaviour manifests because the child does not know how to operate from their upstairs, rational brain, and instead operates from their downstairs reactive brain.  Co-regulating (adult and child) these uncomfortable and overwhelming emotions from the beginning can give the child a healthy and robust foundation from which to navigate their way through life.  As adults we must validate, listen, and recognise a child’s emotions and help them move forward.

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Children are not born with these skills but are born with the potential to develop them.  As practitioners and parents, we need to provide the support that children need to build these skills at home and at nursery and in other settings they experience regularly. Language development is central to self-regulation: children use language to guide their actions and plans. Pretend play gives many opportunities for children to focus their thinking, persist and plan.

Growth-promoting environments provide children with ‘scaffolding’ that helps them to practise necessary skills before they must perform them alone.  Adults can facilitate the development of a child’s executive function skills by establishing routines, modelling social behaviour, and creating and maintaining supportive, reliable relationships.  It is also vital that children exercise their developing skills through activities that foster creative play and social connection, teach them how to cope with stress, involve vigorous exercise and over time provide opportunities for directing their own action with decreasing adult supervision. A well-slept, nutritiously fed and well exercised child is a first step towards aiding self-regulation.

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One of the most common mistakes is to confuse self-regulation with compliance.  A child might behave the way we want because he is afraid of being punished, or solely in order to obtain some coveted award: but this is not at all the same thing as the child who actually wants to behave this way, where the consequences of such an attitude for healthy development are profound.  Self-regulation has nothing to do with being strong or weak and to punish a child for a lack of self-discipline when his problem has to do with an over-stretched nervous system risks exacerbating the self-regulatory problems that the child is dealing with.  For a long time the prevailing idea has been that you can get a child to do what you want by using punishments and rewards; but the more we’ve come to recognise that not only is this very draining on the adults who have to play the role of the disciplinarian but, as far as the child is concerned, they often do not work very well and in too many cases they can actually make thing worse.  Self-regulation on the other hand represents an attempt to understand the causes of problematic behaviour and then mitigate those causes, rather than simply trying to extinguish the behaviour. Children need to be aware of when they are feeling stressed and learn the techniques to manage this.

Each Marmalade nursery has a calming area where children can spend time if they need to self-regulate and all staff have training to ensure the management of behaviour is informed by training on self-regulation and executive function. 

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