Guest Blog Post
Dawne Clark

How to support the ‘air traffic control system’ of your child’s brain

Integrated Learning Strategies (ILS) is a learning and academic center. As a reminder, ILS is not a health care provider and none of our materials or services provide a diagnosis or treatment of a specific condition or learning challenge you may see in your child or student. If you seek a diagnosis or treatment for your child or student, please contact a trained professional who can provide an evaluation of the child.

If your child is involved in organized sports, you’ve probably noticed that at practices and games some children are focused, listening to the coach, and doing what they are asked, whereas other children seem to be doing anything but — daydreaming, fidgeting, watching the birds fly by, or picking dandelions.

What allows some children to stay focused and on task despite all the distractions?

Executive function is a set of mental skills

Scientists are learning more about an extremely important part of the brain which they have dubbed “executive function”. It’s a set of mental skills that work like the air traffic control tower at a busy airport and it’s a key part of development in the early years. This part of your child’s brain allows your child to remember, focus, plan, and respond to changing circumstances. It begins to develop at about 3-years-old and continues to develop well into the mid-20s.

All of us who fly on airplanes rely on the critical functioning of the air traffic control tower to manage the arrivals and departures of many planes on multiple runways. Under a variety of conditions — including fatigue, turbulent weather, and unforeseen emergencies — the air traffic controllers in the tower must keep track of planes taking off, landing, and in the air. Your child’s executive function skills allow her to coordinate multiple types and streams of information to determine what to do.

Danger, danger! Distractions!

In a control tower, distractions can be dangerous! Your child’s executive function skills allow him to prioritize those multiple streams of information, manage distractions, and focus carefully on the task at hand. Conditions at an air traffic control tower change often so it’s important to be able to re-prioritize or change directions when necessary. One element of executive function is cognitive flexibility, which allows your child to shift attention from one task to another.

Finally, air traffic controllers are well prepared — it takes training, ongoing practice, and time to become an excellent air traffic controller. Likewise, your child’s executive function skills are learned beginning in early childhood, and taking around 20 years to fully develop through continual practice. Executive function skills are foundational to learning; they are the processes that enable your child to learn. Physical literacy activities are an excellent way to help your child develop her mental airspace!

This short video from the Centre on the Developing Child at Harvard University explains more about executive function.

How physical literacy helps to develop your child’s mental airspace

Physical literacy — the motivation, confidence, and competence to move for a lifetime — is an excellent route to supporting the development of executive function. Each of the three elements of physical literacy relates directly to executive function — the skills required by an air traffic control system.

An active body builds a healthy brain, for a lifetime.

Active for Life is a non-profit organization committed to helping parents raise happy, healthy, physically literate kids. For more articles like this one, please visit Activeforlife.com.

Integrated Learning Strategies is a Utah-based center dedicated to helping mainstream children and children with learning challenges achieve academic success. Our services provide kids with non-traditional tutoring programs within the Davis County, Kaysville, Layton, Syracuse, Farmington, and Centerville areas. Areas to find Integrated Learning Strategies include: Reading tutors in Kaysville, Math tutors in Kaysville, Common Core Tutors in Kaysville, Tutors in Utah, Utah Tutoring Programs