Misbehavior by your Pre-k child? Or writing "5's" or "D's" reversed? The same solution fixes both.

It's called "Delay Intervention." And the solution for both is the same.  It's getting your child to engage their executive functions, a set of skills that take until our mid-twenties to fully develop.

Dr. Adele Diamond describes executive functions as "The cognitive toolkit for success," or as another researcher describes them, "The deliberate goal directed control of behavior." 

This is how profoundly important executive functions are. We bluntly refer to them as the "Prison or Princeton" outcome. One of the most famous longitudinal study ever completed, the The Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Research Study started following over 1000 children in Dunedin New Zealand and followed them for over 30 years almost invasively studying every facet of their development. Marvelously one of the things they looked at at a very young age is a set of skills called executive functions. At age 3 inhibitory control, one of the executive functions, accurately predicted if the child would experience higher substance abuse, lower chance of finishing high school, more interactions with the law, overall a poor quality of life versus those with higher inhibitory control who experienced a greater chance of going to college, higher incomes better relationships and a better quality of life. As a matter fact executive functions accounts for over twice as much variation in grade all the way through college than IQ.

Here to present is Dr. Adele Diamond who was educated Swarthmore, Harvard and Yale and is recognized as one of the 15 most influential neuroscientists live today. Fortunately for the children of the world, she was instrumental in founding the research field of developmental cognitive neuroscience or the study of the development of executive functions in children.