Producer: Welcome back to Full PreFrontal, a continued Journey exposing the mysteries of executive functions. I am here with our host, Sucheta Kamath.

Good morning, Sucheta. Our second conversation with Dr. Fred Morrison, so much enjoyed and learned a lot from our first conversation with him. What’s in store today? What should we expect from today’s episode?

Sucheta Kamath: It truly was an amazing conversation and Fred Morrison is going to now talk about intervention or how to even think about managing and promoting development of executive functions and self-regulation, and before we got into the interview, I thought I’ll share a quick story:

I grew up in India. I was born and raised in India, and I would say, I had quite a strict upbringing. When I say strict, that means expectations were very clear; there was a lot of consistency, and there were consequences if you didn’t behave well, and to give you a few examples, ever since we were little, I remember we had to make our bed no matter what day of the week, did not matter if it was spring break, summer vacation, if we had guests, we always had to make our bed. We always have to set the table and clean up afterwards, and we were three siblings and there would be always a fight who gets to do what and the division of labor or the fight would always be about who gets the least amount of work, as you can imagine. But parents left us alone and let us fend for ourselves and figure out the share of work and who does it. When I came here as a young adult and then I continued on to raise my own family, I found that raising my two boys with those values of daily habits became more of a culture of the household. Fred and I are going to talk about this a lot, but I think I want to kind of sow these seeds in the listener’s ears that executive function management can begin at home and it’s a culture of the household. What kind of expectations you set for your children or what’s allowable and what’s not allowable? For example, in my house too, my children were required to make their bed before they went to school and we modified how they made their bed the days they had a lot of commitments. For example, they didn’t need to do very complicated things but at least they need to put the cover on the whole bed so the room looks picked up. It was essential that they did their own – they brought the clothes to the laundry and did their own laundry, and of course, I waited until they became a little bit older so they could do that, but I’ll quickly end with a story of my son who went to college and as a freshman, recently, he was telling me the story that – he goes to Columbia University in New York City and the university had some offering for students and that if they volunteered to offer their room for the visitors to come in, they would pay some cash or pay some money to the students, but he and his roommate quickly signed up. The proposition was for a whole month, they had to keep their room clean and tidy, and in return, the university could use their room as a model room for others to come and visit, and then students got something in return, and it was a win-win situation, but when my son was telling me this story, he was laughing and he said, “Mom, they don’t know, I always make my room.” So this was a funny part that I find that it has taken probably 18 years of hard work to see some end results where my son has come to value these simple habits as a form of self-regulation. Now, he will not use any of those words but I think there’s a tremendous merit to instilling a thought process in our children so they become these young adults who run their lives with principles which help them to regulate themselves.

Producer: Well, like your children, Sucheta, I, too, was required to make my bed before I went to school and everyone thought myself included that when I went to college, that I would just stop doing that, and quite frankly, it became an important part of my morning routine and I was surprised myself, and frankly, everyone else that I continued that habit and it just was a way for me to signal that the day was officially underway when I did that task, so fascinating the stuff.

So let’s not waste any more time, let’s get to Sucheta’s conversation, her second conversation with Dr. Fred Morrison.

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Sucheta: Joining us today on the show is a personal friend and an esteemed colleague, Dr. Fred Morrison. He is a Professor of Psychology, Professor in the Combined Program in Education and Psychology, and Research Professor in The Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan. His research has focused on understanding children’s cognitive, literacy, and social development over the school transition period. Recently, he has been exploring schooling effects on the brain and behavior measures of children’s self-regulation.

Dr. Morrison is a co-investigator on the NICHD study of Early Child Care and Youth Development. This national study has been following over 1,000 children since birth in 10 different sites around the nation, focusing on the impact of different context, including family, child care, school on children’s psychological growth. Dr. Morrison has been recognized for his contributions to development and education, being awarded the Dina Feitelsten award for the second time for the Best Research Article published in 2005 and in 2015. He has been continuously funded by federal granting agencies for the last 25 years and has mentored approximately 50 graduate students and eight postdoctoral fellows.

Welcome once again, Fred, to the podcast. Such an honor to have you and we, in our earlier show, discussed what executive functions are, what are self-regulatory skills, and I’m hoping that we can get into the meat of how to think about handling them.

So I will start right off the bat with this very general question that when we educate our children, we teach and teaching involves strategies as well as introduction to new content. What is so special about intervention or how do we separate or distinguish intervention from ordinary classroom teaching or learning that takes place during the process of learning?

Dr. Fred Morrison: I think there are several facets of intervention that have been developed that separate it from what goes in the classroom. Interventions typically, and this includes for executive function or self-regulation, they tend to be much more intense, so if you’re in a regular classroom and you’re trying to help a group of children learn to read, you will spend some degree of time, a few minutes, on letters or letter sounds, or words each day, but in intervention, when you’re dealing with children who may be struggling, you usually are really focusing on much more heavily or intensively on those kinds of skills that actually are problematic for them. Now often, interventions are done outside of the classroom situation too and I think that basically, when you’re intervening with a child, you’re attempting to really focus in on a specific set of skills in the hope that intervention will sort of help them catch up so that they will be able to, in fact, learn at the same rate or at the same level as the other children.

There is something really particular though about executive function, Sucheta, and I think that’s really worth discussing, that says a lot about what it is in our prospects that in trying to get a child to become more self-regulated, to inhibit inappropriate responses, to delay gratification, to attend and not be distracted or sustain attention, we have discovered, I think, that in helping a child through intervention, it is really important to bring to the child’s attention or to their awareness what it is that they are trying to learn and why it is important. So in the technical psychological jargon, that’s called sort of metacognition, but it means becoming aware of what you’re doing and using that awareness to inhibit an inappropriate response or be able to put up your hand when you want to ask a question in kindergarten or to sustain attention over time, almost to, in a sense, talk to yourself about having control, not that that’s not necessarily important in other skills, but I think it’s turning out to be a critical component of becoming self-regulated that we haven’t really focused on enough. We focused on practicing self-regulation skills and practicing attention, but I think in terms of becoming truly self-regulated, we have to emphasize becoming aware of what you’re doing and why you’re doing it, and then after you’ve done it, telling yourself what is it that you’ve done.

So I would emphasize that interventions, in contrast to classroom experiences really, at least with regard to self-regulation, need to emphasize this element of making children consciously aware of what they’re doing and why they’re doing it, and why it’s valuable and how it can help them, and you definitely don’t see that in ordinary classroom instruction.

Sucheta: This reminds me of a quick story I read somewhere that in pre-Shakespearean time when there used to be a play, the actors would come on the station after, and then in the middle of their acting, they would pause and one of the actors would step out in front of the audience and explain what just happened, then step back and continue acting.

Dr. Morrison: It’s that bringing to consciousness or awareness something that was formerly unconscious and that’s one of the keys to any intervention. As you might have heard, that’s one of the keys to sort of psychotherapeutic intervention, but with young kids, I think it’s really important. Now, one of the caveats here or one of the challenges that we face as psychologists is essentially the fact that you don’t really see heightened awareness or consciousness in general in children until about 6 or 7 years of age. I think that’s part of the reason that we haven’t focused on executive function in younger kids, because essentially, that awareness that allows you to be more in control of what you’re doing does it really arise generally until consciousness comes in about 7 years of age or so, so we’ve got a real challenge. We have to, on the one hand, particularly as parents, as preschool teachers, we need to try to get kids to learn to be more self-regulated, but recognizing that a critical element of that is that recognition on their part of why they’re doing it and why it’s important, and that doesn’t really click in until the first or second grade fully.

Sucheta: That’s a really important point for all of us to understand. I think, so the way I see it, Fred, that in younger years, if there is any procedural automaticity that can be built on or brought in for the child, like “We always put our shoes here, or we always button up or put a jacket before we step out,” so those are procedural aspects that no meta awareness is needed for, then once to get more complex self-regulation, you can start, “What is it? How does this matter, and why should we do it?” Kind of process can come it at the later part, but I find that some of the parents or teachers miss that window in emphasizing that automaticity building habitual aspect of development. Can you comment on that a little bit?

Dr. Morrison: No, you make a really good point. I think that differentiating between learning habitual moments of self-regulation and then learning to be self-regulated when you have sort of other options is really critical, so you’re right. The teachers who actually practice telling kids what is going to happen in the next half hour or the next hour, or the day, or the week, they tend to have kids who are more self-regulated than teachers who don’t do that, so saying regularly, “Okay, we’ve finished with circle time, now you know, go to your cubby, get your crayons, sit down, get out some paper, and start coloring.” That becomes a routine and they learn that, so you’re right, absolutely. That doesn’t really require a whole lot of higher-order awareness but it builds on that idea of having a habitual routine that children can sort of then build off of that and thinking about their own behavior once they do become more conscious of it.

Sucheta: So what do you think is the role of parents who are trying to bring a child to formal educational setting where there’s a lot of group regulations is required? That means, how do I manage myself in a group? That means everybody. Teacher says, “Stop, put your crayons away, stop drawing. Now, we’re getting ready for lunch, so form a line,” and there is always those one or two kids who refuse to get because they just – “I love this and I can let it go,” and so parents, with that child alone, and the child is not responding to their demands or commands of stop and we’re going to move on to the next thing, so I see that disconnect often with the parents or – and again, my favorite line to parents is, you become the parent your child makes you to be, so you may start with a great demand on self-regulation and another child doesn’t regulate, you are left to deal with whatever he or she is doing instead, so how can you help us understand how to bridge the gap between what happens at home and what happens in school?

Dr. Morrison: Yes, let me say first that this is a one area where we have less formal research then we might like, and so we are relying on less extensive literature base and a lot of sort of practicals and clinical observations, and I must say, in my own case, watching my daughter with our grandson who is now four and a half, watching her with him over the last year and a half hour or so, to be honest, I think from what we know and from my observations, I would say parents should be more aware of how much time is needed to work on self-regulation in children, both cognitive regulation, emotional regulation, and interpersonal interaction. So things like basically, being able to sit at the dinner table and not get up until everybody’s finished or to have to wait for your dessert until everybody is finished, that goes on every single meal in my daughter’s house. When my grandson gets upset and he has a tendency – he’s a pretty emotional little guy – tendency to cry. Well, at this point, at four and a half, she’s essentially saying, “Well, wait a minute now, that’s not something really to cry about,” or “Don’t whine about that,” and she’s thinking, “Well, what’s going to happen when he goes to kindergarten?” So what she’s trying to do is to get him to realize that when something goes wrong, if he loses a little Lego under the bed, then the first thing he should do is not cry even though he wants to do that, so think about not crying and just saying what the problem is, so that’s emotion regulation, and what she’s been doing for the last while is actually having multiple play dates to try to socialize him into sharing and self-regulation with other kids. He actually goes to a little preschool too so they’re involved in that too, so everybody’s involved in trying to constantly promote cognitive, emotional, and interpersonal regulation, but what I would really emphasize is how much effort and time that really takes with kids. I mean, there’s some variability, and so I think I think some kids are easier than others and I would suspect that boys are a little bit more difficult than girls in general, on average, so my advice to parents would be essentially -and this is tough to say – but you are almost a social regulation socializer most of your child’s day when you’re in interaction with them. I can’t emphasize that enough.

Sucheta: So another very important point you’re making is the intervention or the child teacher focus on teaching in younger children, particularly when it is on managing behaviors, their own behaviors, building more positive relationships with the world around you, and then also dealing with your own emotional internal radar, kind of fine-tuning that, can have a greater impact on the kind of preparatory skills that go into executive function and self-regulation, correct?

Dr. Morrison: Yes, absolutely. Tricky part of executive function is that it permeates everything that a child does and so it infuses how they’re thinking and the control they have over their thoughts, but also it is involved in regulating emotions at the same time that you’re trying to regulate your thoughts and your language, and your communication with others, your interactions with preschool teachers or kindergarten teachers, or elementary school teachers, as well as your peers. So you really do need to be utilizing all of those components throughout all aspects of self-regulation, and mostly, very little of a child’s time is necessarily spent in isolation, so you’re always involved in regulating with peers or other adults.

Sucheta: And the tricky part again, Fred, is younger years, as we are talking about, is more sustain focused, engagement, social regulation, emotional regulation, even like response inhibition. Those are the skills that we talk a lot about, but we are not even talking about building or developing more complex set of skills that start coming into play later part of learning which is time management, planning, organizing, prioritizing, goal-directed persistence, or then later, later part of education which is kind of having a big picture thinking, flexibility, working your way backwards, so how do you see them linked to intervention? Have we figured that out yet? I could share with you the work kind of I do which addresses these different areas of development, but how do you see research helping us understand that?

Dr. Morrison: Yes, I think the kind of work that you’re doing is absolutely critical. Yes, the kinds of skills that we’ve been talking about are very – they’re elementary, they’re fundamental but they are thought, of course, to be the building blocks of things like future orientation or organization, or planning, so somewhere in later elementary school, most schools will start asking children to plan out a project, and so they have to organize themselves and they have to do an outline. So you are projecting into the future and this is sort of the next step in terms of the complexity and richness in what psychologists call becoming a self-regulated learner. It’s not just developing self-regulation in a specific sense but actually becoming a self-regulated learner, and that essentially means being able to understand what a task involves, organize the structure of the task and the time needed for the task, and then to have the persistence to actually see it through. Over in elementary school, sometimes many weeks; later on, many months and years, so I think yes, these are cumulatively developed skills, we think, but that they do require, those more complex skills do require their own level of development, their own level of practice.

The other element, I think that comes into it, Sucheta, is motivation which is different from self-regulation but it is also very important in helping a child to persist and stay organized, and stay on track, and that becomes a challenge in and of itself. If you’re not interested in a particular topic, it is more difficult, even if you were generally self-regulated to maintain that interest and maintain that persistence over time, so that motivation becomes a big factor in older kids.

Sucheta: So Fred, what I see, the struggle I see in educational systems, as well as parents’ desire to make this happen, as well as the struggling students is, everybody wants it, they don’t know how to facilitate it, and so there’s a lot lecturing going on to how the child should be more motivated or persistent. I mean, conventional wisdom says, “If I want you to be motivated, I’m going to tell you to get motivated. If I want you to, I’m going to tell you to be persistent,” and you and I know that is fundamentally counterintuitive. I mean, that is counteracting. It will not develop and become a skill, right?

Dr. Morrison: Counterproductive, yes, right, exactly.

Sucheta: Counterproductive, exactly. So in closing, we didn’t really get into the curriculum-based, research-based curricula. Do you have any comment you can make about your work, Adele Diamond’s work, Lynn Meltzer’s work, there are a lot of – the SECURe that you talked about, the program, can you comment a little bit about that?

Dr. Morrison: Right, yes. We’ve been working on a program that is called SECURe. It means Social, Emotional, Cognitive Understanding and Regulation in education, but all of these programs, I think are designed to help children practice the componential skills that we’ve just talked about: attentional control and flexibility, sustained attention, working memory, and response inhibition, and I think in my view, one of the things that we have discovered is that this is going to be a more difficult task than say, teaching kids early reading, although teaching early reading isn’t necessarily all that is easy, but the kinds of programs that have been developed and you mentioned a number of them, they do have some degree of success but a spotty record of success. We haven’t really found, if you will, the special sauce that’s going to help kids and I think one of the reasons is as we’ve discussed before, that developing, really mastering self-regulation in whatever domain it is takes a lot longer than we otherwise might have hoped, and so we have to be careful of that. I think we can change behavior and parents are constantly doing it with their kids throughout the preschool years, but it really takes a day-to-day effort. It can take months and sometimes years for kids to develop the kind of self-regulation that we want them to have. So I think we are going to find programs that work, we’re going to find programs that can be braided together with the literacy and numeracy programs in school, but it’s going to take some time, and really trying to get kids to the level of self-regulation that we’re hoping, I think we have to be more patient than we are with some of the basic academic skills.

Sucheta: Well, terrific. So how do you want our culture, which is to begin with very consumer-centered and impatient, and loves fast change, how does it come to embrace this truth about executive function development training, as well as progress?

Dr. Morrison: Yes, well, if I had the answer to that, we’d both be rich, I guess, but I think yes, it is a cultural issue. I think what we’ve seen – if you go to look at Chinese preschools. What they tend to do, in part because they are focusing – they have a larger than we do – they focus on practicing these skills a lot more as part of their daily routine, and it’s not in any sort of dictatorial way, but they just practice lining up, they practice doing all sorts of skills that promote response inhibition and promote attention, so I think that basically, we’ve got to start early, but recognize that it takes a long time and I don’t know exactly how we do that because in our culture, we really do emphasize, yes, quick results but we also emphasize individuality and creativity, so we don’t really emphasize learning to regulate yourself because it’s seen as stifling. It’s seen as a road in creativity, so we’ve got to find a balance between those two, and I think that would be a really important sort of insight that we could have in our culture.

Sucheta: Terrific. What a fabulous, fabulous conversation. Thank you so much, Fred. Again, I am indebted to you for coming on the show, and before I let you go, if our listeners want to get ahold of you or try to find your work, how can they go about it?

Dr. Morrison: The best way is to email me at FJMorris@UMich.edu.

Sucheta: Thank you.

Dr. Morrison: Thank you.

Producer: Alright. That was Sucheta’s second conversation with Dr. Fred Morrison, very interesting conversation. Sucheta, let’s just get into it, so Dr. Morrison was talking about and saying that educating children versus helping them overcome problems related to independence are two very separate things, right? So what are your thoughts there?

Sucheta: Yes, so I think as we go into intervention or managing, we have many ways to manage it. We can do individual level of managing and then the global level which is educational level, and then of course, cultural level which will be much larger way of managing it. The general education process is far different than treatment. What we call treatment or interventions are much more targeted on specific skills. They tend to be intense and they are provided by experts or in expert ways. They are not just limited to outside as much as they are inside the classroom, so that’s the one important thing to think about interventions as a global view.

Producer: Alright, well, gosh, just like the first interview with Dr. Morrison, an awful lot of information here today, so lead us off, what are some key takeaways that we should pull from this conversation?

Sucheta: Dr. Fred Morrison is a researcher and he has incredible wealth of knowledge, and what he wants us to focus on, and this is my first takeaway for all of us, is executive function and self-regulation in younger children looks a lot different than as they mature and get a little bit older. So in younger years, the focus of what do we expect these children to master is a lot more on the fundamental or foundational skills and they range from attention, participation, cooperation, socializing, and regulating impulses in a group setting. So the most important focus in that age group is learning to become a member of group, and cooperation and collaboration really sets the tone of how well the young learner will be included in the activities, as well as the social entity that allows self-regulation to emerge, and that’s what the focus of the treatment then is on those kinds of skills that can come from great classroom management, great ways of teaching some habits as a group, great ways of imposing certain restriction and requirements of the classroom behavior. So, cooperation or a protocol of responses, or even families can take advantage of that understanding, that in younger years, we have to be a lot more clear, consistent, and extremely explicit about the expectations we have from our children.

Producer: Okay, so now, in cases of older children or adolescents who have started becoming more self-aware, this is a different story, right?

Sucheta: Yes, that’s the second takeaway from Fred’s talk here, that in older years, the child has moved away a little bit from that fundamental impulse control problem but more the requirements, demonstrating the sharper executive functions or good self-regulation is towards building a future orientation. So there’s a great shift in need, so to speak, so the education and learning needs to focus on how to help students become more self-regulated learners. What does that look like? It’s helping them focus on tasks, helping them become more aware of time, becoming more persistent at difficult tasks, developing more habits of organization, and more long-ranged planning. “How do I work on outcomes that are going to affect my life but not immediately, not now, not tomorrow, but more three weeks down the road, or a semester down the road?” So there is a genuine shift in the way executive function and self-regulation emerges in later years, and hence, interventions, as well as management needs to shift in that direction.

Producer: Obviously, researchers and educators have just started figuring out how to treat problems with executive functions and self-regulation in classrooms, but goodness, this is all complicated matter, yes?

Sucheta: Yes, and this is my third takeaway from our conversation with Fred that just as he mentioned in his earlier talk, that it goes back to how we define executive functions, and executive functions, if you have a framework to think that it has a maturational component to it, that means it will get better in time, better with maturity, then you may not intervene, you may not support, you may not promote the development of certain skills and that can be a big problem, but the interventions that are coming on board, that are emerging, we don’t have longitudinal study on that. We don’t know how the impact of this kind of treatment will be when you have implemented it for five continuous years, so he was very cautious and making any plans regarding what does successful treatment look like, but he kind of warned all of us to think about that it cannot be short-term. It needs to be done over a long period of time. It needs to be done systematically and it needs to be done with this in mind that you are promoting habits of mind and we are promoting certain thought process that will build a future-oriented thinking, and when both of these components are done simultaneously, there’s a greater chance of developing these skills and helping students develop the mastery of it.

Producer: Okay, well, thank you for that. Before we wrap, Sucheta, any final thoughts on this conversation with Dr. Morrison?

Sucheta: Yes, and this is my last takeaway for all of us, that there are several levels of self-regulatory control, and the development of executive functions and self-regulation can be judged and assessed over time, and as he mentioned, they are devilishly difficult to learn and they are devilishly difficult to teach. The root approach that could really, really help is self-awareness or something in the field is called meta cognition. That means awareness of your awareness, and so when we talk about treatment or interventions, or managing executive functions, one must think about the performance of that individual in the greater context of society, as well as greater context of culture, and there comes that culturally-imposed limited way of thinking that we need to circumvent, particularly in western world where individuality is promoted, routines and systematizing certain aspects of your daily life is considered very boring or annoyingly limiting, or stifling, and there’s a rebellion when there’s a pushback, even from adolescent or young adults that, “Eh, I don’t believe in going to bed on time. I want the freedom to use my cell phone whenever I want. I want to be able to write in Starbucks, my four page paper, I want to write it in Starbucks,” or “I don’t feel like coming out for dinner because I’m not hungry.” So when you start rebelling against foundational structural elements in your day or life, then you start becoming kind of disregulated, and certain cultures allow that and certain cultures don’t allow that, so I do think that there’s an opportunity for all of us to talk about grit or this effortful learning or sticking with harder stuff, with great belief that that’s what I’m here for, and I think if we take that approach, I think we will make a lot more sense to everyone who’s listening.

Producer: Well, lots of great information to take away from your conversations with Dr. Fred Morrison, so very, very good stuff.

Alright, well, that’s it for today’s conversation. On behalf of our host, Sucheta Kamath and all of us at Cerebral Matters, thank you for listening and tuning in today. We look forward to seeing you next week on Full Prefrontal.