Published by DK Children on February 13, 2024
Genres: Children's, Children's Educational
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What are 2 things every person has? A brain and a body! This book is all about how they communicate and play together-aka, executive functioning! Learn executive functioning skills and start practicing them today. Because when our brains and bodies work well together, we can truly thrive!
Right now, if I used the term “executive functioning” would you know what I meant? Maybe not. (It’s not about things CEOs do…) Executive function refers to the tools and skills you use to control and coordinate your other cognitive abilities and behaviors. Planning, emotional regulation, prioritizing tasks, keeping focus on tasks, and staying organized are all examples of executive functioning. Or, as Iris Wong puts it in A Kids Book about Executive Functioning: “Your brain tells your body what do, think, and feel.”
The A Kids Book series covers an amazing array of topics. I’ve also reviewed Rebekah Bruesehoff’s book in this series about inclusivity. The books are written as conversations between the author and the reader and meant to be read by both parents and kids. This is both an endearing and a limiting factor. Conversations are two-sided. Authors of a book can obviously only provide one. Rather than what I expect from a book, the text and tone of this series feels more like a transcript from a short video—and I actually wonder if the series might be more effective in a short-form video format.
Wong introduces a number of terms straightaway, defining executive functioning, goal-directed persistence, and body doubling all within the first few pages. That continues to be a theme as Wong talks about task initiation, working memory, response inhibition, metacognition, emotional control, and the list goes on. In fact, if I had to offer one criticism of this book, it would be that the entire book seems just to be about redefining terms in a child-friendly way. The book says that we’re going to “play with the idea of executive functioning” but the format of the book prevents a lot of that. It’s a feature of the series that limits Wong’s writing and teaching.
And Wong tries. There’s playful back-and-forths that try to create a patter of conversation, that try to be silly, that move toward engagement in play. I can imagine it working in a conversation with a kid. I can imagine Wong having this conversation as a therapist with a child and it working, but I’m not convinced it does in the book.
I think this would have worked better had it been simpler and more streamlined. We’re two-thirds through the book before we get to what executive functioning actually helps us do. Well, why would a kid suffer through forty pages of definitions without knowing why it is this all is important?
In the end, Wong does her absolute best within the parameters that have been given to her. But the book is just information overload and such a didactic style just isn’t greatly conducive to the way kids the age the book is aimed at actually learn. A Kids Book about Executive Functioning is perhaps better for the parents, who will now have lay-level language to talk about executive functioning.