Originally Posted by MumOfThree
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She's actually doing better than "typical" in terms of her age-mates, according to everything we can find on the subject. The problem is the inappropriate expectations placed on her because of the (marginally?) more appropriate academic setting.
My own DD is not average (let alone better than) for her age, so I am confident there is an issue there. But do you define whether a child's executive function is problematic relative to their intellectual ability (and thus what they are trying to do with their time) or their age?
In my DS's case, this is pretty simple. He's highly asynchronous, so there are tasks he does alongside age-mates that are appropriate, and others that would normally be given to children much older than him. I look at how he does on tasks where he's doing the same thing as his age-mates, and I ask, does he organise and control himself as well as other 7yos on those tasks? Answer is clearly yes. Then I look at how he organises and controls himself on tasks which would normally be being done by a much older child, and I ask whether he does as well as would be expected if he were that age. Answer is clearly no. That's the point - his executive function is age-appropriate, but not appropriate to all the tasks he's doing. Because of this I'm with HowlerKarma - I wouldn't contemplate medicating him (even if I thought it would help) because - well, as I type it I find it's hard to be pithy and convincing, but it doesn't seem right to risk side-effects and possible long-term effects for something which is not his brain working wrongly, but just it still working right for his age in one way.

I'm sure there would be other cases where it'd be much harder to sort out - for younger children, I guess, and maybe also for older children who are less asynchronous. I could imagine someone having trouble if their child didn't have the EF for intellect-appropriate tasks but also found (all) age-appropriate tasks so boring that they couldn't focus on them for that reason; you'd have to watch very carefully to spot that two different things were going on!


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