For parents
When your kid is struggling and nothing is working.
You've probably already tried a lot. Tutors, apps, reward charts, taking the phone away, giving the phone back, the meeting with the school that produced a plan nobody followed. You may have been told your child is bright but not applying themselves — which is both true and completely useless as advice.
Children with learning and attention differences are almost never failing for lack of effort. They are often working substantially harder than their peers to produce less. After enough years of that, the difficulty stops being about executive functioning and becomes about what a child has concluded about themselves — that they are dumb, or lazy, or simply not a learner. That conclusion is the one that follows them into adulthood.
This is why the relationship is the vehicle and not merely the setting. New skills are internalized within the safety of a clinical relationship a child actually trusts, and that same safety is what protects a positive self-image as a learner — so that curiosity remains available to them rather than becoming one more place they expect to fail. It is the argument of my paper The Power of Connection: A Relational Approach to Executive Functioning Interventions with Children and Adolescents (Cox & Levy-Warren, Journal of Infant, Child, and Adolescent Psychotherapy, 2025).
