Customer Reviews

Smart but Scattered: The Revolutionary "Executive Skills" Approach to Helping Kids Reach Their Potential

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I noticed that a lot of reviews were written by special ed teachers and psychologists, and wanted to add mine as a parent. This book FINALLY shed light on the challenges my son faces at home and school. It not only gave me concrete tools and ideas to help him strengthen his executive skills, but also an understanding of what was going on, which led to more patience on my part. Nagging him to get organized and constantly reminding him to stay on task was not helping. His executive skill weaknesses were beginning to lead to low self-esteem and a "better not to try than to fail" attitude. This book has helped me to begin turning that around. It was recommended to me by a psychologist. If anyone has ever hinted that your child might be ADHD-- read this book before accepting any labels.

I bought this about 8 months ago to read for tips on how to help our teenage son, who has high functioning autism,ADD, and anxiety. It has become possibly the best book resource for helping us help him with organization at home and school. I just read a section to him yesterday as we were considering the possibility of increasing his medication--the checklist of questions provided in the book helped us to make our decision.

One thing the book talks about is how OUR own executive weaknesses can exacerbate our kids' struggles. Through reading this section I realized I have HUGE problem in estimating how long things take to accomplish, and how this has affected my life, in creating stress for me, and how this has impacted my being able to help my son, who also has this weakness.

I also appreciate the respectful tone the book has towards the struggles kids have. The authors do not focus on blame, but rather focus on dealing with the problems and solving them

Extremely practical, realistic and hopeful. Two words--BUY IT! You won't be disappointed.

I initially checked this book out at the library, read it, re-read it and then photocopied a few pages and returned it. I have a child who struggles with all areas of organizational skills, time management, goal directed behavior and this book has practical suggestions on how to address the problems in a systematic way and while recognizing that the improvements will not be immediate. For example, my son would disappear into his bedroom to put his shoes on, get distracted by a book or toy and 15 minutes later, I would find him on the floor in his bedroom with his shoes still off. By setting a goal for him to require less reminders (instead of going from 10 reminders to 0 reminders), we can make progress toward the goal without getting discouraged along the way. I found myself wanting to use this book for reference when a new problem would crop up. It's well written, gives great examples and illustrations and is a great resource for those who are parenting or teaching kids who struggle with executive skills. I have many parenting resources and this one stands alone with its' detailed and systematic approach to helping kids develop life-skills.

As a Special Ed. teacher, I found this book to be very helpful. It is user friendly and has easy to use forms. I was originally looking for information as to how to get my students organized with homework and day to day tasks. This book had what I was looking for and some. I recommend it for teachers and parents as well.

This book provides interesting background, though it excludes so many areas of psychology and neurophysiology. I do like very much the way executive function is broken into the specific areas of skill acquisition. And the real life examples provided to illustrate struggles are excellent. As both a clinician and a parent, I find the solutions offered completely unrealistic for all except the youngest children - maybe 8 and under. It is a very good attempt at tackling this emerging science in comprehensible terms for parents and professionals who work with children. My biggest criticism is on the section regarding organization. If that is your primary concern as a reader, look elsewhere. This section is not correct and very inadequate.

I am a child/adolescent psychologist. This book is excellent in terms of helping you identify areas in need of support and providing practical ways to help support kids to be more successful at home and at school. I highly recommend it to parents, teachers, and psychologists. The content is particularly relevant for intermediate elementary grades, middle school, and high school students.

Dawson and Guare have delievered a great book at a more than reasonable price. This book is recommedned to parents, by our school team, when they have a have a child with executive function difficulties. It gives them real tools to work with their child and reduce frustrations at home. I gave it to all of my educator/psychologist friends becasue it is a great reference to help parents help their kids. You can even apply some of the tools listed to yourself if you are a "scattered" adult!

This book was very informative and well-written. It gave great suggestions for improving behaviors and tackling weaknesses. The tests for identifying weaknesses in executive skills were very helpful in understanding my son's problems as developmental issues. Not every child easily develops the executive skills defined within the book. Realizing that executive skills need to be taught to many individulas and can be strengthened with practice and consistent reinforcement was extremely reassuring.

There is no quick fix for deficiencies in executive skills. Improvement takes time and patient commitment from both parent and child. For me, the most important result after reading this book was a change in my own attitude. I feel less frustrated and angry with my son because I stopped believing that his problems stemmed from a lack of effort on his part. I see now that he honestly was not able to figure out, on his own, the best way to direct his efforts. The book gives worksheets and check lists which are giving us a starting point in helping my son to understand the different executive skills. They are practical tools designed to keep him focussed in his efforts to master the skills, where weaknesses were identified (in his case, setting goals, planning and prioritizing, and time management).

I am very glad that I found this book. I recommend it to any parent struggling with a child who is not succeeding in school. It is an eye-opening read.

As a Developmental/Behavioral Pediatrician, I have been recommending this book to the families that I see in my clinic with children that struggle with many different aspects of "learning" from "ADHD", to brain injury, to many other developmental disabilities. It gives the parents a functional framework to begin understanding the concepts of Executive Functioning within the Frontal Lobe System that are so developmentally important in day to day functioning. Having a good basic profile of understanding of their child's functioning can then help them to begin developing the accommodations within the home system, and then begin the educational process of the teachers in the classroom (imagine that!-teaching the teachers these concepts) to help them develop accommodations that can become MUCH MORE SPECIFICALLY FOCUSED FOR THE 504's. So many of the accommodations are very generalized ones that are often created from more broad "labels" applied to children. What does "ADHD" truly mean anyway for example? You have to understand what the very specific underlying impairments are to create very specific accommodations to be most effective. This book focuses very well on teaching parents about Executive Functioning and giving them some great basic strategies to look at and work with. Language therapists that do neurocognitive therapy can then provide additional strategies for the more severe children where needed. Parents then are also much more effective in follow through because they know what is being focused on in therapy. This book doesn't cover learning disabilites that often accompany the scope of general learning problems, and it's not meant to. Many schools and even psychologists will focus only on searching for "learning disabilities" in their evaluations. Without attaching this "other half" of the concepts of understanding executive functioning together with the learning disability however, I find that many kids will still be 'underserved' in terms of needed accommodations in the school setting and many parents continue to be frustrated by their child's lack of progress.
If you as a parent really take these concepts into understanding, you will begin to understand why your child behaves, does things, reacts, or responds in the way they do. You will also better understand YOUR OWN strengths and weaknesses in executive functioning!!
This is a GREAT BOOK!! You will have that "lightbulb" moment and understand how we "process and achieve goals". Profile your child! You know them the best! THEN TEACH THE TEACHERS AT SCHOOL WHAT THEIR STRENGTHS AND WEAKNESSES ARE! "My child is NOT a procrasinator! He/She has TASK INITIATION problems!". "I'm just going to scan and email his/her completed homework to you (teacher) because my child has severe ORGANIZATIONAL problems (and all the other strategies we've tried have failed!)" In so many children, these executive functions can also be disabilities as well, and not just a developmental issue that will mature with time. Where they are disabilities (Fetal Alcohol effects, brain injury, associated seizure disorders, more severe ADHD, or other numerous issues), ensure that the school is aware that it is a DISABILITY. It is an Executive DYSFUNCTION!

This is an amazing book for any parent, child care person or teacher who needs to interact with kids with executive functioning issues. I myself had poor working memory issues and have a 7th grader who needed a lot of help in this area. I also have a 7 year old that I never could understand. He has poor impulsiveness and emotional control. This book really, really helped me to understand him and figure out how to help him. I highly recommend the book. The only negative is that I think there could have been more hands on solutions to help kids (even though there were a lot) and maybe that is because I am a teacher, a person who overcame working memory issues and taught my 7th grader how to overcome them so I already had a bunch of tricks up my sleeves that weren't in the book.