Late, Lost, and Unprepared: A Parents' Guide to Helping Children with Executive Functioning by Joyce Cooper-Kahn, Laurie Dietzel

From the Publisher

Executive functions are the cognitive skills that help us manage our lives and be successful. Children with weak executive skills, despite their best intentions, often do their homework but forget to turn it in, wait until the last minute to start a project, lose things, or have a room that looks like a dump! The good news is that parents can do a lot to support and train their children to manage these frustrating and stressful weaknesses.

Late, Lost, and Unprepared is a must-have book for parents of children from primary school through high school who struggle with:

Impulse Control (taking turns, interrupting others, running off)
Cognitive Flexibility (adapting to new situations, transitions, handling frustrations)
Initiation (starting homework, chores, and major projects)
Working Memory (following directions, note-taking, reading and retaining info)
Planning & Organizing (completing and turning in homework, juggling schedules)
Self-monitoring (making careless errors, staying on topic, getting into trouble but not understanding why)

Written by clinical psychologists, Late, Lost, and Unprepared emphasizes the need for a two-pronged approach to intervention: 1) helping the child to manage demands in the short run, and 2) building independent skills for long-term self-management. Full of encouragement and practical strategies, the book's organization--short chapters with overviews, summaries, case studies, tips, and definitions--makes it easy to grasp concepts quickly and get started.

Part I, What You Need to Know, provides information about:
what executive functions are and how weaknesses in these skills affectdevelopment; the impact of weak executive function on children's emotional lives and their families; how professionals assess executive function problems; and associated conditions (AD/HD--children with an AD/HD diagnosis always have executive skills issues--learning disabilities, autism spectrum disorders, Tourette syndrome, etc.).

Part II discusses What You Can Do About It including how to change behavior and set reasonable expectations, and offers specific intervention strategies for children of different ages, varying needs, and profiles.

Late, Lost, and Unprepared is chockful of ideas for helping your child or student be productive and independent--today and in the future.

Autism Asperger's Digest

LATE, LOST, AND UNPREPARED delves deeply into the world of executive functioning skills, explaining their role in learning and in critical life skills: time management, impulse control (in words and deeds), cognitive flexibility, and initiation, planning and organizing, among others. Part I of the book widens understanding about EF skills in general, including assessing your child or student's abilities. Part II, the "what you can do about it" section is page after page of positive strategies, highly practical tips and case studies that cement concepts and learning. A well-organized, well-written book that's sure to become a well-used addition to your home or professional library.

Shawna Thorup - Library Journal

Two groundbreaking guides explore a burgeoning parenting topic. Executive functioning/executive skills are a series of cognitive skills that regulate behavior and help accomplish tasks, e.g., impulse and emotional control or planning and organizing work. When these skills are weak, children's behavior can be frustrating and vexing for parents who show strength in the particular skills with which their child struggles. Both guides emphasize children's nonperformance as caused by inability, and both illustrate how to improve functioning. Clinical psychologists Cooper-Kahn and Dietzel offer a practical approach through detailed explanations, explorations of causes and effects, and strengthening techniques. Especially helpful are a professional assessment how-to and abundant tips for advocacy at school.

Using a similar tack, Dawson, a psychologist, and Guare, a neuropsychologist, follow up on their clinician-specific Executive Skills in Children and Adolescents, with more compassionate and parent-friendly results. They include age-specific questionnaires to assess skills in both child and parent and focus on the fit between children's and their parents' strengths and weaknesses in skill-building techniques and daily living. Notable are several useful checklists and a clear framework for intervention. While both titles include resource lists and clinical examples, Dawson and Guare's personal anecdotes lend immediacy. They also provide lists of toys and games to promote skill development and several relevant web sites. Overall, Smart but Scattered is the more comprehensive, accessible, and hopeful title. Donna Goldberg and Jennifer Zwiebel's The Organized Student:Teaching Children the Skills for Success in School and Beyond showed the tip of the iceberg, and other books devoted exclusively to Asperger's syndrome or ADHD cater to a specific audience. As the first books on the subject to speak directly, comprehensively, and universally to parents, both titles are recommended for parenting collections in public and school libraries; Dawson and Guare's work should be considered essential.

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