The job of a mental health clinician is to help parents and teachers recognize a child's difficulties and come up with a plan for intervention. Here are six steps used by clinicians to help a child that has problems with executive function.
- Introduce a dynamic assessment process and set goals for interventions.
- This gives the parents and teachers a new way of looking at the child's difficulties and helps to set realistic goals.
- Identify persons who can act as facilitators and engage them in that role. This offers the parents another avenue to address the ir child's behaviors that does not involve discipline. Therefore, tension is often relieved between the parents and the child.
- Engage the child's interests by introducing developmentally appropriate interventions. The child's motivation is increased when the executive function is linked to situations that are important to the child. They suggest this can be done through game play and playful activities.
- Plan external support (scaffolding) for guiding development at the point of performance. During scaffolding the child can function at his/her potential rather than actual level of development. Scaffolding allows a facilitator to go from full external support to independent performance.
- . Sequence and amplify the intervention, adjusting the level of support in response to the child's level of performance. Once the child masters the interventions at home it can be carried over into other situations. Ex. Social settings or school
- Introduce a long-term vision, engaging the child as an active partner in treatment and engaging other facilitators as partners in ongoing dynamic assessment. The long- term goal is for the child to be able to use the tools creatively and independently.
In the case examples it shows how the clinician has a different role depending on the child's individual needs.
Yeager, Marcie, and Marcie Yeager. Executive Function and Child Development. New York: W.W. Norton, 2013. Print.