Here are 100 books that Executive Skills in Children and Adolescents fans have personally recommended if you like
Executive Skills in Children and Adolescents.
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Is there a Japanese or Dutch word for "One who loves to geek out on organizational strategies, productivity (and post-its) SO MUCH they focus their career on it?" If there is, um......that's me. I'm Dr. Rebecca Branstetter, and I've been a school psychologist and collector of practical strategies to support students with executive functioning challenges for over 20 years. As the author of The Everything Parents Guide to Executive Functioning and creator of the “How to Teach Children and Teens Executive Functioning Skills” masterclass, my passion is to help kids figure out how they learn, what's getting in the way of their potential, and what to do about it!
So often, executive functioning challenges like impulse control, difficulties with attention, and trouble with organization are thought of as isolated skills to be taught as an “add on” lesson. However, there are easy ways to teach executive functioning skills as an “add IN” to what parents and educators are already doing throughout the day. I recommend this book because it helps teach executive functioning in everyday routines, like cooking, going to the store, and on the playground. I really love the colorful and ready-to-use pages in this book! The author also sells a really cool card deck you can get to take with you “on the go” to boost not only executive functioning but also emotional regulation and social communication.
The Mom’s Choice Award winner, Make Social and Emotional Learning Stick! Practical activities to help your child manage their emotions, navigate social situations and decrease anxiety, Expanded and Updated, (black and white version!) has helped thousands of families boost emotional regulation, executive functioning, social communication, reduce anxiety, and so much more!
Does your child struggle to have meaningful connections, navigate social situations, and communicate with others?
Learn how to support them so that they can build on their strengths and interests to feel confident and connected in social relationships and situations.
Does your child experience high levels of anxiety or…
Is there a Japanese or Dutch word for "One who loves to geek out on organizational strategies, productivity (and post-its) SO MUCH they focus their career on it?" If there is, um......that's me. I'm Dr. Rebecca Branstetter, and I've been a school psychologist and collector of practical strategies to support students with executive functioning challenges for over 20 years. As the author of The Everything Parents Guide to Executive Functioning and creator of the “How to Teach Children and Teens Executive Functioning Skills” masterclass, my passion is to help kids figure out how they learn, what's getting in the way of their potential, and what to do about it!
I’ve been a huge fan of Ross Greene’s work for a long time because he is changing the way parents and educators look at children with behavioral challenges. His powerful motto, “Kids do well when they can” is a call for teaching lagging executive skills, instead of punishing kids for having executive functioning challenges. Instead of thinking of a child with ADHD as being a “behavior problem” or “unmotivated”, Dr. Greene's Collaborative & Proactive Solutions (CPS) approach helps parents and educators focus on the true factors contributing to challenging behaviors, empowering educators to address these factors and create helping relationships with their most at-risk kids.
From the renowned authority on education and parenting, “an in-depth approach to aid parents and teachers to work together with behaviorally challenging students” (Publishers Weekly)—now revised and updated.
School discipline is broken. Too often, the kids who need our help the most are viewed as disrespectful, out of control, and beyond help, and are often the recipients of our most ineffective, most punitive interventions. These students—and their parents, teachers, and administrators—are frustrated and desperate for answers.
Dr. Ross W. Greene, author of the acclaimed book The Explosive Child, offers educators and parents a different framework for understanding challenging behavior. Dr.…
I’ve always been drawn to babies and toddlers and fascinated by the development that happens in the early years of life. This fascination led me to become a teacher, parent, and emotional development expert with a master's degree in early childhood education. Eventually, my passion for this field led me to co-create the Collaborative Emotion Processing method and research it nationwide. The research results were compelling, and so began my mission to share it with the world.
I love this book because it changed my entire outlook on behavior. It helped me understand the relationship between nervous system regulation and emotional regulation.
It helped me identify the underlying needs that drive the challenging behaviors we see in childhood. It changed the game for me as a parent and teacher.
There's no such thing as a bad kid. That's what a lifetime of experience has taught Dr. Stuart Shanker. No matter how difficult, out of control, distracted, or exhausted a child might seem, there's a way forward: self-regulation. Overturning decades of conventional wisdom, this radical new technique allows children and the adults who care for them to regain their composure and peace of mind.
Self-Reg is a groundbreaking book that presents an entirely new understanding of your child's emotions and behavior and a practical guide for parents to help their kids engage calmly and successfully in learning and life. Grounded…
Is there a Japanese or Dutch word for "One who loves to geek out on organizational strategies, productivity (and post-its) SO MUCH they focus their career on it?" If there is, um......that's me. I'm Dr. Rebecca Branstetter, and I've been a school psychologist and collector of practical strategies to support students with executive functioning challenges for over 20 years. As the author of The Everything Parents Guide to Executive Functioning and creator of the “How to Teach Children and Teens Executive Functioning Skills” masterclass, my passion is to help kids figure out how they learn, what's getting in the way of their potential, and what to do about it!
This picture book for elementary-aged students is a great one because it helps shift the focus of ADHD as a “deficit” to a potential strength. I’m a big believer in educating children with ADHD and executive functioning about how their brain works differently, which can sometimes be a good thing! This book can be read to students with or without ADHD and includes a page of discussion questions to build awareness and empathy for students with ADHD.
Someone has been stealing food from Snowball, the classroom pet bunny! Can Izzy use her SEN Superpowers to track down the culprit and save the day? SEN Superpowers: The Classroom Mystery explores the topic of ADHD with an empowering story and adorable illustrations.
The SEN Superpowers series celebrates the positive traits associated with a range of common SEN (Special Education Needs) conditions, boosting the confidence and strength-awareness of children with those conditions, while also allowing for better understanding and positivity among their peers. Each book includes a page of discussion points about the story, a page of tips for how…
Inspired both by my marriage to someone with ADHD as well as my own neurodiversity, I have been researching this topic for the last 15 years. As a collegiate athlete and stimulation seeker myself, my doctoral dissertation explored the impact of HIIT exercise on symptom presentation in adults with ADHD, and the results were inspiring. I truly believe that with the right set of tools and supports, those with ADHD can be the driving force behind humanity's many accomplishments. This belief also informs my strength-based counseling approach with those who have ADHD that I am honored to continue working with throughout their own self-empowerment journeys.
I stumbled on this book when trying to help my husband, who has ADHD, find some actionable coping skills. This book was so different from others I had encountered, and I loved it for exactly that reason. Written by an MD who was diagnosed later, the author shared real-life scenarios and difficulties he had experienced his entire life that he had never known were attributed to his unique brain.
I enjoyed how the author offered short, entertaining, and memorable accounts of his experiences. Simple things like “rulemaking” or understanding struggles with visual cues (ie. looking right at the condiment in the refrigerator but not seeing it because it was not where it was meant to be) were just some of the relatable examples he provided about what it was like to struggle with executive functioning with ADHD.
I would highly recommend this book to someone who wants to feel like…
ADHD causes us many problems and make our lives harder. This book focuses on strategies that will make your life easier and better.
I’m a psychiatrist who has ADHD. I’m going to share with you some of the ways I’ve learned to cope with my ADHD problems. I’ll also share with you some coping strategies from my friends and some from my patients with ADHD. I’ll also share some of the ways that we’re still not coping so well.
Unlike most books on ADHD, the focus of this book is on strategies; strategies that will make your life easier. The…
My boys greedily consumed books until middle school when screens began to pull them away. I still brought home piles of books, especially stories that stirred empathy, hoping they would pick them up (especially during enforced no-screen times). My then-5th grader complained that I brought home too many “sad books about kids having a really hard time,” and that’s when I realized I was choosing titles I liked and wanted them to read. The novels I had written thus far were heavy stories for teens, but after this little episode with my boy, I decided to pay attention to what they really wanted to read. And to write one they might like.
I love everything written by Jack Gantos, but the Joey Pizga series is so fun.
With his unnamed diagnosis (most likely ADHD), Joey is often wild and impulsive and gets into all sorts of trouble.
My son has moaned that I bring home too many books about kids having a hard time, and Joey Pizga is a kid who has struggles, but his difficulties are balanced by the funny and shocking situations into which he gets himself. And he wants so much to be better!
Joey is a good kid, maybe even a great kid, but his teachers never know what he's going to do next. He sharpens his finger in the pencil-sharpener and swallows his house key. He can't sit still for more than a minute - Joey is buzzing!
Told from Joey's own unique viewpoint by acclaimed American author Jack Gantos, this is an exceptionally funny and touching story about a boy with severe attention deficit disorder (ADD).
I am a clinical psychologist who has specialised in neurodiversity and neurodivergence for the past twenty years. Human brains, emotions, and behaviour have always fascinated me, hence why I studied psychology. Neurodiversity was a natural field to enter for someone interested in both child development and neuroscience. I am also an avid reader and wax lyrical about the value of literature for understanding both one’s inner self and the world around us.
I found this book while I was researching for my own book and have been recommending it regularly to families ever since. It promotes a positive view of neurodiversity without being ‘PollyAnna-ish’–I would call it positive realism.
It was written over thirteen years ago now, so not all the language will be perfect for everybody by today’s standards. However, the concepts are still very current, and they are expressed sensitively. Clinical conditions such as autism, ADHD, and dyslexia are described in a very accessible way, demonstrating how symptoms are on a continuum, and many of us can relate to at least some features of most of the conditions.
Chapters on depression and anxiety are included, and while these arguably fall under mental health rather than neurodiversity, I was really glad of their inclusion in this book, as the overlaps between mental health conditions and neurodiversity are many, and clinical distinctions…
I’ve alwaysbeen fascinated by children’s language development and am a word hound. For over five decades I’ve been a teacher, teacher trainer, school founder/director, mentor, founder/executive director of a large children’s museum; author of 6 classic textbooks on how children think and learn, and author/self-publisher of one of my many story-poems. My passions are writing, studying new findings in brain development, and launching top-quality schools in underserved urban areas. Between 1969 and 1990, I founded six schools, five still running, three as private non-profit schools and two as essential entities (one called the “safety-net") in their public school systems. The MELC is the only U.S. school accredited by Reggio's founders.
1961: My life’s thrill was Danny’s birth—happy, loving, and by age 2, articulate speech that turned heads. But in Montessori school, despite numerous materials for writing and reading, he was called “hand retarded.” He struggled, only acquiring reading in high school. Today he is a clinical psychologist with honors galore! 1961: We knew little. 1971: First brain scan. 1977: Cognitive science was born as scientists from numerous fields began brain studies. In Danny’s youth, there were guesses and alleged treatments but little science.
Cognitive-Behavioral Neurologist/Kennedy Krieger Institute, Developmental Neuropsychologist and Professor Emeritus/Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Martha Bridge Denckla’s book, Understanding Learning and Related Disabilities: Inconvenient Brains, gives a scientific understanding of ADD, ADHD, ASD, and six other brain dysfunctions to parents, teachers, and others suspecting learning problems.
Wow! Dr. Denkla is so deeply knowledgeable. Her scholarship and explanations of conditions provide information to relieve readers' anxieties.
Children with developmental disabilities inhabit a gray zone: they live and learn under normal conditions in some aspects of their lives, while their "inconvenient brains" present a range of challenges in other school and life contexts. Dr. Martha Bridge Denckla provides parents and educators with general knowledge, research findings, and practical recommendations about a variety of these developmental conditions, including dyslexia, dyscalculia, ADHD, autism spectrum disorder, problems with motor coordination, and executive dysfunction. Inspired by her efforts to explain these conditions to parents over 45 years of clinical practice, she provides a science-based understanding of the issues in an accessible…
In college, I majored in Human Development and Family Studies and found my calling – to work with kids and create SEL (Social and Emotional Learning) content for them. While still an undergrad, my first book was published (People Are Like Lollipops - a picture book celebrating diversity.) Throughout my career, I’ve continued writing books and creating multimedia content for kids and teens while helping parents support their kids’ character development in the digital age. I read a lot of parenting books, but I don’t always learn something new that opens my heart and mind. Each book I’ve recommended here did that for me. I hope the books on my list will help you on your parenting journey.
Katherine Ellison is a Pulitzer Prize winning investigative reporter. When she and her pre-teen son were both diagnosed with ADHD in the same year it became her personal and professional mission to find out as much as she could about this increasingly common diagnosis. Anyone who knows and loves someone who’s been diagnosed with ADHD would do well to read this book as a guide through the often bewildering landscape of ADHD treatments. As serious and personal as Buzz is, Ellison is a great writer and her memoir is equal parts science, expert interviews and analysis, parenting angst, and humor.
"An absorbing, sharply observed memoir." -- Kirkus Reviews A hilarious and heartrending account of one mother's journey to understand and reconnect with her high-spirited preteen son-a true story sure to beguile parents grappling with a child's bewildering behavior. Popular literature is filled with the stories of self-sacrificing mothers bravely tending to their challenging children. Katherine Ellison offers a different kind of tale. Shortly after Ellison, an award-winning investigative reporter, and her twelve-year-old son, Buzz, were both diagnosed with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder, she found herself making such a hash of parenting that the two of them faced three alternatives: he'd go…
I grew up undiagnosed autistic. I got excellent grades and never caused much trouble, so no one could tell what was going on inside. But sensory overload and confusion over social dynamics kept me in a bewildering muddle. Books and stories are what helped me through! But there were no stories featuring neurodivergent kids like me, so, as an adult, I resolved to write some. I want to bust stigmas and write honest, fun, heartfelt stories for kids who might be going through their own ‘bewildering muddles.’ Now, I'm an award-winning author of several children's novels and a picture book. I'm also co-founder/editor of A Novel Mind, a web resource on mental health and neurodiversity in children's literature.
Young Gwendolyn Rogers struggles in middle school and with friends. She’s impulsive and makes poor decisions – and longs for a clear diagnosis of ADHD. Author Caela Carter, who has ADHD herself, lets us slip inside her character in such a fascinating way. We see how much Gwendolyn longs to get things right, how much she cares about her family and friends, even though she makes mistakes and does things to annoy them.
From the critically acclaimed author of the ALA Notable and Charlotte Huck Honor Book Forever, or a Long, Long Time comes a moving own-voices story that shines a light on how one girl’s learning differences are neither right nor wrong…just perfectly individual. For fans of Alyson Gerber, Cammie McGovern, and Kathryn Erskine.
No one can figure out what Gwendolyn Rogers’s problem is—not her mom, or her teachers, or any of the many therapists she’s seen. But Gwendolyn knows she doesn’t have just one thing wrong with her: she has fifty-four.
At least, according to a confidential school report (that she…
