*School Responsible for Executive Dysfunction?*

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Background: I can manage stuff like being on time for things, ( by being early, which is very inefficient of time), and getting washed , dressed etc correctly when go out, and, my finest achievement, eating fairly healthily, and I can more or less do the washing up and clothes washing that it takes to keep things rolling, etc. I even managed, last year, to plan our first real holiday in years, and make all the reservations etc necessary.

But almost anything else seems difficult to the point of impossibility for me to organise, prepare, maintain, or accomplish.

I now think that this is why when I was young and footloose ( pre-motherhood, and pre-breakdown particularly), I used to rush at things like bull etc , because if I did not think too hard about them, just leapt, something happened, not always the most useful things in consequence, but something.

Executive function has generally been something coming from outside myself, and I have rebelled against it, or conformed to it, depended on it or resisted it; parents, school, work places, and my own,( but curiously separate from me), body, ( food intolerances requiring certain dietary restrictions etc).

But when I try to function with executive frameworks to achieve anything, something goes wrong. The relationship I have with EF is of conflict or dependence, and so imposing it on myself puts me in a weird relationship to myself. I don't know how to do it without taking myself over. And there is less and less room left for my "usual" me.

For many years school, aswell as my parents, imposed systems of executive functioning on my life, long term goals particularly, and time management, that I learned to rely on. I didn't learn how to do it for myself. Could I have developed my own executive functioning if I hadn't been freed of all necessity to do so, in fact prevented from doing so, by the all-embracing timetables and instructions of 14 years of school?

Or is executive dysfunction an unavoidable part of AS, which I would have suffered from anyway, even if I had had the opportunity to practice executive skills during those 14 years of my childhood, instead of submitting to other people's?

What do people think? Who has reasonable EF? Do you know why? Who here doesn't , and wonders if years of school attendance might have played a part in suppressing its development?

Last edited by ouinon on 17 Apr 2008, 12:31 pm, edited 4 times in total.

I have clinical ED and I very much agree with this

It is a contradictory part of me, that stops me from being me.


However I'm not sure it is a learned behavior. I wish is was then I can unlearn it.

It has to do with AS because it is related to the frontal lobe. But not everyone with AS has clinical ED.

I most certainly do.

For a long time I did not know what it was or why it was so hard for me to DO stuff...

(sigh)

I don't know if school had anything to do with it...but certainly adversely affected my relationship with school.

Wow, so glad to hear someone else has same experience !

Do you know if there is an age at which executive functioning "normally" develops, in "normal" people?

Do you know if any studies have been done on when this capacity evolves in people? Under what conditions, etc.

That is the one drawback of school systems being able to work with children who have problems in executive functioning. They do tend to not learn it themselves because the school overcompensates. It's all geared toward making you successful as a student not as a functioning member of society. So, what happens is that a student who was able to successfully complete executive functioning tasks with lots of help in the classroom goes into the real world, and has no coping skills because their help is now non existent. I've watched my son struggle with it alot. Me, I invariably work better under deadlines like "in an hour", "first thing tomorrow", "yesterday", etc.

Me too. Totally. And after a while I found that no longer worked, not if weren't already well into another infra-structure with a history behind you of your achievements. Because nobody demanded anything of me anymore.

But as a child there had been no need for me to develop a long-term perspective because school had all that wrapped up. They did that. The problem, as you say, is that when you leave school there is no longer anyone to tell you what you're going to be doing for the next 5 years to achieve such and such.

I'm wondering at what age people "normally" develop these skills.

Most students begin to develop these skills around junior high and fine tune them in high school. AS kids just never seem to get it.

What if AS children have acquired a too hard-wired reliance on school executive-frameworks by then to learn any other way of doing things?

What if they ( AS kids) "outwork" stuff whenever it seems possible, because of own overloading by sensory stimulation, or language issues, and so if schools seem like structures which programme/plan/organise for the long term, maybe AS children see no reason to not delegate that function to them?

Or what if they need more time at their own rhythm to learn the skills? What happens to AS children who don't go to school, until after that age anyway?

Last edited by ouinon on 17 Apr 2008, 2:37 pm, edited 2 times in total.

Like more and more people's use of the internet, the school-system as part of one's functioning

Seriously, what if AS children exposed to school aged 5-6-7-8-9 experience it as the system which does the executive function, and treat it exactly the same as many people increasingly do the internet, as part of how they navigate/organise/manipulate the world.

No blame at all should be attached to people who don't develop Executive Functioning in the modern world, because they see that school is doing it for them, and very logically don't waste brain capacity and energy on learning to do it themselves.

We should get compensation for withdrawal of services!!

Maybe precisely because AS children are so sensitive to systems, or because they have a need, ( overload), they will understand/grasp, very fast, what function school carries out, and seeing these immense buildings and resources ( of time and energy aswell as money and people ), devoted to it never imagine that it could fail them later on.

Like people putting their entire lives onto blackberries/other electronic life-organisers are lost if/when the system crashes.

Maybe school, ( if quiet and uninfested by bullies) , would be great for AS people, if they could stay there their whole lives. I know that I miss the exams, ( what fun), and the detailed colour coded timetables, amongst other things.

But worse than useless otherwise, because train AS children in executive-function-dependency..

Last edited by ouinon on 17 Apr 2008, 2:37 pm, edited 1 time in total.

This is true. I don't know any phone numbers without my cell phone. But that's the trade off with modern life. We don't need to know those things because we have devices to make our lives easier.

So what about executive functioning; why does society expect everybody to have these skills, and penalise those who haven't, when school is so good at doing it for you?

What kind of mental cruelty is it to offer a service to a 5-6 year old and then withdraw it just when they are expected to start living independently of their parents?

Last edited by ouinon on 17 Apr 2008, 2:44 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Because NT people have them without the school doing it for them exclusively or with very little help from the school. It's more like a training program for them. We're in it for life.

But what if we would have learned the skills if we'd thought they were necessary?

The school system convinced us that there was no point in learning how to run and organise one's life. It did such a great job of it that there didn't seem any point in duplicating functions.

Maybe NTs miss the extent of what schools can offer like that, or don't need it so much, ( little or no "overload"), or in fact are completely damaged by it too; there are many millions of non-AS people with lamentably poor executive skills out there.

It's the lucky few who emerge with their executive skills well developed. Either because they didn't appreciate the system, and what function it fulfilled, ( like those who hardly use the internet at all because they don't realise what it can do for them) , or because they were able to grasp that this service genuinely wasn't going to be available to them all their lives, so they mustn't rely on it.

Last edited by ouinon on 17 Apr 2008, 3:19 pm, edited 2 times in total.

Maybe AS children would be less sucked in to using the school-system as a life-organiser/blackberry/prosthetic-executive-function, ( thus never developing their own ), if they didn't go to school until are old enough to fully/truly understand that it isn't for ever. That it will end.

Perhaps most of the damage is done by sending AS children to school, many NT's too for that matter, before they really grasp that. Shouldn't send children to school until their sense of time is really well developed, so that they will be less likely to connect up with school as a permanent support-system.

Maybe the number of years children go to school now make it difficult for many children to believe that it will ever end. Might aswell permanently integrate it in one's functioning.

How do they measure this? What is being measured when test for "executive functioning" in children? What skills exactly do "most" children show capacity for at those ages? Do you have any links to studies/articles?

I'm going to go look some out.

Last edited by ouinon on 17 Apr 2008, 3:56 pm, edited 1 time in total.