Pathways and Triggers 25what thinking skills your child is lacking, you’ll know ex-
actly the thinking skills that need to be taught.
EXECUTIVE SKILLSExecutive skills—including shifting cognitive set (the abil-
ity to shift efficiently from one mind-set to another), or-
ganization and planning (organizing a coherent plan of
action to deal with a problem or frustration), and separa-
tion of affect (the ability to separate your emotional re-
sponse to a problem from the thinking you need to
perform to solve the problem)—are crucial to one’s abil-
ity to deal effectively with frustration, think flexibly, and
solve problems. While these skills are thought to be gov-
erned by the frontal, prefrontal, and frontally intercon-
nected subcortical regions of the brain, what’s really
useful about them is that they help us understand what’s
going on (or, perhaps more accurately, what’s not going
on) inside the brains of many explosive children. By the
way, most kids diagnosed with ADHD have difficulties
with executive skills. Let’s take a quick look at each skill.
Moving from one environment (such as recess) to a
completely different environment (such as a reading
class) requires a shift from one mind-set (“in recess it’s
OK to run around and make noise and socialize”) to an-
other (“in reading, we sit at our desks and read quietly
and independently”). If a child has difficulty shifting