The beginning of the school year is one of my favorite times to reset the systems we use at home. Not because children need more rules, more charts, or more things for parents to manage, but because the right systems can actually lead to less managing.
The goal is independence.
When we think about executive functioning—planning, organizing, managing time, initiating tasks, remembering what needs to happen next—we sometimes treat these as skills children either have or don’t have. But these are skills that develop over time, and we can make them much easier to practice by creating an environment that supports them.
Here are some of my favorite strategies, starting with our youngest learners and building all the way through high school.
Early Education: Make the Routine Visible
For young children, I love using photos to create a visual routine for the beginning and end of the day.
Take pictures of your child actually doing each step of the routine: getting dressed, brushing teeth, putting on shoes, packing a backpack, eating breakfast, putting pajamas on, choosing a book, getting into bed.
Print the pictures and turn them into cards.
Then, instead of repeatedly telling your child what to do next, have your child put the cards in order and follow the sequence. At first, you will do this together. You might ask, “What comes next?” rather than immediately giving the answer.
Over time, something wonderful happens: your child begins to execute the routine without you.
That’s the point.
We aren’t simply trying to get everyone out the door on time. We’re teaching children how to understand a sequence, follow a plan, remember what comes next, and eventually manage a routine independently.
Elementary School: Create a “Work” Routine
In elementary school, I take that same concept and apply it to after-school work.
If your child has homework, that becomes part of the routine. If the school doesn’t assign homework, you can still create a short, predictable period for academic practice: independent reading, a math game, journal writing, reviewing vocabulary, or another activity that makes sense for your child.
I also recommend creating a designated place to work.
It doesn’t need to look like a classroom. It simply needs to contain what your child needs so that beginning the task doesn’t require ten other steps.
Add a Time Timer or another visual timer so your child can actually see time passing. Put up a monthly calendar so they can begin seeing today, tomorrow, next week, and upcoming activities in relationship to one another.
This is how we start building time awareness.
For the first few days, sit with your child and practice the routine. Show them how to look at what needs to be done, decide what comes first, gather their materials, set the timer, complete the work, and put everything away.
Then start removing yourself from the process.
You don’t need to disappear completely. Move from doing it together to accountability checks: “Show me your plan.” “Let me know when you’re finished.” “Did everything make it back into your backpack?”
Independence doesn’t mean children never receive support. It means we are thoughtful about gradually transferring responsibility to them.
Middle School: Teach Executive Functioning in Context
Middle school is often the point when the organizational demands of school become significantly more complicated.
Students aren’t just being asked to “do their homework.” They are juggling different teachers, longer assignments, tests, projects, extracurricular activities, social commitments, changing schedules, and deadlines that may be several weeks away.
This is often an excellent time to bring in a professional.
A strong executive function coach should do much more than tell a student to “use a planner.” The coach should understand the student’s existing strengths and use those strengths to support areas where skills are still developing.
Maybe a student understands material beautifully but doesn’t know how to study for a test. Maybe they can complete assignments but consistently underestimate how long they will take. Maybe they know exactly what they need to do but have difficulty initiating the work. Maybe long-term projects become overwhelming because they haven’t learned how to break them into manageable pieces.
A coach can meet weekly and teach these skills using the student’s actual schoolwork. That matters. Executive functioning becomes much more meaningful when it isn’t an abstract lesson but a strategy the student can immediately use on Thursday’s history test or next week’s English paper.
And if you want to make the work even more impactful, extend the planning beyond school.
How does soccer fit into the week? When will the student practice an instrument? What happens when a birthday party and a major test fall on the same weekend? When does downtime happen?
We’re teaching students how to manage a life, not merely a homework folder.
High School: The System Needs to Belong to Them
By high school, the student should increasingly own the system.
At this point, I generally want students working from a digital calendar and building a system they can actually maintain themselves. They should be entering tests, assignments, practices, appointments, commitments, and important deadlines—and learning to look ahead rather than simply reacting to whatever is due tomorrow.
The parent can still provide accountability, but the student should be doing the planning.
A helpful question becomes less, “Did you do your homework?” and more, “What’s your plan for the week?”
That shift is important. We aren’t managing the work anymore. We’re asking the student to demonstrate that they are managing it.
One Strategy I Use at Every Age: Functional Organization
There is one back-to-school strategy I recommend for everyone, from preschoolers to high school seniors: organize your home according to how your family actually functions.
I call this functional organization.
Instead of thinking only about where something looks nicest, think about where it needs to live in order to be used successfully.
Soccer clothes? Put everything together in one drawer or one designated area.
Art supplies? One accessible location.
School clothes? Give them a predictable home.
Laundry? Establish exactly where dirty clothes go and where clean clothes will be found.
School supplies? Keep the things your child routinely needs together and accessible.
Even free time can benefit from this idea. Younger children can have a visible “What can I do?” menu with options for independent play, reading, drawing, building, going outside, or other activities they enjoy.
The basic principle is simple: have a spot for how you function.
If your child needs five different things every morning, don’t store those five things in five unrelated places and then wonder why mornings feel chaotic.
The environment can carry some of the executive-function load.
The Goal Is Not a Perfect System
None of these strategies is about creating the perfectly organized child or the perfectly organized home.
The goal is to build systems that allow children to practice independence while the stakes are still relatively low.
A preschooler sequencing photographs of a bedtime routine is beginning to learn how to follow a plan. An elementary school student setting a timer before reading is developing time awareness. A middle schooler breaking a science project into four work sessions is learning long-term planning. A high school student looking at the week ahead and deciding when to study is practicing a skill they will eventually need in college, work, and adult life.
And this is why I love starting these systems at the beginning of the school year.
We aren’t just trying to make September run more smoothly. We’re using everyday routines to teach children how to understand what needs to be done, make a plan, organize themselves, execute that plan, and eventually do more and more of it without us.
That’s the real goal of a strong back-to-school routine: not getting your child to depend on a better system that you run for them, but helping them learn how to create and run systems for themselves.
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