Why Kids Don’t Follow Directions
Turns out, their inability to do what we ask is kind of a good thing.
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Dear Is My Kid the Asshole,
No matter how hard I try, my kid doesn’t do what I ask. I’ll say, “Hey, when you feed the cat, please put her in the kitchen, and then you can finish vacuuming the den,” and my kid will say "OK." Then, ten minutes later, the cat has been fed in the wrong room and the vacuum hasn’t been touched. Why can’t my kid follow simple directions?
Sincerely,
Pulling My Hair Out
Dear Pulling My Hair Out,
Just this morning, I told my son to put his socks on three times before he actually did, so I hear you loud and clear on this one. What is it with kids not being able to do what we ask? Are they defying us on purpose? Trying to drive us insane?
Actually, no — they’re just doing what their brains are designed to do. That’s essentially what I learned after speaking with Daniel Berry, a developmental psychologist who studies the development of self-regulation and attention at the University of Minnesota.
Let’s first discuss what has to happen for a kid to follow directions. Number one, they have to remember what you said — they have to keep your directions in their working memory for as long as it takes to accomplish the task (which is not very easy for kids to do). Number two, they have to focus their attention on the thing you’re asking and not get distracted by the 80 other things they encounter along the way. As they walk upstairs to the sock drawer, for instance, they might first come across the dog, who looks like he needs a head scratch. Then they see the library book on the stairs that they really want to thumb through. Then they see the water cup on their desk, and boy are they thirsty. Suddenly, they’re sipping water and thumbing through Harry Potter and wait, why did they go upstairs again? And why is Mom suddenly yelling at me?
The ability to focus attention on one task and inhibit all other competing desires requires something called executive function, yet the part of the brain responsible for executive function — the prefrontal cortex — doesn’t finish maturing until people reach their mid-twenties. (See also: Why college students are technically adults but still do really dumb things.) So as frustrating as it is when our kids just can’t get their damned socks on, there are real biological reasons that explain it.
And actually, kids’ inability to follow-through is good for them. It’s adaptive. Kids are like young scientists, Berry explained — one of their most important jobs is to make sense of the world around them. To achieve this, kids need to take in all kinds of data from their surroundings. They need to pay attention to the things they encounter throughout the day, like the dog and the book and the water. As a kid, “what you want to be able to do is have the machinery that allows you to adapt to a wide range of experiences,” Berry said. You “want to have some freedom to make sense of your world.” If kids’ brains shut out all possible distractions, they wouldn’t be able to accomplish that.
When I spoke with Berry, I was also reminded of an interview I did a few years ago with developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik, the author of a number of fascinating books including The Philosophical Baby and The Scientist in the Crib. A kid “starts out with this brain that's not very good at doing things for a purpose, efficiently, but he's very good at learning how to do new things,” she told me. Then, when a kid becomes an adult, the reverse is true — his brain is quite good at getting things done, but not so good at changing and learning new things.
Put another way, the fact that your kid fails to follow your directions is a sign that his brain is doing what it’s supposed to be doing. “Grown-up brains and children's brains are really designed for different purposes,” Gopnik said, because “children's brains are really designed to learn.” And being observant (i.e. easily distracted) is an important component of learning, even though, when your kid can’t focus on his homework, it can seem like the exact opposite.
Berry also pointed out to me that executive function skills can fluctuate depending on how tired kids are or what mood they’re in. In other words, you might notice that your kid is better able to follow directions on some days than others, and that’s normal. Also, kids develop executive functioning skills at different rates, so you might notice that one of your kids is worse at following directions than your other kids are. Again, that’s to be expected and nothing to worry about. But if you’re worried about your child’s inability to focus, it’s never a bad idea to talk to your pediatrician. In some kids, distractibility can be a sign of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).
So — is it impossible to get our kids to do what we ask? Not necessarily. We can make it easier for our kids to follow through by changing how we engage with them. Here are three science-backed suggestions.