At our recent board meeting (01.29.13) the board voted to change the Foundation’s Mission Statement in the following way:
To explicitly promote Executive Function Theory as a guiding principle toward understanding and solving societal problems.
We are shifting focus from Bowlbian attachment to Executive Function Theory. We’re not leaving behind attachment; we’re adding EF to attachment to in effect create a continuum that holds both Bowlbian attachment and EF. This makes sense because John Bowlby essentially said that safe and secure attachment early on (if all goes well) pours the foundation upon which EF is built.
If you would like to know more about EF and EF Theory, please read my multi-part blog summary of William Powers’ book Hamlet’s BlackBerry—A Practical Philosophy for Building a Good Life in the Digital Age. Here’s the link to part one.
For a more in-depth look at EF, here are the two books I would recommend:
1) Executive Functions—What They Are, How They Work, and Why They Evolved by ADHD expert Russell Barkley
2) The New Executive Brain—Frontal Lobes in a Complex World by neurobiologist Elkhonon Goldberg
For a lay look at EF, try these two recent articles:
1) How To Avoid the Temptations of Immediate Gratification
2) How Living with Undiagnosed ADD was Detrimental to My Life
Over the next several months I’ll be writing more on EF via the Foundation’s blog (although there is a lot on EF here already). Suffice it to say that EF plays a large role in such issue areas as Alzheimer’s, Dementia, school preparedness, ADHD, autism, Traumatic Brain Injury, PTSD, career success, economic success, and even the very development of culture (i.e., ethical codes, standards of care, legal systems and processes, philosophies, etc.).
As a result of shifting our Mission Focus, the FHL Foundation will begin encouraging organizations to research and prepare their grant proposals using the lens of Executive Function Theory. Here’s a quick case example.
Consider this observation by a local Grief Support Center made as a part of a final report to our Foundation:
Working with bereaved families is always challenging. Adult grief can be described as similar to a blow to the head – one’s ability to prioritize, organize, even one’s short term memory are impacted. We provide regular reminder calls for each group session, a simple meal before group begins, and plenty of reminders about our policies, program and offerings.
Suffice it to say that when the EF system is compromised in some way (such as through grief), such things as organization skills, the ability to prioritize, and even the ability to maintain effective short term memory all are impacted. In essence, this organization report talks about how grief can (and often does) affect the EF system and, along with it, EF skills. Notice how this organization accommodated these “blows to the head” by creating scaffolds for the EF system in the form of meeting reminders, mental energy (e.g., food), and policy reminders. Without knowing it explicitly, this group already had a focus on EF.
Part of the purpose in shifting our Mission Focus over to EF is to make these EF intuitions, if you will, explicit. If you have EF intuitions and you would like some help making them explicit, please feel free to contact us and we’ll do the best that we can. Fortunately the academic research community is catching on that there is a Bowlbian attachment – EF Theory connection. As examples, consider the following research publications that were sent to me in recent months:
Executive Functioning and Romantic Adult Attachment in Intimate Partner Violence Perpetrators (J.E. Plummer)
From External Regulation to Self-Regulation: Early Parenting Precursors of Young Children’s Executive Functioning (A. Bernier, S.M. Carlson, and N. Whipple)
All this to say that we will be calling upon the research community to help in the process of bridging insights drawn from the academic treatment of the Bowlbian – EF Theory continuum to application at group, lay, and even policy levels. As they say, stay tuned to this blog for further developments. If you have comments concerning our new Mission Focus, feel free to leave them in the comment box below. If you have questions, feel free to use the Contact Us link above. If you have an idea for a project but you are not sure if it fits within the Bowlbian attachment – EF Theory continuum, again, contact us and we’d be happy to kick around some ideas. In the same way it would be hard to go through a day without attachment, it would be hard to go through a day without EF. If you set your alarm clock last night or put a task on your favorite To Do app today, you have used EF thinking and skills. They’re instrumental executive function skills (according to Barkley), but they’re EF skills nonetheless. And if you overslept??? … Those are called snooze button skills, and mine are well-honed ;-)
