We know that one of the most important skills we can develop in children is their communication skills. That comes from a rich language experience. Most parents rightly believe one of the best ways to do this is by reading to our children. But what if there was an even better way?

Executive functions, next to Social Emotional Learning are the most important skills we can develop in children. We call it the "Princeton or prison” outcome.

Albert Einstein had about 23,500 citations of his research. Drs Terry Moffitt and Avshalom Caspi together have over 190,000 citations because of the significance of their work!

In the longest and most extraordinary study of its kind, they followed more than 1,000 children for over 30 years in Dunedin, New Zealand, invasively studying every facet of their lives. Drs Moffitt and Caspi found that executive functions measured at age 3 could predict a child's future wonderful success or failure. In fact, Dr. Angela Duckworth has shown how executive functions account for over twice as much variation in academic performance as a child's IQ.

There are many things we can do to support executive function development in children. A critical one is to relieve stress in their lives and the lives of their parents.

There are other ways to develop them, and one is to tell stories instead of reading to children.

Here’s Dr. Adele Diamond, PhD, the world’s foremost researcher on executive functions.