It’s 11 p.m. and nothing has started. The phone was supposed to go down at nine, the essay is still a blank document, and now the whole house is awake and unhappy about it. That night gets described to Carrie Visintainer over and over by the teenagers she works with — twenty minutes of scrolling that became three hours, and a kid too stressed to sleep.
Carrie Visintainer, M.S., Certified Executive Function Coach, works with teenagers and young adults, roughly ages 15 to 24, as they move from high school into college or their first job. Her focus is the unglamorous machinery underneath school and work: planning, prioritizing, starting, and keeping track of time. We talked about why those skills come apart right at the transition, what actually helps, and what parents can build at home years earlier.
What is executive function, and why does it fall apart right when my teen needs it most?
Executive function is what Carrie calls “self-management skills” — planning, prioritizing, starting a task, tracking time, asking for help. It comes apart at eighteen because it was never fully theirs yet. The prefrontal cortex is, in her words, “the last part of the brain to develop,” and the National Institute of Mental Health puts it the same way: the prefrontal cortex “is one of the last parts to mature,” with the brain finishing its development in the mid-to-late twenties.
So a teen leaves a house with alarms, dinner times and a parent tracking the calendar, and lands in a dorm with none of it. Carrie described that jump as moving “into the Great Wide Open, which feels pretty exciting to them in the beginning, but also can be awfully scary when you’re nearing second semester of senior year.” What shows up in October of freshman year usually isn’t a new problem — it’s the first clear look at how much of the system was you.
There’s also a reason an outside person often gets further than a parent does. Carrie has noticed it with her own kids: “I’ve suggested something for months and there will be no, you know, no interest. But then someone else will suggest it a coach, a teacher, and suddenly it’s the best idea.” When someone else carries the reminding, she said, it “takes it off the shoulders of the parent and they can focus on being present.”
1. The Scroll Window
We call this one the Scroll Window. The practice is Carrie’s: instead of banning the phone or pretending it won’t happen, you schedule the scroll and give it a hard endpoint. “I’m gonna take twenty minutes to check Snap and TikTok and then I am gonna set a timer,” is how she put it. What makes it work is that “there’s an endpoint” — a timer, an alarm, a distraction blocker, something outside the kid’s own willpower that says stop.
She was blunt about the alternative, speaking in the voice of the teens she works with — a kid who “was only gonna be on my phone for 20 minutes, but that turned in three hours, and now it’s 11 p.m. and I haven’t started and I’m stressed and I can’t sleep.” Twenty contained minutes isn’t a punishment. It’s what keeps the whole evening from disappearing. Her framing, which most tired parents need to hear: “There’s time for all of it.”
2. Move it once, but only once
Most high schoolers do not have a calendar. They have an assignment portal, which tells them when things are due but not when they are going to do them. Carrie’s rule for that gap is one line long: they can “move something on their calendar once, but only once.”
Say your teen blocks Tuesday and Wednesday to study for a chemistry test, and Tuesday falls apart. Fine, move it. But it moves one time, and then it happens. A plan you can slide forever was never a plan. As Carrie put it, “if I’ve prioritized this to do with my time, I’m going to follow through.” She attaches a piece of good news teenagers rarely believe: finish early and you keep the extra time. Try it with one recurring assignment before you try it with a whole week.
3. “A wall that is hiding vulnerabilities”
This is the part of the conversation I’d want every parent and every teacher to hear. Carrie has met many students who look like they don’t care, and what she finds underneath isn’t indifference: “that’s a wall that is hiding vulnerabilities.” The work, as she describes it, is figuring out why the wall is there at all — “why is it that you would, rather hold this wall up than address some of these really hard things” — and then starting to work on it with the student. “It’s just something a lot more tender than that,” she said.
One example stayed with me. A student who avoided math because math was hard for him took a summer landscaping job, ended up building a retaining wall, had to learn to take measurements, and told her he was loving math in that setting. Same kid, same brain, different wall. Name what the wall is protecting and you have something to work with. “Lazy” gives you nothing to work with.
4. Packing a lunch is executive function practice
If you have an eight- to thirteen-year-old, this is where you start, and it costs nothing. Carrie’s example is a chore checklist on the fridge, where “the child starts looking at what they need to do and checking it off” without a parent narrating each step. A family whiteboard calendar works the same way, and by middle school it can move to a shared digital one.
Another one she names is smaller than that. Have your kid pack their own lunch the night before. What do I want to eat, what do I need to make it, is that ingredient even in the house, and the hard part, do I remember to take it in the morning. As she said, “there’s really a lot of steps to making a lunch and remembering to take it to school.” That’s planning, sequencing and follow-through in a six-minute task, years before the stakes are a college syllabus.
5. “Doing together over doing it for them”
I asked Carrie for one small change a parent could make this week, and this was her answer. Before you do the thing for your kid, ask yourself, in her words: “is this something that I really need to do for my child, or can I let go a little bit?”
Her example is the job application you could knock out yourself because it’s quicker and easier. Sit next to them while they do it instead. Same for the email to the teacher, the appointment, the form. It’s slower, and it’s genuinely hard to watch. She named that too: it’s “hard to just watch them potentially mess up on some stuff.” Watch anyway. The goal was a kid who has now done one.
Her phrase for it, which is the one I’d put on the fridge: “choose doing together over doing it for them.”
Resources mentioned
- Carrie Visintainer, M.S., Certified Executive Function Coach — https://www.lightmywaycoaching.com/
- NIMH, The Teen Brain: 7 Things to Know — https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/publications/the-teen-brain-7-things-to-know
- Related reading on this site: ADHD testing in Denver
If the pattern is bigger than a system problem
Executive function coaching is its own field, and it is not something we offer at Integrated Behavioral Health. What we do offer is the other half of this question. When a teen has been trying real systems and still can’t start, can’t finish, or can’t hold a plan together, that is often worth understanding rather than managing — and a comprehensive evaluation is how you find out what is actually going on. We test for ADHD, learning differences, and ASD and twice-exceptional profiles in children, teens and adults at our Denver and Greenwood Village offices, and we have no waitlist for assessments.