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Helen Dale's avatar

Have deleted another valueless comment. Once again, pls don't lower the tone around here.

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Holly MathNerd's avatar

As always, fascinating and interesting. I'm especially curious about executive function being quite heritable -- that seems unlikely to me. Most of what executive function really is, from my understanding, is "self-regulation." My observation (and certainly my experience) has been that if you grow up in circumstances detrimental to learning this (high conflict/lots of trauma/lots of unpredictability) you are almost certainly *also* getting terrible parental modeling. But when you grow up and get out of the unpredictable, dangerous environment and are able to start choosing your own models, these skills are absolutely learnable. I have a long way to go, but someone who measured my executive function the week after I left my parents' house vs today would see at least 2-3 standard deviations worth of improvement. I am also thinking of a family I know, with four kids. Regardless of any excuses (including being able to pay for it themselves) the kids do not get smartphones until their 16th birthday, period. And those kids all have good attention spans, including the ability to sit and read books for hours -- as do 100% of the homeschooled, not-on-smartphones kids I know.

Am I perhaps misunderstanding "heritable" here? I usually understand it to mean "inherited in the biological sense and mostly out of a person's control".

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