Welcome to the Attention Deficit Disorder Expert Podcast Series by Attitude magazine.

Good afternoon everyone at Susan Koffin. I'm an Attitude magazine and today we have

Peg Dawson, PhD, with us to talk about executive function in ADHD teens. Thank you very much Dr Dawson for joining us.

Dr Dawson is a school psychologist, well the school psychologist for many many, and for the past 20 years has worked at

CECOS Mental Health in Portsmouth, New Hampshire at the Center for Learning and Attention

Disorders.

She specializes in the assessment of children and adults with learning and attention disorder.

She's the author of a number of books, Smart But Scattered, and Smart But Scattered teens

published by Guilford Press, which is a great source of information about ADHD.

So with that, let me turn it over to Dr. Dawson and thank you again for joining us.

You know, I'm happy to do this and it's great to reach out to this particular audience, just a sort of brief background about

executive skills and where my colleague, Dr. Gware, and I have come at it from.

And it really did come out of working primarily with kids with attention

disorders in the early years and just recognizing that the diagnostic

criteria for ADHD really didn't cover all the problems these kids had and many of those problems

ended up being executive skills which are and again probably many in the audience

know this they're brain-based skills they're located primarily in the front of the brain.

And they're basically the skills required to execute tasks.

So that's point number one about them.

And point number two is they take 25 years to reach full maturation.

So when we're talking about teenagers,

it's really, really important to keep in mind

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