The executive function secret: How advanced reading and writing builds future leaders

Personal development

What If Leadership Training Starts With a Book? Some of the skills we associate with strong leaders—thinking clearly, weighing evidence, understanding different perspectives, communicating ideas, and reconsidering an argument—can begin developing in a much quieter place: through challenging reading and writing. 

Parents often think about preparing children for the future through confidence-building activities, extracurriculars or public speaking. But some of the underlying skills begin much earlier, in quieter moments when a child is trying to understand a difficult text or explain an idea clearly.

The book and the essay are simply the context. What matters is the thinking and communication happening underneath.

What Executive Function Actually Has to Do With Reading and Writing

“Executive function” is a term psychologists use for the mental skills that help us manage attention, information, decisions and actions.

• Working memory
• Cognitive flexibility
• Inhibitory control
• Planning
• Organization
• Self-monitoring

None of this belongs to reading and writing specifically; a nine-year-old builds working memory at the piano bench just as easily as at a desk, and cognitive flexibility gets a workout mid-argument with a sibling over whose turn it actually is on the Switch. 

But a genuinely hard reading or writing task tends to drag three or four of these into the room at once. That’s really the whole reason ELA ends up being such a good place to practice them. 

Take a fifth grader writing a short essay defending an opinion with evidence pulled from a text she read that week. She’s holding the main idea in her head while hunting for two or three supporting details, working memory, doing its unglamorous job. 

She skips the genuinely interesting fact that doesn’t actually back her point up. That’s inhibitory control, quietly at work. She has to decide which piece of evidence goes first. 

Then the draft doesn’t quite hang together, and she has to notice that on her own and go back in and fix it. The essay isn’t really the point of any of this. What’s underneath it is.

Advanced Reading Teaches Children to Look Beyond the Obvious

• Working out what the author’s actually trying to accomplish, not just what they said
• Telling a stated fact apart from someone’s spin on it
• Checking whether the evidence in front of them genuinely backs the claim or just sounds confident
• Catching an assumption the writer never bothered to justify
• Considering two opposing perspectives on the same event without automatically reducing them to a single viewpoint.
• Drawing a conclusion based on the strong implications of the text, even if the author does not explicitly articulate it.

Picture what someone in almost any leadership role spends a chunk of their actual working hours doing: reading a report or a client email and asking, is this claim well supported, or does it just sound confident? 

Simply skimming a book for its plot isn’t the same thing. The deeper practice comes from discussing it, arguing over its difficult parts, and returning to it over time. 

None of this guarantees the kid who reads difficult novels at eleven is going to run a company someday. It just means the habits line up more than most parents give them credit for.

Stories Can Develop Perspective-Taking and Empathy

Good stories rarely hand a kid one tidy point of view. There’s a character who wants something reasonable and does something questionable to get it. Two people in the same argument, both making complete sense from where they’re standing, think of a book where one sibling feels invisible and the other feels smothered, and they’re both right. Situations where, honestly, there isn’t a clean answer at all.

Talking through those moments, not “what happened” but why someone behaved that way, and whether another character in that same scene sees it completely differently pushes toward a kind of perspective-taking that frankly doesn’t come naturally at any age, adults very much included. 

Knowing intellectually that other people have different experiences is the easy part. Sitting with a character whose logic makes total sense to them and drives you a little crazy at the same time, and actually trying to get inside that anyway, is the harder skill. That’s the one worth building.

This isn’t quite the same as saying reading fiction automatically makes kids kinder. That claim tends to fall apart once you poke at it. What holds up is narrower: stories hand kids low-stakes chances to practise imagining someone else’s reasoning, and a real conversation about the story afterward is what turns an occasional chance into something closer to a habit.

Writing Forces Children to Make Their Thinking Clear

Reading is where kids practice understanding other people. Writing flips that around; it’s where they practice being understood themselves, on the page, without being in the room to explain what they meant.

Good writing takes a lot more than correct spelling and grammar, obviously. A kid working on something that has to actually land with a real reader, not just satisfy a rubric, runs into questions most homework assignments never quite force:

• Which point has to go first for any of the rest of this to make sense?
• Is there a gap here I’m gliding past because dealing with it is annoying?
• Who am I writing for, and what does this reader need to understand? 
• What can get cut without losing anything, and what’s actually missing?

The Leadership Skill Hidden Inside Revision

Real revision is a different, harder animal. It asks a kid to go back into their own thinking and actually find where it’s broken.

Sometimes that means realizing an argument falls apart the second you look at it straight on. Sometimes it’s spotting that a point made three paragraphs back quietly undercuts the conclusion two pages later. 

Sometimes it means cutting a paragraph the kid was genuinely proud of, because a teacher points out gently that it just doesn’t earn its place anymore, or taking a note and rebuilding around it instead of slapping a patch over the original problem. 

It can also mean accepting feedback without treating revision as criticism, then using that feedback to make the argument clearer and stronger. 

Worth saying plainly, because it doesn’t get said enough: plenty of capable, experienced adults still can’t do this well. 

From “I Have an Opinion” to “I Can Make a Case”

On paper, the progression looks simple: Opinion → Reason → Evidence → Counterargument → Conclusion. But underneath, it asks a child to do something much more sophisticated than simply state a preference. They have to explain why they think something, support that reasoning with evidence, consider where a reasonable person might disagree, and arrive at a conclusion that can survive that pushback.

A kid who learns to explain not just what they think but why, including where a reasonable person might disagree with them, is carrying around a transferable skill. It shows up in a college seminar eight years later. 

It shows up in a disagreement with a manager fifteen years down the line, when simply insisting you’re right stops working as a strategy. That outcome lasts a lot longer than a good grade on one essay ever does.

How Working Parents Can Practise These Skills at Home

None of this needs a curriculum overhaul, or another hour squeezed out of an evening that’s already gone by the time dinner’s cleared. Five small, repeated conversations beat one occasional big production, most weeks.

Ask “Why?” After Reading. Instead of asking only what happened, ask why the character made that choice. What in the story makes your child think so? Would another character see the same situation differently? A few questions like these can turn an ordinary reading conversation into practice in reasoning and perspective-taking.

Compare two perspectives out loud. After a story, or even a movie on a Friday night, ask how a different character in that same scene might tell the story differently.

Ask for evidence, every time, without exception. When your child makes a claim—“that character’s the villain” or “that was a bad call”—ask what in the story makes them think that. This habit can build surprisingly fast, usually within a few weeks.

Turn everyday opinions into mini arguments. Best family activity, and why? Homework every night, yes or no? Which book gets read next? Push for an actual reason each time, not just a preference stated loudly enough to end the conversation.

Rewrite Something for a Different Audience. Ask your child to explain the same idea to a younger child, then a friend, and then a teacher. What changes each time? They may simplify some details, explain others more carefully, or choose different examples. That small exercise builds audience awareness and communication flexibility without feeling like another assignment.

None of it takes more than a few minutes. None of it requires you to know anything about pedagogy. Just one extra question, on most days, instead of letting “what happened” be the end of the conversation.

What Advanced ELA Looks Like in Practice

Advanced ELA isn’t more worksheets or a nastier spelling list. In practice, across a typical middle-school year, it tends to look like close reading of genuinely hard texts, analysis across both fiction and nonfiction, evidence-based and persuasive writing, some creative writing, basic research skills, structured discussion and debate. And then there’s the part that actually matters most, and often gets cut first when time is tight: real revision, with real feedback attached to it, not just a grade at the bottom of the page.

The thread running through all of it isn’t vocabulary size, even though that’s usually what gets measured on a report card. It’s thinking that gets more sophisticated year over year, paired with the ability to actually get that thinking across to somebody else who wasn’t inside your head while you were forming it.

Over time, that kind of practice can also strengthen the language children need to express increasingly complex ideas with precision.

When Parents Want More Structured ELA Development

Some families manage this without even trying that hard. Dinner conversations naturally drift into “why do you think she did that,” library trips happen because the kid asked, not because it’s scheduled. If your child is younger, that’s often already enough you don’t need to add anything on top of it.

It gets harder once work eats into the evening. A parent who’s just finished a nine-hour day doesn’t always have it in them to turn dinner into a Socratic discussion, and that’s a completely normal limit, not a failure of parenting.

That’s usually where something with more structure earns its place not as a replacement for the dinner-table stuff, but as a backstop for the weeks when there isn’t time for it. Regular writing practice, texts pitched at the right level, and actual feedback from someone whose job is to give it, spread across a school year instead of crammed into whatever’s left of a Sunday.

A structured English Language Arts programme for kids tends to work well here for exactly that reason: it doesn’t ask a tired parent to become an English teacher on top of everything else they’re already doing.

The Quiet Version of Leadership Development

A surprising amount of that gets built one book and one essay at a time; over years most parents don’t get to watch closely. 

Not because English class is secretly leadership training wearing a disguise, but because thinking clearly and communicating well are what almost everything else the meeting, the interview, and the hard conversation at seventeen or thirty-seven eventually get built on top of.

Conclusion

None of this is a checklist you tick off by Friday. It’s slower than that, and honestly less tidy. Some weeks the dinner conversation happens, some weeks it doesn’t, some essays get revised three times, and some get handed in half-finished because everyone’s tired. 

If there’s one thing worth taking from all of this, it’s probably this: the next time your kid is stuck on a paragraph or arguing with you about why a character in their book “isn’t even that bad,” you’re not watching homework happen. You’re watching a child practise the same habits that matter far beyond the classroom: thinking carefully, reconsidering an idea and making a case for what they believe. Those habits may look small in the moment, but repeated over time, they can become part of how a child learns to think and communicate.

FAQs

Does reading really make kids better leaders, or is that a stretch?

It’s a stretch if you mean it literally no book guarantees leadership. What’s more accurate is that advanced reading gives kids repeated practice in skills leaders happen to rely on: weighing evidence, understanding people who think differently, and explaining ideas clearly. The connection is real, just less direct than “read more, lead better.”

My child hates writing. Is there any point pushing advanced writing tasks if they resist it?

Resistance is common, and forcing longer assignments usually backfires. What tends to work better is smaller, more frequent practice a few sentences defending an opinion, not a five-paragraph essay every time. 

How young is too young to start any of this at home?

Younger than most parents assume. A five-year-old can already answer “why do you think the character did that,” even if the answer is simple. The complexity of the conversation should grow with the child, but the habit of asking can start as soon as they’re old enough to talk about a story at all.