We spend an awful lot of time talking about children’s brains in education. We talk about working memory, processing speed, executive functioning, attention, cognitive flexibility, reading comprehension, number sense, and any number of other things happening somewhere behind a student’s forehead. We ask kids to focus, remember, organize, plan ahead, think before acting, and—my personal favorite—“just get started.” Then we are surprised when telling a twelve-year-old to “just focus” doesn’t magically make them actually focus.
Part of the problem is that we think about learning as something that happens exclusively from the neck up.
It doesn’t.
The brain we are asking to pay attention, remember the homework assignment, resist checking something else, organize a backpack, read a chapter, and solve an algebra problem is attached to a body. That body moves, eats, sleeps, gets tired, gets restless, and sometimes desperately needs to run around. This is particularly important when we are talking about students with ADHD, learning disabilities, or executive-functioning challenges. These students may already be working harder to sustain attention, hold information in working memory, inhibit impulses, shift strategies, regulate emotions, and initiate tasks.
We spend considerable time figuring out how to support those skills academically, but perhaps we should spend a little more time thinking about the body doing all that work.
Sometimes You Need to Move to Sit Still
There is something wonderfully counterintuitive about the idea that one way to help a child sit down and concentrate might be to first let them get up and move, yet there is research behind it. Physical activity has been associated with benefits to executive functions including working memory, inhibitory control, and cognitive flexibility. For children with neurodevelopmental disorders, these are particularly interesting findings because these are many of the same processes students depend upon throughout the school day.
Consider how much executive functioning is hiding inside an ordinary classroom direction: take out your notebook, turn to yesterday’s work, read the comments, make your corrections, and then begin the next problem. Before a student has engaged with any actual academic content, they have already had to remember directions, sequence actions, ignore distractions, transition between tasks, organize materials, and initiate work.
Sometimes we treat executive functioning like Batman’s utility belt: a catch all of all the tools you could need at any given time. But even Batman needs prep time to load up that belt and invent all those wonderful toys. Human brains aren’t designed with infinite pockets that have the gadget you need just because the writer says it’s there.
Movement may help support some of the systems directing all the cognitive traffic. our students are directing.
This doesn’t require an elaborate training regimen or another scheduled activity wedged into an already crowded family calendar. Riding a bike to your friend’s house counts. So does swimming, playing basketball, going to the playground, taking a walk, or simply getting outside. Kids have been pretty good at inventing ways to move for thousands of years. We probably don’t need an app for this.
There is also some evidence that activities requiring children to think while they move may be particularly interesting for students with ADHD. Consider what happens during a basketball game. A child is running, but simultaneously tracking other players, remembering rules, predicting movement, inhibiting one response in favor of another, coordinating their body, changing direction, and making decisions in fractions of a second.
We don’t want just the raw, the kid isn’t just giving the engines more power. Somebody still has to be on the bridge.
Soccer, martial arts, dance, tennis, obstacle courses, and games with changing rules make similar demands. The brain and body have to communicate, adjust, anticipate, and respond. Of course, there is an important caveat: your kid has to actually want to do it. We can identify the theoretically perfect activity for executive functioning, but if getting a child to participate requires a negotiation worthy of an intergalactic peace treaty three evenings a week, we may have missed the point.
The best activity may simply be the one a child enjoys enough to keep doing.
Readiness Isn’t Intervention
Whenever research connects something relatively simple—exercise, food, sleep, music—to complicated outcomes like learning, the internet has a remarkable ability to transform “this may help” into “THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING.”
It usually doesn’t.
Exercise does not cure dyslexia, dyscalculia, ADHD, or another learning disability, and we shouldn’t expect it to. More importantly, it does not replace explicit instruction, specialized intervention, accommodations, SETSS, therapy, or whatever other supports a particular child needs. Research on school-based physical activity for children with disabilities has found benefits for cognitive and mental-health outcomes without finding a significant overall improvement in academic performance itself.
That distinction matters.
A child can be more alert, regulated, attentive, and emotionally ready to learn and still need specialized reading instruction. A student can have improved conditions for concentration and still need explicit mathematics intervention. A student with executive-functioning difficulties can exercise every afternoon and still need structures, strategies, accommodations, and adults who understand how they learn.
Physical activity may help prepare the runway. We still need to teach the child how to fly.
Or, to borrow from Star Wars, the Force may be with you, but more training you need otherwise the Dark Side you’ll find. Preparation, practice, instruction, and some fairly patient teachers were still involved. Yoda did not simply tell him to go jog around Dagobah and hope for the best.
Readiness creates opportunity for instruction. It isn’t a substitute for it.
Feeding the Brain Means Feeding the Kid
Nutrition takes us into similarly tricky territory because the phrase “brain food” sounds exactly like something that belongs on a package designed to cost three dollars more than the nearly identical package sitting beside it.
The actual research is considerably less exciting—and probably more useful.
Researchers have found positive associations between healthier long-term dietary patterns and executive functioning in children and adolescents, but nutrition research requires caution. An association between diet and cognition does not automatically mean that eating a particular food directly causes a child to think better. There probably isn’t a berry, seed, vitamin, smoothie, or vaguely exotic superfood that will suddenly unlock your middle schooler’s frontal lobe.
If there were, every episode of Saved by the Bell would have ended very differently. Zack Morris would have eaten some blueberries, organized his binder, completed his homework ahead of time, and rendered most of the plot to pass Mr. Dewey’s test unnecessary. There would hardly be any need to be so excited, let alone so scared of the test results.
The more useful idea is the considerably less marketable one: patterns matter. Balanced meals, fruits and vegetables, whole grains, protein, and water contribute to a larger nutritional pattern. One rushed dinner does not destroy a child’s executive functioning any more than one plate of broccoli creates it. We’re talking about habits that develop over time, not perfection at every meal.
Breakfast deserves a little additional attention because research comparing breakfast with continued fasting has found short-term benefits in areas including attention, executive functioning, and memory. Interestingly, researchers have been less certain about exactly what kind of breakfast is “best,” which I actually find reassuring.
Parents do not need another thing to optimize.
There is no reason to wake up at four in the morning to construct the nutritionally perfect breakfast by calculating glycemic index of a blueberry and determining if it will provide the 1.21 gigawatts of electricity required to get your kid back to the future. For a child who comfortably eats breakfast, the practical takeaway is much simpler: starting the school day fueled rather than fasting may help support some of the cognitive processes we are about to spend six or seven hours asking them to use.
Kids Are Still Allowed to Be Kids
There is a danger lurking underneath almost every conversation about helping children. Once we discover that something is beneficial, adults have a remarkable tendency to turn it into a program. Movement becomes exercise time. Reading becomes twenty mandatory minutes. Play becomes enrichment. Breakfast becomes optimized nutrition. Before long, childhood has somehow acquired a project manager.
That isn’t your job and it probably isn’t what your child needs you to do.
Kids need opportunities to move, play, eat, rest, socialize, explore, get bored, run around, and occasionally do things that accomplish absolutely nothing measurable. We don’t need to turn family life into another intervention plan simply because research tells us that some of the ordinary things children have always done are good for them.
What we may need to reconsider is the artificial line we draw between a child’s academic life and everything else. Learning isn’t something children switch on when they walk into a classroom and switch off when they leave it. Likewise, the brain isn’t operating independently from the rest of the body carrying it around.
A bike ride isn’t reading intervention. Breakfast isn’t executive-function coaching. Soccer isn’t ADHD treatment. Playing outside isn’t tutoring. They don’t need to be.
They can simply be parts of a healthy childhood that also help create better conditions for attention, regulation, memory, and learning.
We rightly spend enormous amounts of time thinking about what children need to learn and how we are going to teach it. For students who struggle, we spend even more time thinking about accommodations, interventions, strategies, services, and supports. All of those things matter. But the brain doing that learning is part of a body, and feeding and using that body may be just as important to creating the conditions for learning as feeding and using the mind.
Sometimes supporting a student means teaching them differently. Sometimes it means challenging them more. Sometimes it means giving them the right intervention, accommodation, strategy, or adult support.
And sometimes the best thing we can do for a kid’s brain is remember that it came attached to the rest of the kid.
Selected Research
Liu et al. (2025), Physical activity and executive functions in children with neurodevelopmental disorders.
Fang et al. (2024), Cognitively engaging physical activity for children and adolescents with ADHD.
Leahy et al. (2025), School-based physical activity for children with disabilities.
Cohen et al. (2016), research examining healthy dietary patterns and executive functioning in children and adolescents.
Adolphus et al. (2016), research examining breakfast composition and cognition in children.