Neuroscientist Dr. Adele Diamond's research on executive functions, why they matter more than raw intelligence, and how ordinary games with rules build them in young children.
Dr. Adele Diamond is Professor of Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of British Columbia, and one of the founders of the field that bears that name: developmental cognitive neuroscience, the study of how the thinking brain is built across childhood. Her speciality is a family of mental skills called executive functions, and her central finding is the kind that quietly rearranges how you see your own child.
When a field has founders, it is worth listening to them. Diamond has spent her career mapping how the brain's control systems develop in the earliest years, and her conclusions are not abstract. They point directly at the things small children do at kitchen tables every day.
Executive functions are the brain's air traffic control. Diamond's work identifies three core ones. Working memory is the ability to hold information in mind and use it: remembering the rule while you take your turn. Inhibitory control is the ability to stop yourself: not grabbing, not blurting, not taking the easy and tempting option. Cognitive flexibility is the ability to adjust when the situation changes: the plan failed, so think again. Every act of focusing, waiting, planning and adapting runs on these three.
Diamond's striking claim, set out in her major 2013 review of executive functions in the Annual Review of Psychology, is that these skills predict school success better than IQ does. A child's ability to hold a goal in mind, resist distraction and shift approach when needed tells you more about how they will fare in a classroom than a measure of raw intelligence. That should change what we mean when we say a child is "ready for school". Readiness is not knowing letters. It is being able to sit, wait, remember and adapt.
The second half of her claim is the hopeful half. Executive functions are not fixed at birth. They are built through experience, the way muscles are built through use, and Diamond's review draws together evidence that they improve when children practise them through activities that are challenging, governed by rules, and progressively harder over time. Games sit squarely inside that description. The discipline matters, though: an activity only trains executive functions while it keeps stretching them. Once it becomes easy, the workout stops, which is why the difficulty has to keep rising as the child grows.
The source
Diamond, A. (2013). Executive Functions. Annual Review of Psychology · Read the original
The years before school are when executive functions are growing fastest and are most responsive to experience. That makes the early years a window, not a waiting room. But the practical message for parents is gentler than it might sound, because the experiences that build these skills are not flashcards, apps or tutoring. They are ordinary situations in which a small child has to hold something in mind, resist an impulse, or change course, in doses they can manage.
Honesty requires a caveat. Much of the evidence connecting specific activities to executive function gains is still being worked out, and a finding that executive functions predict school success does not mean every game guarantees a better report card. What Diamond's review supports is the broader principle: these skills are trainable, the training looks like challenge plus rules plus rising difficulty, and childhood is full of natural opportunities to do it. A parent does not need to engineer anything exotic. They need to notice that the boring-looking moments, the waiting, the remembering, the losing gracefully, are the curriculum.
It also reframes some behaviour that drives parents mad. A 3 year old who cannot wait their turn is not being naughty. They are standing at the very start of inhibitory control, a skill with a long developmental runway. Every small, supported act of waiting is a repetition in the gym. The job is not to demand the skill fully formed but to keep offering safe chances to practise it.
Watch a 4 year old playing snakes and ladders and you can see all three executive functions working at once, out loud, in real time. The dice goes round the table and her whole body wants to grab it early; she doesn't, just. That is inhibitory control, exercised in the most concrete form a preschooler can understand. She has to remember that the snake means down and the ladder means up, and count her counter forward exactly the number on the dice, no more. That is working memory, holding two rules and a number in mind while her hand moves. Then, two squares from home, she lands on the long snake and slides back to the bottom, and after the wail passes she picks herself up and re-plans. That is cognitive flexibility, learned the only way it can be: by having a plan fail in a place where failure is safe.
This is why games with rules are such a precise match for Diamond's prescription. The rules are the workout. Waiting a turn trains stopping. Holding the rules in mind trains remembering. Adapting when the game turns against you trains flexibility. And the difficulty rises naturally with the child: dominoes and matching games at 3, dice-and-counter games at 4, then draughts, then chess, each step asking a little more of the same three systems. A family shelf of traditional board games → is, seen through Diamond's lens, a graded training programme that happens to be disguised as fun.
The physical, traditional versions of these games earn their place here. A wooden counter has weight in a toddler's fingers; the click of a domino on the table marks a turn taken and a rule followed; the dice has to be passed from hand to hand, which means the waiting is real and visible, not hidden behind a screen that takes everyone's turn for them. A tablet game will often do the remembering for the child: it highlights the legal moves, enforces the rules, removes the very effort that does the building. Around a real board, the child's own brain has to do that work. Jaques of London has been making games with rules → since 1795, longer than any games company on earth, and the firm that invented croquet in 1851 and created the Staunton chess set in 1849 was building executive function workouts a century and a half before anyone had a name for them.
Diamond's full review is long but unusually readable for an academic paper, and worth the time if you want the complete picture of what executive functions are and how they grow: Executive Functions, Annual Review of Psychology (2013). On this site, our guide to first board games turns the principle into specific games for 3 and 4 year olds, the science page sets Diamond's work alongside the wider evidence on play and development, and why real play matters makes the broader case for hands-on play over screens.
They are the brain's self-management skills: holding information in mind while you use it (working memory), stopping yourself from acting on impulse (inhibitory control), and switching approach when circumstances change (cognitive flexibility). Together they let a child focus, wait, follow rules and adapt, which is why Diamond's research finds they matter so much for school.
Diamond's 2013 review concludes that executive functions predict school success better than IQ does. That does not mean intelligence is irrelevant; it means that the ability to deploy intelligence, to sit with a hard task, resist distraction and recover from setbacks, is the stronger predictor of how a child actually gets on in a classroom. The encouraging part is that, unlike IQ, executive functions respond clearly to practice.
Most children can manage very simple rule-based play, matching games, dominoes, taking turns at a shared task, from around 3, and dice-and-counter board games from roughly 3 and a half to 4. The age matters less than the dose: short games, real but tiny challenges, and a rule structure the child can actually hold in mind. If every session ends in tears, the game is too hard; drop down a level and build back up.
Almost certainly the opposite, within reason. Losing a fifteen-minute game with a parent nearby is exactly the kind of manageable challenge Diamond's framework points to: the disappointment is real, the stakes reset immediately, and the child gets to practise flexibility and recovery in safety. Keep games short and luck-based at first so wins and losses fall fairly, name the feeling, and let them see you lose well too. The meltdowns shrink with repetitions, which is rather the point.
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