Earlier this month I attended a presentation by executive functioning coach Sarah Ward, co-director of Cognitive Connections. She was teaching parents how to make their home structure support better executive functioning.

I was attending this to help figure out how to set up my home to better support my children, but along the way I came across an insight that helps clarify an issue of financial planning as well.

What do I mean by setting up my home? It may be easier to visualize for a Montessori home for toddlers:

This image from YouTube, shows a house where everything is within the child’s reach, everything is the child’s size, everything has its place, the bed is a floor bed that they can get in and out of without assistance, and nothing is cluttered. The environment sets the child up for success. I wanted to know more about what a house set up for a child to succeed at executive functioning would look like.

Sarah introduced us to the idea of how far into the future can humans see, by age.  If your child is neurotypical, that progression might look like this:

• 2 years old – right NOW, acting on impulse
• 3-5 year olds – 5-20 minutes into the future
• K-2^nd grade – several hours into the future
• 3-6^th grade – 8-12 hours
  • They can see themselves doing homework, but not turning it in, so they leave the completed homework on the counter at home.
• 6-12^th grade – 2-3 days
  • They don’t see an exam coming at them 2 weeks away, or feel the need to start working on that semester long project.
• 17-23 years – 2-3 weeks
  • The idea of staying ahead of their workload to be in good shape schedule-wise by finals is beyond them.
• 23-35 years old – 3-5 weeks.

Beyond those timelines, deadlines don’t spur you to action.

But that was just for neurotypical children. What if your child has ADHD (which Sarah recommended we think of instead as EFDD:  executive functioning developmental delay). These children have a 30-35% developmental delay, which means an average of a 3-3.5 years delay.  Yes, sometimes the gap can be larger.

Now what if, instead of focusing on the kid end of the age spectrum, we start to think about what this means for adult tasks.

So what does this have to do with financial planning?

Only at 23-35 years old do you start to see a shift from immediate to delayed gratification. But even then, most people can’t “feel” the idea of reaching retirement, let alone 30+ years of retirement.

This is why it can feel like an impossible lift to get your adult children to start saving for their retirement. Because to them, it just isn’t “real” yet.

How to make the future feel real

In order to do these tasks, we have to make them feel real. I recommend reading this article from the Harvard Business Review about how to do that.

In short, visualize what that future you would physically look like (look at a digitally aged photograph). What would you wear, where would you have wrinkles, how would white hair (or no hair) look on you? Envision how a day might play out, what you would be doing, and whom you would be doing it with. How would you feel, would you have to work to get out of that chair, walk with a limp, or have aches and pains that don’t go away?

Only when we connect with that future self, by doing out of the ordinary things to make our brains stretch further than they normally would, will we change our behavior to treat future-self as well as we treat current-self.