Executive Function & Girls with ADHD – Rachel Kapp Explains

Why are so many smart, capable girls with ADHD struggling—and going unnoticed? In this episode, board-certified educational therapist Rachel Kapp breaks down how executive function challenges present in girls, why they're so often misinterpreted, and how educational therapy offers a path toward confidence, clarity, and independence. From masking and late diagnosis to supporting moms with ADHD, Rachel shares compassionate, practical insights every parent, educator, and clinician should hear.

Whether you're raising a neurodivergent daughter or navigating your own EF struggles, this conversation will leave you feeling informed, empowered, and seen.

📍 Learn more: www.kappedtherapy.com
📚 Get free tools: www.FINDtheADHDgirls.org/repository

#ExecutiveFunction #ADHDinGirls #GirlsWithADHD #EducationalTherapy #FINDtheADHDgirls #NeurodivergentSupport #ADHDAwareness #LateDiagnosis #ParentingADHD #NotLazy #MaskingADHD

Find The ADHD Girls is a project of the Inattentive ADHD Coalition (www.iadhd.org)

The mission of this project is to give all girls who have ADHD
a fair start in life by getting them diagnosed by age 8.

COULD YOUR DAUGHTER HAVE ADHD?

ADHD can look different in girls - meaning that often, they are missed for ADHD diagnosis.

Find out if your daughter has ADHD at findtheadhdgirls.org

Learn about inattentive ADHD at www.iadhd.org, the only website solely about inattentive ADHD

Transcript

Hi. Nice to meet you Rachel.

Can you introduce yourself? Sure. Tell us your name, what you do, and where you're speaking from. 

Sure. Thank you so much for having me. My name is Rachel Capp. I am a board certified educational therapist. I live in Encino, California. My practice is Kapp Educational Therapy Group, where we specialize in learners who struggle with executive functioning skills challenges.

So that would include both kids with ADHD. 

It is through the lens of executive functioning skills challenges. Oftentimes the learners that we work with will have a diagnosis of ADHD. Sometimes they don't. We do executive functioning skills plus.

Whether they have the diagnosis or not usually there's another comorbidity alongside of that. We work with learners fifth grade through adulthood. 

How many are girls and how many are boys? Really evenly split. 

The girls tend to be older because they get diagnosed later because ADHD looks so different in girls. Executive functioning skills

challenges can look really different in girls as well. Girls can compensate and mask a lot longer than boys. Because there's three different kinds of ADHD, but the world is really only familiar with the one, which is the hyperactive boy

who is a behavioral issue. Girls with ADHD or executive functioning skills challenges can present differently. They're not a behavioral problem in the classroom. They tend to be obedient. They compensate really well with their intellect and their working memory. Boys can as well, but more typically the girls don't get those kind of professional and teacher eyes in the same way that the boys do so it's very typical for a girl to be coming into the practice in middle school when a lot of those executive functioning skills challenges really level up. The boys can come into the practice a little bit younger. But.

That's not a hard and fast rule. We have girls who come in college. We have women who come in as young adults or working professionals, mothers. It's just a timing issue and their story tends to be very similar. I had a lot of challenges. Nobody really helped me and it didn't get identified as an area of need. They were 

doing well enough. The mission of this council is to get girls diagnosed earlier so they don't get this toll of anxiety and depression. 

They don't get the message that they're lazy or that they don't wanna achieve.

That early understanding of who they are as a learner is really important for their self esteem and self preservation. It's something that we talk about on both my podcast and internally about how do we emotionally support the journey that these kids have been on and the journey their parents have been on

'cause they don't know either. I always tell parents that because there's a lot of parental guilt around maybe a later diagnosis. You don't know what you don't know until you know it. So when you know, you can do something about it. Oftentimes parents will share that this was an intervention that would've benefited them,

for them to have a therapy intervention, but they didn't know.  

So Interesting. When parents bring their girls in middle school to you, what kinds of issues do you find them coping with?

So there's a lot of. Anxiety, there's always going to be an anxiety alongside an executive functioning skills challenge. There's perfectionism around school, spending a lot of time on assignments that don't require a lot of time. There's not a real ability to prioritize or differentiate between what is a critical use of time and what isn't a critical use of time.

So those five point assignments and they're spending the same amount of time as they would on an essay. Written expression is challenging for girls who struggle with executive functioning skills. Organizing their thoughts, understanding the prompt appropriately, dealing with blank page, anxiety of just looking at the page and knowing you have to fill it with something.

There's a lot of I'm starting this at 11:00 pm and it's due Monday morning on a Sunday night. There's a lot of Sunday scary challenges. There's family and home life discord around learning, around ,school their missing assignments, and their child has no answer about why it's missing.

They don't know. There's a lot of shock and surprise about assignments that there shouldn't be shock and surprise about. They're not prepared for their day. They don't bring home the correct materials. They don't properly account for They don't properly account and have a good sense of time of how long something takes. Their predictive skills around time are generally very off. They're either overestimating how long something will take and then can be avoidant about that, or they're underestimating how long something will take and then not have enough time to complete the task.

 

You're an educational therapist, you're not a coach, so you're seeing kids, adults, one-on-one once a week.

Is it okay if I explain a little bit about educational therapy? I think starting there might be helpful.

As educational therapists, we work one-on-one with learners who have some sort of learning difference or learning challenge. They're not meeting expectations in some capacity and they need extra support, extra intervention, extra. Extra skills around their We are focused on how learners are acquiring information and then how they're sharing what they know as opposed to a tutor who's primary focus is the content.

We teach skills and strategies oftentimes as educational therapists through the curriculum. At least in my practice, I can speak to that. Other therapists who maybe have a different focus might use outside programs or outside skill sets, but we are highly trained and are taking all the best practices from all the different good programs out there that are research based and providing interventions that are specific to that individual learner. Our sessions are one-on-one because in my practice we specialize in executive functioning skills, challenges. We typically meet with learners twice a week. I always say if it's time permissive and financially feasible. The objection that parents will have to that beyond the financial but is my kid already doesn't have enough time and now they're gonna need two hours a week in this. The truth is that good intervention from our practice means they have more free time and have a sense of control over their time. They feel like they're controlling their learning as opposed to their learning, controlling them. 

Educational therapy, is it a new strategy? 

It started in Los Angeles in the late eighties, early nineties so it's a relatively new field. It tends to be really centralized in Los Angeles where I live, San Francisco Denver's having more ed therapists, Dallas, Texas has more ed therapists in Chicago. It is going further east. We're different from coaches. We're not co-creating any experiences. We're offering the skills and strategies. It's a more directive and directional.

We're giving them the skills and strategies and then teaching them how to strengthen that muscle so that they can be independent and autonomous. The goal of any educational therapist is not to keep that kid in ed therapy forever. The goal is that they learn what they need to learn and then they go off and fly.

And you have more educational requirements than a coach, right? 

I'm not a hundred percent familiar with what is required to be a coach, but as educational therapists, most of us have advanced degrees. I have an advanced degree in special education with a certification in educational therapy.

There's a higher qualification. We have an internally run professional organization called the Association of Educational Therapists, which is how we get our certification that we can practice.

And if you're curious, if about of the background and the skillset and the schooling that the person you're working with has, you can always look on the Association of Educational Therapy website to see if they're listed as a member in good standing. If they're not there, you can question about why not.

Most parents don't know though. 

In a lot of cases where you see people do they also need psychotherapy or do you think that educational therapy can take the place of that? 

We stay in our lane,. there's therapy in our title, but when it bridges beyond the scope of our intervention, we work in tandem with psychotherapists and LMFTs

I always wanna make sure that the learner that we're working with that we're preserving their self-esteem first and foremost. We wanna be careful about messages that we're sending, about how many hours a week they're working with interventionists. That's why you wanna work with a highly skilled, thoughtful

practitioner who can make those recommendations of who are the other people on the team that can support the learner? When you see a learner who struggles with executive functioning skills challenges, there's a lot of discord in the home, and oftentimes the result of that is family therapy or individual therapy.

There's a structural problem. It's not an identified patient issue, usually of EF challenges. We really like working with practitioners who are looking at the whole child and looking at the whole family and the way that we are as well. 

I wonder how many of the people that you see also might be served by medication.

They say that pills don't teach skills. 

This is how we think of it. I'm not a medical diagnostician.  my area and zone of genius is in the intervention and how we support these learners in their academics and in their life.

We don't require a diagnosis. If you're having executive functioning skills challenges, you're having EL skills challenges, and we can work with you. We ask for openness around other suggestions and coaching for the parents themselves. Some clients are coming into the practice already on medication. Some are coming in and the parents are very against medication. I'm down for whatever path makes sense for the family. We ask for openness if it gets to the point that we start with the intervention and we reach a critical point where we feel strongly that this is a child that would massively benefit then we ask for openness around that. But ultimately, it's a family's decision. Good medication will clear the traffic on the road, but good intervention from people like me teach the learner how to drive on the road in the fastest, shortest way possible. It's sometimes that tandem can be really wonderful. Sometimes that's not the direction the family wants to go. 

A long time ago, my son had a great educational therapist. He said she doesn't work with kids who are drugged. That was really tough at the time because he was one of those kids that needed medication.

I understand that position. Maybe there's been an evolution and help understand this. Medications are better. They've gotten better. 

Some of your clients are mothers. Are all your clients in a educational environment? Are they all going to school ? Not everybody. 

We work with a lot of adults in the practice.

So a lot of stay-at-home moms whose job it is to keep the family home running, but things that aren't getting done that they wanna get done. Their executive functioning skills, weaknesses are getting in the way of these long-term project management, skills that they don't have but are necessary for their job as a stay at home parent.

We've worked with women who are going through a home remodel and they're being they're really a stop gap in the decision making of it. We work with adults who are trying to write a book. They've wanted to write a book their whole life and they're struggling with their attentional challenges and their EF skillset . They start over here, and then they write over here, and they just can't gain momentum.

We've interviewed several adults about the benefits of educational therapy as adults. A population that wish they had it as when they were younger. It generally goes faster, I will say they're the ones paying for it. We tend to be motivated by the things we pay for, right? 

Yeah. What are the attitudes of the kids that, that 

you are dealing with? 

This is a pretty familiar question that I.

That we get asked is what's the buy-in level that my learner needs to have? I don't think it's almost the right question because I don't need them to have buy-in. I need them to like the person that they're working with, and I need the parent to be able to force them into attending sessions.

At the end of the day the critical component and the critical piece that we have found anecdotally in our practice of what makes this really work is that they like the clinician that they're working with.

They might not be thrilled about it, and they might have a lot of objections. I don't have time for this. I don't need this. I don't wanna do this. I'm too busy. They they really, it if they like the person they work with, they don't, they will see the benefit of it.

It that's a lack of experience on their end. They've likely been burned by other things in the past that they have thought might work and don't work. We're often the last stop for a reason. People don't know about us. Tried this and they've tried that and lots of things have been tried

prior to coming into my practice. They've been burned. 

That's interesting that you say that because why would you start with fifth grade? W 

Executive functioning skills is really done by the classroom teacher and the parent of learners who are younger than fourth grade. We see a transition in middle school of learners who struggle with executive functioning skills, with the parents in sixth grade still being the manager of their learner.

That's still developmentally appropriate, but by the end of middle school, we really want them transitioning into being the consultant. 

Interesting. Yeah. And 

So you have a kid who has executive functioning skills, challenges, let's deduct two or three years.

They can be younger than their peers. When we get these kids who are in fifth grade who are going to matriculate into sixth grade and the executive functioning demands a thousand fold explode in that transition of elementary school to middle school.

That's when we, I'm so sorry. What? What happened? My dog is barking. Oh, I didn't even hear it. So sorry. The joys of working from home. Yeah. Yeah. 

That's when we can really make our greatest impact is in that age range. 

Just an example of how you work with kids, did they bring an assignment? 

There's three phases to the work that we do. I can only speak to my practice 'cause every a therapist can set up how they wanna set up. 'Cause we specialize in executive functioning skills challenges, we start there. We start with their three foundational systems,

A system for managing their time, a system for managing themselves physically, and a system for managing themselves digitally. Takes about four to six sessions to create those systems. Have their systems. Sorry, my dog again. Take your time. Kids have those systems, but oftentimes they're over complicated.

We need to simplify, we need to create some manageable rules that they don't have around those systems. Then they move into the second phase where we spend the first five to 10 minutes of each session focusing on making sure those systems are well updated and well maintained.

What does your calendar look like? Is everything in its home In your binder? Is your email dealt with appropriately? All those sorts of things. Then we spend the remainder of the time in session on what we call the nitty gritty.

Things that are challenging for our population, and this is where they're bringing in their school assignments. We're either trying to complete with late work. We're helping with project management. They tend to circle with written expression, like we've said, reading comprehension on non-preferred literature,

building up their own sense of time and addressing time blindness, study skills, self-advocacy skills, all the business of studenting, the verb of studenting. Because we are looking to work ourselves out of a job.

We are looking to graduate these kids, but we need them to be able to do these skills and self-select things independently without us. We are looking for five things. We want them able to independently maintain their systems without coaching from us. We want them to be able to predict what's challenging and why.

We really do want them to demystify their own learning profile and have a metacognitive understanding of their own learning and their own interaction in the world. We want them to be able to self-select the appropriate strategy for that challenge. We want them to be able to advocate appropriately. And then we want them to have a plan of what to do when they don't know what to do. Once they start to approach competency and independence in those five domains, that's when we have the conversation about graduating them out of our services. 

Typically, how long will a student stay with you?

Most learners are in our practice for two complete academic semesters. So if you're starting mid-semester, that doesn't count as one of those two semesters.

It also depends on the age of the learners. If a learner's coming in 11th grade, it's reasonable that we'll be working with them during that first semester of college or that first semester of their gap year, whatever they're doing post high school. It depends on the age and stage of the learner and the x factor of the kid is what I can't predict.

Rachel, I have one more question what got you into this? What got you so interested in executive function? 

Thank you for the question. That's a good question. Prior to being an educational therapist, I was a preschools teacher.

I knew that I wanted to move beyond preschool teaching. There was a little girl I noticed. I was teaching pre-K, so she was four and a half. I noticed that she was not attending to the information being given at circle time.

And that's when you're teaching and introducing new ideas and explaining about whatever it is that you're learning about in the classroom You would ask her a question about what happened in circle time and she wouldn't be able to answer it. We were able to identify an auditory processing issue at four and a half.

A girl who was not a behavioral challenge in the classroom. We were able to address this learning challenge at a very young age that would've likely gone ignored for a while. I was very inspired by that and I knew that I was interested in how kids learned. Then I found ED Therapy.. 

You went back to school? 

Yeah. Yeah. I had my own tutoring business. A lot of ed therapists come out of tutoring. I had my own tutoring business. I was teaching full-time. I was in grad school full-time. So it was a busy time.

It sounds like you just come up with such an interesting structured way to get at these problems. It didn't happen 

overnight, figuring out how to support these learners and then seeing the impact that it can have and the transformation that can have, not only for that learner, but for their family. When a kid is coming in middle school and high school, what do we want these last few years to look like in the family home?

When we can really make an impact on that, it's extremely gratifying, meaningful work. I had a learner that I worked with early on in my ed therapy career. He was in fifth grade, matriculated into sixth grade while we were working together before I graduated him and he was there primarily for executive functioning.

This was prior to me specializing in that. And and He looped back with me when he was a senior. And it's like just, and He literally said, Rachel, I just want one session to go over. I have a few questions for you. All I wanna do is see you. This is such a, and so being able to be a part of somebody's journey like that is really it's a special thing to make the, it's the impact that we all wanna make when we go into education.

I get to make that impact as an ed therapist. 

I'm really glad you talked about all the stress on the family and the family dynamics and the identified patient too, because that is often such a big part of this . Just like a vicious circle of, yeah. 

The apple tends to not fall far from the tree.

This is highly genetic. The parent who identifies with their kid will respond in one of two ways. Either respond like I gotta get my kid the support that I didn't have or they respond with, I figured it out. They'll figure it out. 

Oh yeah. 

Usually a parent doing homework with them who will say that?

Looking at the whole child's understanding, their cultural background, understanding the cultural norms around learning is really an important component of helping these families. It does help the family, for sure. 

Yeah. This has been very inspiring to talk with you

Can she tell parents how to help with their child who has challenges?

They're not trying to upset you. I would start there . We have a fundamental belief in my practice, but I feel very confident speaking for my field, all kids wanna please the adults in their lives. When they're not meeting your expectations, it is our job as the adult to get curious and not punitive.

Executive functioning skills challenges can look like the dreaded word lazy. This is not a population that is lazy. This is a population that is working twice as hard. Expectations are usually two to three years beyond their ability

and they're producing half as much. Then they're getting told that it's not good enough. I also, If I had healthy self-esteem and was getting that message a lot for years, I also would emotionally disconnect from school and say, this is not for me, and find esteem in other ways. And so it, My only thing with parents is to join me in that perspective taking of

They're not trying to piss us off? If this was easy, they would do it. 

That's a super important message. I'm so glad that we got to that question. It's very important. What percent of the parents get it?

The good one and not the good one? In our practice, we're able to coach them through that because I don't expect a switch to turn on for parents who have seen behaviors over the years that

don't align with a learner who wants to be successful. All kids wanna be successful. 

I think that's so true. Thank you very much for the work that you're doing and that wonderful message. It's really been great to talk with you. 

Thank you for the conversation. I really enjoyed it. Thank you so much.