Forgets Directions Halfway Through? 4 Ways to Lighten Your Child’s Working Memory

Why does my child forget what I said a minute ago?

You give three steps. Your child comes back after the first one, with a blank look. It wears on both of you.

Darius Namdaran hosts the video below. He calls working memory a whiteboard. It is the small space where we hold words while we use them. When something new comes in, the old note gets wiped. That happens to everyone, not only to your child.

In our view, holding words in mind is one of several jobs at once. Following directions uses it. So does reading. When the jobs pile up, something drops. To us, that does not look like a child who is not listening. Here is how working memory fits with a child’s other skills.

His guest, Dr. Erica Warren, names the gap behind this. She hears schools complain that kids “don’t know how to focus.” They say kids “don’t know how to listen.” Her reply: “we’re not explicitly teaching executive functions.” Those are the skills that run the rest: holding on, staying on task, changing course. In her view, schools ask for them every day and rarely teach them. So the job lands at your table.

What helps a child hold on to directions?

Some advice tries to make the space bigger with memory drills. We will not promise you that. Our view is simpler. Put less in the space at once.

One finding points the same way. Best and Miller wrote a 2010 review in Child Development. It reports a memory task from Luciana and Nelson. Only one thing changed: how many places a child had to hold in mind. With a few places, children kept up with young adults. With more places, the children fell behind. It is one task, not the last word. But it points one way: how much we ask at once matters.

Here are four ways to carry less, all from the video:

• Write it while you say it. Grab a whiteboard or scrap paper. Jot one key word for each step as you talk. Darius keeps his half of the kitchen whiteboard blank for this.
• Group it. Dr. Warren uses a grocery list. She says two meats and three vegetables are much easier to hold. A loose list is harder. She calls this chunking.
• Set things side by side. Darius talks about two windows on a screen. Stacked, you keep hunting for your place. Side by side, you stop hunting. Try the same with a worksheet and the book it comes from.
• Show it and say it. Point to the word on the board as you say it. Darius wants children to “dual code it,” to see it and hear it together. Then they “don’t have to hold everything in their mind.”

Darius adds one more idea. He calls the person with the smaller space “the canary in the coal mine.” That person overloads first. But everyone’s space fills up in time. So getting it on paper helps the whole table. A mind map does this for a child with ideas and nowhere to put them.

Should I find out my child’s learning style?

This is where the two speakers disagree on air. Darius says to put it on the board for every child. Dr. Warren pushes back. “It works so well for you that you’re convinced that it’s going to work that well for everybody else,” she tells him. Her answer is to “assess what their best ways of processing are” and teach to that.

On this point, we side with Darius, and the evidence has names. Pashler and colleagues reviewed learning styles in 2008. They found no credible evidence that matching teaching to a style helps. A 2024 meta-analysis in Frontiers found the same. Learning styles were tested and did not hold up, twice. Classrooms still teach to them. That is not a science problem. It is a systems problem.

Dr. Warren tells of college students whose grades rose. She had worked with them this way. That is good news for them. They also had her close, focused help. One story cannot show which part did the work. Some plans sort a child into one type, then teach only to that type. That is the same move.

What we do instead is the opposite of sorting. Show it, say it and write it for every child in the room. Dr. Warren says this too, as her fallback: “use a variety of modalities.” We agree with that part. It is the idea behind three doors into every lesson.