What Monster Jam Can Teach Us About Executive Function

A few weeks ago, my partner and I took our 5 year old son to Monster Jam in San Jose.  We have been thinking of doing this for a few years now and I am glad that we had a chance to do it.  I will be the first person to admit that I did not make the connection between Monster Jam and executive functioning skills.  Since I have now had a chance to reflect on what I saw, Monster Jam and EF skills are pretty closely aligned.  

If you've ever sat in the stands at a Monster Jam event , ears ringing, kids screaming, thirty-foot trucks launching off dirt ramps, "executive function" is probably not the phrase that comes to mind. But watch closely, and the sport turns out to be a surprisingly good illustration of the skills we work on every day in EF coaching.

Planning and Goal-Directed Behavior

Every freestyle run looks chaotic, but it isn't. Drivers walk the course beforehand, mentally mapping which obstacles to hit, in what order, and how to save enough truck (and enough fuel, and enough tires) to finish strong. That's planning: holding a goal in mind and working backward to sequence the steps that get you there. It's the same skill a student uses when they look at a project due in three weeks and reverse-engineer a timeline instead of starting the night before.

Working Memory Under Pressure

A driver is tracking a dozen things at once mid-run — throttle position, truck angle, the location of the judges, how much time is left on the clock, whether the truck in front of them just stalled. That's working memory: holding multiple pieces of information active and updating them in real time. Students do a version of this constantly — remembering the instructions for a multi-step math problem while also keeping track of which formula applies and what the question actually asked.  We spoke to a few drivers at the Pit Party and I am pictured with Loghan Ashline who is a driver of Sparkle Smash.  

Inhibition and Impulse Control

The instinct in freestyle is to gun it — bigger air, bigger crash, bigger cheer. But the drivers who last are the ones who know when not to floor it. Overcooking a jump ends the run early. That's inhibition: the ability to override the urge that feels good in the moment for the sake of the larger goal. It's the same muscle a kid uses when they want to open TikTok/Facebook/Instagram "just for a second" but stays with their homework instead.

Cognitive Flexibility

No two courses are identical, and no run ever goes exactly to plan. A truck bogs down in soft dirt, another competitor takes the line you wanted, the ramp angle is different than it looked from the pits. The drivers who adapt on the fly — adjusting strategy mid-run instead of forcing the plan they walked in with — are exercising cognitive flexibility. This is the EF skill that lets a student shift strategies when their first approach to a problem isn't working, instead of freezing or melting down.

Self-Monitoring

The best drivers can feel when a run is going sideways and pull back before it becomes a rollover. That's self-monitoring: checking your own performance against the goal in real time and adjusting. It's a skill many students genuinely lack not because they don't care, but because no one has taught them to pause and ask, "Is this working?" while they're in the middle of doing it.

Why This Framing Works for Kids

Talking about EF in the abstract  such as "you need better planning skills", tends to land flat with a ten-year-old. Talking about why the truck that won didn't just gun it the whole time gets their attention. If your kid is a Monster Jam fan, or a sports fan of any kind, that's a real entry point: the athletes and drivers they admire are using the exact same brain skills we're trying to build at the homework table. Naming that connection out loud — "you just did the thing the driver does when he holds back before the jump" — can make an abstract skill feel concrete and worth practicing.