Draft:Lynne Kenney

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Lynne Maureen Kenney is an American pediatric psychologist, author, and educator known for her work in executive function development, cognitive-motor physical activity interventions, and cognitive skill coaching for children. She is a psychologist on the Language and Cognition Team at the Wellington-Alexander Center for the Treatment of Dyslexia in Scottsdale, Arizona, and the creator of educational frameworks including The Developmental Pillars, The Kinetic Classroom and CogniSuite.

Kenney is the author or co-author of several books on child development, executive function, and social-relational learning, including Move More, Learn More: Harnessing the Brain-Body Connection in Early Childhood (2026, with Michael Kuczala), Brain Primers (2020, with Kuczala), Bloom (2016, Kenney & Young), Bloom Your Room (2016, Kenney with artist Meg Garcia) and 70 Play Activities for Better Thinking, Self-Regulation, Learning, and Behavior (2016, with Rebecca Comizio). She has lectured internationally on coordinative rhythmic movement, cognitive-motor interventions, and early childhood learning.

Early life and education

Kenney earned a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology in 1984 and a Master of Arts in Physical Education with an emphasis in Sport Psychology in 1986, both from the University of Southern California. She received a Doctor of Psychology (PsyD) from Pepperdine University in 1992, completing a dissertation in forensic clinical psychology.

She completed a fellowship in forensic and clinical psychology in the Department of Psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School from 1991 to 1992, followed by a fellowship in pediatrics at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center and the UCLA School of Medicine from 1992 to 1993, with a joint appointment in the Departments of Pediatrics and Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.

Career

Clinical practice

Kenney was licensed as a psychologist in California in 1994 and has been licensed in Arizona since 1994. From 1994 to 2004, she practiced at the Melmed Center (formerly Developmental Pediatric Associates) in Scottsdale, Arizona, as part of a multidisciplinary team focused on developmental and behavioral assessment of infants, children, and adolescents, as well as forensic evaluations in family, civil, and criminal court.

From 2006 to 2009, Kenney served as a consulting psychologist to North Scottsdale Pediatrics. In 2009, she joined Beljan Neuropsychology. From 2013 to 2019, Kenney conducted research and taught cognitive skill coaching and motor-cognition to clinicians and educators internationally, in the USA, Canada, and Europe.  Since 2019, she has been a pediatric psychologist at the Wellington-Alexander Center for the Treatment of Dyslexia, a neurodevelopmental assessment and treatment center in Scottsdale.

Educational programs and frameworks

Kenney is the creator of CogniSuite and The Kinetic Classroom, programs developed from 2013 onward that apply coordinative cognitive-motor movement to classroom instruction. The programs are designed to support executive function skills, including attention, working memory, cognitive flexibility, and inhibitory control, in children from preschool through middle school.

From 2017 to 2019, she co-created 5n45, a classroom cognitive-exercise program developed to accompany the ACTIVATE platform from C8 Sciences. She previously developed Play Math, a neurocognitive mathematics program for children ages 6 to 12, emphasizing the role of movement in mathematical learning.

Dr. Kenney’s “Spotlight” cognitive-visual-motor language was the foundation of several programs dating to 2013, including CogniTap, 5N45, CogniMoves, FlowMoves, FloorMoves, and DanceMoves. In partnership with Fit and Fun Playscapes, Kenney developed Cognitivities, a line of portable activity mats that translate her executive function songs into short classroom movement sequences for students in prekindergarten through third grade.

Teaching and community work

With a master’s degree in physical education, specializing in sport psychology, Kenney trained Olympic and professional athletes in the 1980’s. Kenney has served as a value-added instructor at Norland College in Bath, England, since 2018 and as a contributing editor at the Neurological Health Foundation since 2015. She was an adjunct professor at Arizona State University and consults with university programs in occupational therapy, sport psychology, and speech-language therapy. She has worked with organizations including Head Start, Understood.org, the ACT II Foundation, HandsOn Phoenix, SparkPE, Points of Light (Generation On), and the First Nations in Canada, with a particular focus on Title I schools and under-resourced communities.

Earlier in her career, she served on several court-affiliated advisory bodies in Arizona, including the Family Court Advisory Committee of the Superior Court of Arizona, Maricopa County (2003 to 2004), and a workgroup on family law statutes of the Domestic Relations Committee of the Supreme Court of Arizona (2004 to 2005). With Diana Vigil and later, David Weinstock, JD, PhD. Dr. Kenney developed the concept of “Therapeutic Interventions” in family court. Her work shifted the family court paradigm away from purely adversarial litigation toward using behavioral health services as a structured tool for resolving custody disputes and family trauma. Her landmark 2005 publication in the Family Court Review, titled "Expanding Forensically Informed Evaluations and Therapeutic Interventions in Family Court," formally crystallized this model. Kenney was a board member of the Arizona Chapter of the Association of Family and Conciliation Courts from 2001 to 2003.

Media

With over 400 media appearances, Kenney has contributed to parenting and family-oriented media, including ABC 15 Phoenix programs Sonoran Living, Smart Family, and The List, where she served as a consultant from 2002 to 2018 and 2026. Her commentary has been published in outlets including Real Simple, Success, People, Parents, and Parenting, as well as on the website Understood.org. Dr. Kenney currently contributes to news segments at ABC 15 Phoenix.

In 2026, she co-launched the podcast Move More, Learn More with educator Michael Kuczala, as a companion to their book of the same title.

Work and methodology

Kenney's approach integrates neuroscience, kinesiology, developmental psychology, auditory neuroscience, and music to support children's cognitive development. A central concept in her work is helping children become what she terms "coaches of their own brains," using metaphors such as an "attention engine" and a “memory window” to teach self-regulation and metacognition.

Kenney’s seminal work in the Developmental Pillars Framework (2026) aims to ensure children with neurodevelopmental uniqueness are identified earlier in pediatrics, psychiatry, and developmental pediatrics. Her frameworks emphasize early brain development and coordinative rhythmic movement as a lever for the development of executive function, using structured sequences tied to musical time signatures. Her more recent theoretical work, developed in collaboration with other researchers, addresses subcortical and cerebellar contributions to learning and reading, drawing on the cerebellar deficit hypothesis of dyslexia associated with Rod Nicolson and Angela Fawcett, as well as the work of Fleur Bouwer and Enikő Ladányi, who developed the Atypical Rhythm Risk (ARR) Hypothesis with Reyna Gordon.

Selected publications

Books

• Kuczala, M., and Kenney, L. (2026). Move More, Learn More: Harnessing the Brain-Body Connection in Early Childhood. Teachers College Press.
• Kuczala, M., and Kenney, L. (2020). Brain Primers. Moving Minds Press.
• Kenney, L., and Comizio, R. (2016). 70 Play Activities for Better Thinking, Self-Regulation, Learning, and Behavior. PESI Publishing.
• Kenney, L. (2016). Musical Thinking: Five Simple Steps to Teaching Children How They Think. Unhooked Books.
• Kenney, L. (2016). Bloom Your Room, Move2Think, LLC
• Kenney, L., and Young, W. (2015). Bloom: 50 Things to Say, Think and Do with Anxious, Angry and Over-the-Top Kids. Unhooked Books.
• Kenney, L. (2009). The Family Coach Method. St. Lynn's Press.

Selected academic articles

• Meloy, J. R., Gacono, C., and Kenney, L. (1994). A Rorschach investigation of sexual homicide. Journal of Personality Assessment, 62(1), 58 to 67.
• Markan, L., and Weinstock, D. (2005). Expanding evaluations and therapeutic interventions in family court. Family Court Review, 43(3), 466 to 480.
• Weinstock, D., and Markan, L. (2006). Training custody evaluators: formalizing training to assert minimal competency. Journal of Child Custody, 3(2), 1 to 21.
• Kenney, L., and Vigil, D. (1996). A lawyer's guide to therapeutic interventions in domestic relations court. Arizona State Law Journal, 28, 629 to 672.

Personal life

Kenney is based in Scottsdale, Arizona. Outside her clinical and educational work, she is a songwriter and lyricist who has composed original educational songs used in her executive function curricula.

External links

• Bouwer F.L. (2022). Neural Entrainment to Auditory Rhythms: Automatic or Top-Down Driven? The Journal of neuroscience: the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience, 42(11), 2146–2148. https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.2305-21.2022
• Official website: www.lynnekenney.com
• Wellington-Alexander Center: www.wellingtonalexandercenter.com