Teaching your child to focus | Integrated Learning Therapy

Leanne Gray, of The Prepared Environment, shared some ideas about children’s focusing on her blog and I appreciated them so much that I’m hopefully disseminating them further!

Focused attention is necessary in the classroom and in the home. We all know how annoying it is when we trying to speak to someone and their attention is clearly wandering. Even more important, teachers despair when children struggle to maintain focus on a topic or a task. So what should you be doing to help them learn to focus?

First of all, we know how difficult it is to return to something that we were doing after we’ve been interrupted. For example, the phone rings and we have to break concentration to attend to the call; or our child rushes in with news that distracts us from a task. Keeping this in mind, how often do we interrupt our young children when they are attending to something and in the process, teach them to be easily distracted? For example, a young child is trying to master tying their shoelaces. Do you become impatient and offer to help too soon?

We interrupt by asking questions, commenting, offering praise or encouragement – even smiling. Try to be more patient. Realise that very young babies can focus on something for a very long time. Their brains take much longer to process than ours and children as young as 3 years old can spend up to 20 minutes focusing on an activity. If this happens with your child, don’t interrupt with anything. Wait until she is clearly finished, then perhaps offer an encouraging remark.

If he is playing with jumbo crayons, let him play. Don’t interrupt by telling him the crayon’s colour is blue and getting him to say ‘blue’ after you. Don’t take away the box she is trying to open and do it for her. Don’t help her butter the slice of bread she wants to eat.

In other words, don’t interrupt children when they are focusing on something. It’s very easy to interrupt a child and you might find it takes some practice to stand back and let them persevere by themselves. See their endeavours and play as opportunities to practice the ability to sustain attention on a task – without being distracted.

Speaking of distractions, try to create an area in your home where your child can be focused without too much in the environment that may draw attention away. Don’t allow them free access to a multitude of toys – let them choose one or two toys at a time and focus on those. Don’t always have the TV or radio on where the child is playing but keep the area quiet and inviting.

Be careful of allowing too much screen time and electronic ‘toys’. Remember that it has been recommended that children under the age of 2 years should have no screen time at all and until aged 5, only up to one hour of quality, parent-chaperoned use.

Then be cautious too about the plethora of modern toys available that interfere with the ability to focus. Media-type toys, or active, fast-paced ‘learning’ toys can have attention-robbing qualities. No children should engage in play with toys that result in a trance-like state. No learning happens in these situations but they may be negatively affecting children’s developing minds and fracturing their ability to focus and pay attention.

The kinds of toys children benefit most by are concrete objects, real experiences and social interaction. Magda Gerber (http://www.magdagerber.org) wisely said: ‘The best toys for babies don’t do anything.’ Just like the old adage about how children typically throw the toy away and play with the box in which it was packaged!

So the bottom line is to refrain from keeping your child happy and amused and solving all her problems. She needs to practice on her own, make mistakes, and go through difficulties.

The Prepared Environment can help you know when and how to offer help to your children. Read more about how to do that at the following sites:

0-3 years (https://www.thepreparedenvironment-com/blog/8-steps -to-help-infants-and-toddlers-do-it-myself

3-6 years (https://thepreparedenvironment-com/blog/four-steps-to-offer-as-little-help-as-possible-primary

6-9 years (https://thepreparedenvironment-com/blog/how-to-offer-your-elementary-children-as-little-help-as-they-really-need

Integrated Learning Therapy is focused on helping children fulfil their potential. If you enjoyed this post, please visit our website at www.ilt.co.za and Like and Share our Facebook posts.

We also offer courses for parents to understand the root causes of learning difficulties and challenging behaviours. For more information, email us at info@ilt.co.za.

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Martin Doherty, writing for The Conversation, says that at the age of about four, children reach important milestones in brain development.

One of these is a huge improvement in understanding others’ thoughts and feelings. This is the start of empathy. Another is in spatial thinking—understanding how objects are positioned and related. This is the beginning of the ability to read maps.

Martin and his colleague, Catherine Sayer, conducted a study with 175 two to five-year-olds to explore how children are able to use scale models to figure out where something is in the real world. At about four, children are able to use a scale model of a room to work out where something is. We thought that this might result from children’s understanding of how one thing can represent something else. But we actually found that four-year-olds’ ability to use scale models came from their spatial abilities.

At the same age, children start to understand that someone’s behaviour is due to what that person believes, not necessarily what is really the case. This has interesting consequences.

If you’ve played hide-and-seek with young children, you may have noticed that they aren’t always very good at it. They love the ritual of looking in all the wrong places first, but beforehand they may tell you where they are going to hide, hide in the same place every time, or not be especially hidden.

After their fourth birthday, they get much better at hide and seek. They understand that the seeker looks in the wrong places because they don’t know where the hider is.

At about three to four children also start to tell lies. They realize they can make someone believe something that isn’t true.

Understanding symbols

Martin’s earlier research with fellow psychologist Josef Perner suggests that four-year-olds don’t just start to understand how others’ minds work. Figuring this out is part of the development of an understanding of “representation”—that symbols, like thoughts, words, or pictures, can be used to stand for something else.

Children start to think about how words relate to objects. This means, for instance, knowing that “animal” can refer to something you already have a name for, such as “rabbit”. This might help children learn the new word.

Their ability to use a understand the components of pictures also improves around this age. Very young children use a lot of trial and error to complete a jigsaw, picking up random pieces to see if they fit. By the time they are about four years old, they start to use the picture as a guide, trying to connect lines and match bits of colour, while checking the guide picture on the box lid.

Developmental experiments

Another ability children develop at around four is using scale models. A classic set of developmental experiments involved a model of a regular household room. The real room had typical furniture—sofa, table, cupboard and so on—and the model had miniature versions laid out in the same way.

Children were shown where something was hidden in the model and told to find an object hidden in “the same place” in the room. Children of around four can find the object using the identical layouts. If shown a sticker under a particular chair in the model room, for example, they can go straight to the “same” chair in the other room. This is the fundamental understanding required to read maps.

Adults see scale models and maps as representations. Maps represent a town or a country. A scale model of, say, the Eiffel Tower represents the real thing. At first, Martin suspected children’s ability to use scale models is more evidence of understanding representation at this age.

He was wrong. Instead, the researchers found that this ability is based on a development in children’s spatial abilities that also occurs at about four. This is the ability to think about spaces and where objects are within them. Spatial abilities help with maths skills, and good spatial ability is linked to an interest in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

Their experiment was simple. They compared the model room task with a test of understanding how representation works. The two abilities develop around the same age, but they found they were not related. Children who could do one task couldn’t necessarily do the other.

They also had a test of purely spatial ability. Children who passed the model room task also passed the spatial task. So it looks like the model room task relied on children‘s spatial thinking.

They don’t yet know why two important but apparently unrelated abilities arise at the same time. Perhaps it’s related to changes in the growing brain at this interesting age.

Provided by The Conversation.

Image supplied by Freepik.