Some time ago, I sorted out everyone's consultation message about "what to do if the child's concentration is too poor", and then found a very interesting phenomenon, that is, everyone is anxious about the child's concentration, most of which begins when the child enters the kindergarten and participates in multi-person learning (such as attending an interest class).
Why is the timing of anxiety so similar?
I believe that there is a key word that has a great influence on it - comparison, when the child enters kindergarten or attends some interest classes, "being compared" becomes inevitable, because these places often have the following two elements:
Many other people's children
Do something with other children
Once the child enters the collective life, he will be exposed to many children of the same age, and will often be asked to participate in the same thing together, such as drawing, taking classes, reading picture books, etc. At this time, it is easy to see a phenomenon: the same teacher teaches, the same is learning to draw, the age is the same, why other people's children have been very focused, on my children looking around, small actions continuously?
At this time, coupled with the teacher's "observation feedback" to fuel the waves, the child is likely to mention a "poor concentration" label, and even suspected of ADHD.
And even if you put aside the blessings of the school and the teacher, as the child grows up slowly and faces the early rise, our focus on the child will be more and more focused on the aspect related to learning, at this time, as long as the child is found to twist the body during the online class, the eyes are fluttering when reading the picture book, or there are small movements when doing practice questions, it is easy to conclude: the child's concentration is not good.
What is even more miraculous is that when we have this conclusion, when we look at the child again, if there is divine help, we can casually find evidence of the child's poor concentration.
But in fact, whether the child's concentration is good or bad, it really can't be judged by "seeing", let alone by our subjective assumptions.
So how to judge a child's concentration? Is there any scientific basis?
Judge the child's concentration
It can be measured in two ways
The first thing we want to make clear is that concentration is a skill, not a natural quality. Since it is a skill, there must be a level of high and low, and each child's performance in this regard will certainly vary from person to person.
In addition, the level of children's concentration is determined by congenital factors and acquired factors, while the brain of preschool children is still developing, and the level of concentration is unstable, but when judging the level of concentration, there are theoretically two dimensions to refer to.
Time
Children's concentration is related to the degree of neurodevelopment of the brain, so the duration of concentration will increase with age. Although there is no exact accepted standard for how long a child should be focused on a few years old, it is certain that the younger the child, the shorter the focus time.
The following is the data given by a Canadian research institute on children's behavioral development, you can refer to it.
*Source: speechtherapycentres.com
However, it should be noted that this data is the length of time that the child focuses on when carrying out the project he is interested in, and if it is something that the child is not interested in, the length of time he can focus on will be much lower than this.
At the same time, from the above table, it is not difficult to see that children of the same age in the time of concentration, the fluctuation range is still relatively large, we can not because a three-year-old child read a picture book for 15 minutes, and another three-year-old child only read 6 minutes, it is determined that the child who reads 6 minutes is too poor concentration.
continuity
The English word for concentration is "attention", derived from the Latin "attendere", which originally means "forward", which we can also understand as "continuity".
Another criterion for judging the strength of the child's concentration is the continuity of doing things, that is, whether the child can continue to return to the original thing after being disturbed by the external environment or internal factors, and quickly put into it, in other words, the degree of seriousness.
For example, when building blocks, children are easily attracted to other toys (external environment) or give up immediately because the blocks are overturned (internal factors), which may mean that the child is not fully involved in building blocks.
However, we must not ignore that children themselves are more susceptible to external interference, and it is easy to give up when encountering difficulties in the process of doing things, which is an important feature of young children's development, so even if the continuity of children's concentration is not ideal at present, it cannot be judged that the child's concentration is poor, but it is only a way to measure concentration.
Therefore, although the child's concentration can be "quantified" with time and continuity, everything in the child is still developing, and it is certainly inappropriate to draw conclusions to the child one-sidedly and prematurely, but concentration is a skill after all, and the exercise and cultivation of the day after tomorrow is also very important for the child.
So how to cultivate it?
The first step in developing your child's concentration
Do not "destroy" the child's concentration
For preschool children with normal brain function development, they are actually born with concentration, such as many small babies, especially like to stare at a certain thing such as a bedbell, a look at a long time, which is a manifestation of children's concentration.
And many studies have found that if a child's spontaneous behavior (the child can follow the inner drive of life to do what he wants) is free to develop and protect from the moment of birth, they can achieve long-term concentration on what interests them.
Therefore, in terms of cultivating preschool children's concentration, many parenting experts (such as Montessori) have particularly emphasized the importance of giving children freedom, that is, allowing children to focus on things they are interested in, because only if children first maintain the innate concentration development, subsequent concentration training will be more effective because of the "foundation".
The reason why we "can't see" the child's innate concentration is that many times it is only because we think that serious study is the manifestation of concentration. But putting aside this concept, we will find that preschoolers have their own natural interests, such as some children like a variety of cars, some children like to draw, and some children like to study animals, etc. When children are involved, they are actually exercising their concentration.
Therefore, in a sense, in order to cultivate the concentration of preschool children, parents must first protect the child's own concentration development.
But in fact, due to our parents' limited understanding of "concentration", many times in an unconscious state, we will destroy the child's natural opportunity to develop concentration.
In this regard, I also helped you summarize three kinds of "sabotage behaviors" that need to be paid attention to in our daily parenting process, which you can refer to.
1
Do not disturb attentive children
We parents often have a misconception about preschoolers, that is, if the child is not learning, it is okay to disturb the child's state.
For example, the child is obviously very serious about building blocks, but we want to call the child to eat fruit and drink milk; the child is drawing seriously, we have to go over and ask the child with concern, what are you drawing; or the child is playing with toys, we suddenly want to play with the child and immediately join in, and even regardless of the desire to "help" and take the opportunity to "early education".
These behaviors are considered harmless to many adults, and may only be done out of "kindness", but it cannot be denied that for a child who is concentrating on his "work", the uninvited and sudden intervention of others is a kind of disturbance and an interruption of his own concentration.
And this interruption not only deprives children of the opportunity to develop and exercise their own concentration, but also deprives children of the experience of independent exploration and problem solving. In the long run, the child's concentration is likely to be affected.
So in this regard, we parents should be clear that concentration is a skill, as long as the child is using this skill, then his concentration is being developed and exercised, and we casually disturb the child's behavior, which may destroy the child's concentration.
After all, for preschoolers in the exploratory period, any activity they engage in is essentially a kind of "learning."
2
Do not create too much external environmental stimulation for the child
For the child's concentration observation, we may have experienced such a scene: the child was originally quietly doing the things in his hands, if the adult played the mobile phone at this time to open a video, then the child is likely to be immediately attracted by the sound, quickly drop the matter in hand to find out.
Or, the child reads the picture book alone and reads very attentively, at this time, if the adults chat too loudly, or there are sudden guests at home, the child will immediately drop the book and start looking.
At this time, many of our parents can't help but blame their children: they are not focused at all, and a little movement can be affected.
The behavior of children in these scenarios is actually a very typical reflection of the young children's low resistance to external environmental interference. But this is not to blame the child, and it is not evidence of the child's poor concentration. On the contrary, it is very much in line with the characteristics of the child's concentration at this stage: the attention is extremely unstable.
And so far, psychologists have believed that the attention span of three- and four-year-olds is unstable. Children at this age will be attracted to what they see and hear, so their attention will continue to shift, and it is difficult to concentrate on an object (which also shows from the side that the moment when the child devotes himself to concentration is very rare, do not destroy it at will). Although they are developing "intentional attention", "unintentional attention" still exists and has a certain advantage.
This is actually very common in young babies, such as holding the baby into a room full of toys, and the baby plays with the toy for a while, nibbles on the toy for a while, and has no intention of exploring one.
Therefore, for how to cultivate children's concentration, some psychologists have proposed to create a weak interference environment for children, "only if children have the ability to focus in a quiet and simple environment, it is possible to develop high-order concentration resistance to interference."
As the saying goes, "Words are not as good as teaching by example, and teaching by example is not as good as teaching by example (environmental education)."
So instead of blaming the child who is doing homework and being distracted and poorly focused because the rest of the family is watching TV, it is better to simply turn off the TV and be in a quiet environment with the child.
It has to be said that for children whose concentration is still developing, an orderly, quiet, and relatively simple environment is very beneficial to the child's concentration. What we have to do is to minimize the interference with the child's concentration and understand the development characteristics of the child who is easily disturbed.
3
Allow your child to complete the experience from beginning to end
Usually, everyone may have encountered such a situation, that is, when the child does something he likes, he often invests too much time and refuses to end it easily, such as building up wood at home, reading a detective story book, or piling a castle in a sand pool, if we do not remind, the child will continue to continue.
But seeing the planned time to go out, sleep or go home, shouldn't we interrupt them at this time?
Let's start with a look at the inappropriate approach.
A more common way of dealing with it is to use the "distraction" method, that is, to attract the child through other things, so as to achieve the purpose of terminating the child's behavior. For example, through delicious things, more fun things to induce children to abandon the current things.
This kind of quick-acting method of diverting attention is very effective in many cases, because children are naturally curious, their attention is unstable, and they will be "bought" by parents every minute.
There is also a way to deal with it, that is, the parents can't help but say, directly and simply and rudely force the child to end the matter at hand, even if the child is very reluctant, he also feels that "making a little mood" is good.
But in fact, in both ways, the child's concentration is a kind of harm, because concentration is a continuous cognitive activity, once the child's attention is often interrupted, the child's ability to maintain concentration will also become weaker.
Each of us, in fact, from birth, has an innate psychological tendency in our hearts: we like to do things "with a beginning and an end". It is also this innate obsession that naturally motivates us to actively develop concentration, which is understood as "innate internal drive".
The seemingly easy to use "distraction" and rough termination method is an internal loss for the child, the child can not get spiritual satisfaction, over time, in addition to the destruction of concentration, its "beginning and end" obsession will slowly weaken.
So how do you remind your child to stop the activity while protecting your child's concentration?
In this regard, everyone can set an "end point" with the child before putting into what they like, such as the end of the building block when it is built into a certain shape, the detective story reads a chapter to stop, the English animation can only watch one episode a day, etc., which is a target endpoint, when the child is completed, even if it means everything, it is still a complete experience process of "beginning and end" for the child.
For the case that there is no end point set in advance, but the child is very engaged, we can try to observe the child's state when he is engaged in activities, try not to interfere with the child under the child's extremely concentrated state of self-forgetfulness (that is, flow), but wait until the child's attention is loose, and then remind.
Or terminate when the child takes the initiative to seek help, and then terminate it after solving the problem with the child.
These methods can well protect the child's concentration, let the child get a complete and satisfying experience process, and also help cultivate the habit of "beginning and end" of children's work.
Well, here's what I want to share with you about concentration.
Note that this discussion is mostly aimed at preschoolers. At this stage, due to the immature development of their brains, the easy diversion of attention is a very typical growth characteristic of them, but many times we misunderstand that the child is "poor concentration".
In fact, children have been spontaneously "developing their own concentration" since infancy, which is manifested in the fact that when doing what they like, it is particularly easy to invest and focus, and it can be maintained for a long time.
Of course, in areas that they are not interested in, children are less willing to use their concentration skills, which is actually the same for us adults.
Based on this point of view, judging the child's concentration by "comparing with other people's children" is obviously not appropriate, after all, everyone's interests and hobbies are different.
Therefore, at this stage, instead of spending energy to exercise children to focus on things they are not interested in, we should pay more attention to avoiding the behaviors that we accidentally make in our daily lives that destroy the child's concentration, do a good job in this step, let the child's own development of concentration be protected, lay a good foundation, and some subsequent improvement exercises will be easier and more effective.
Today's article is here first, about concentration, if you have other questions or want to add to share, welcome to leave a message in the comment area Oh ~
bibliography:
1. "Family Education Practical Manual - Let the Child Be Himself" by Robert Keith Wallace, Frederick Travis, Wu Xiaoling
2. "Mindfulness Training that Benefits Children for a Lifetime" by Rui Caiqin
3. "21 Tricks, Let Children Be Independent" by Ye Zhuang
4. "Children's Concentration Training Method" by Lin Chengzhi
5. Whole Brain Parenting: 12 Revolutionary Strategies for Expanding Children's Minds by Daniel Siegel
6. "Children's Concentration Training" Author: Wind Shadow
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