Parents today realize that education and learning are important part of a child’s development. Psychologists argue that in the first 6 years of life, young children have incredible potential to absorb and process information, and as such more parents are spending time with their children in learning activities like reading, writing, singing and drawing.
Many parents share the same concern about the struggles they face in teaching their children due to their children’s limited attention spans. Some children would lose interest in their reading and writing work after only 10 minutes. Some could not sit still to listen to a story for more than 5 minutes, but at the same time, they could spend many hours silently watching cartoons on television.
Dr Goh, a Cognitive Development Psychologist said that it is normal for a young child, aged 2-6 to have limited attention spans. Most young children, by nature, are extremely energetic and active, always on the lookout out for new and exciting experiences. These high levels of energy are a good thing, as they enable learning, but they can also mean that the child may get bored quickly if a learning activity is not engaging or interesting.
The following are some things we as parents can do to help keep our children’s attention when they are learning:
The Right Time
Firstly choose a time when the child is most alert and ready to absorb information. Most children are the most alert in the morning from about 9:00am to 11:00am, in the late afternoon after 5:00pm and at night. Of course, each individual child has unique rhythms and parents should be observant about when your child is most awake and active.
The key principle here is not to try to teach your child something new and challenging when they are tired and drowsy.
Short and Sweet
Secondly, make the learning activities short and sweet. For children below 5 years old, each session should not last more than 30 minutes and for children who are 5-6 years old it should not last more than 40 minutes.
Parents should be particularly mindful of the length of sessions when difficult tasks are involved. For example when a child is learning to write for the first time, or when a child is learning to read the alphabet for the first time, we must appreciate that there is a lot of mental effort required to absorb this new information. As such, a short and more intense learning session would be more effective than a long drawn session that will eventually tire the child.
Some parents argue that young children should be trained to stretch their attention to prepare for school sessions that last 4 to 5 hours. We must bear in mind though, that school sessions are also divided into 40 minute periods; which means that children are not learning the same subject for more than 40 minutes.
However, we can and should train our young children to gradually extend their attention spans. We can start with very short learning sessions (of less than 20 minutes) for our 2-3 year olds and slowly extend this as they grow older.
Engage, Engage, Engage
Thirdly, make the lessons interactive. The key to securing our children’s attention is to engage them and make them interested in what they are doing. The best way to get children interested is to make them active learners rather than passive learners.
A child should learn by doing (active learning), rather than just by listening (passive learning). A good lesson will involve talking, listening, drawing, making things and lots of moving around.
Most bookshops have excellent learning activity books that parents can use for their home lessons. These books are divided into individual sessions and each session comprises of many learning activities from writing to coloring to story telling and even acting.
When learning becomes active and fun, we no longer need to fight to keep our child’s attention. Their attention will automatically be drawn to
Limit Television
Many developmental psychologists are discouraging parents from letting children below 3 years old watch television. The debate is still brewing, with some educationist saying that television helps expose children to lots of information and language in a short time and other educationist arguing that it encourages mindless passivity among children.
What I would suggest is that parents should limit the amount of television time for children below 6 years old, to no more than 90 minutes a day. To some extent television does encourage a more passive learning style and makes it difficult for teachers and parents to compete.
