It is essential to address children’s attention spans as it has a great impact on their day-to-day activities, education and relationships. Kids have short attention spans, after all. But when do you know if your child’s inattention is an issue that needs to be addressed?
Having age-appropriate expectations about attention spans will help you understand and improve your child’s ability to maintain focus.
Childhood development experts generally say that a reasonable attention span to expect of a child is two to three minutes per year of their age. That’s the period of time for which a typical child can maintain focus on a given task. Here is what an average attention spans looks like:
Two years old: four to six minutes
Four years old: eight to 12 minutes
Six years old: 12 to 18 minutes
Eight years old: 16 to 24 minutes
10 years old: 20 to 30 minutes
12 years old: 24 to 36 minutes
14 years old: 28 to 42 minutes
16 years old: 32 to 48 minutes
17 years old: 34 to 51 minutes
18 years old: 36 to 54 minutes
However, there are ways to improve your child’s attention span to help him increase focus and his ability to complete tasks. They are:
Include breaks – A child can often focus better when they are able to take short breaks to relieve the stress of trying to pay attention. Give them an opportunity to have a break that includes some kind of physical activity or play that can help to release tension.
Make an activity fun – Something that is fun for your child will be more interesting to them and therefore they will pay more attention simply because they want to participate. Get creative in how you present activities to your child so that they find the activities more enjoyable and are able to stay focused on what you are doing with them for a longer period of time.
Remove distractions – If you are able to remove visual or auditory distractions from the area in which a child is working, it is so much easier to retain their attention.
Have a special area where they do their lessons or their work. Try to do more complex tasks with your child in an area that is free of their toys or media items such as tablets or televisions.
Demonstrate good attention skills- It is so easy as parents for us to be so distracted that we don’t listen very well to our children or we are managing multiple tasks at a time. It is important for us to take the time when we are asking our children to focus and demonstrate that we too are able to focus and put our full attention on the present activity. Sometimes this means we have to forgo taking a phone call, put our phone down, turn the television off, or sit with our child and exercise patience and focus.
