How Do You Teach Kids to Pay Attention?
Children can be taught how to cut through the culture of distraction.
As well, evidence is mounting that our powers of attention can be bolstered and even attention deficits can be remedied. Using computer-based, behavioral, and meditative practices, scientists are boosting people’s powers of focus, awareness, and memory — and measuring the gains using new barometers of attentional prowess. The implications of these discoveries are revolutionary.
Inspired by skills training of monkeys, Michael Posner and Mary Rothbart at the University of Oregon have developed a five-day computer-based attention-training program for young children. After the training, six-year-olds show a pattern of activity in the anterior cingulate — a banana-shaped brain region that is ground zero for executive attention — similar to that of adults, along with a slight IQ boost and a marked gain in executive attention.
“We thought this was a long shot, maybe we’ll see some improvement and maybe we won’t,” says Posner, a neuroscientist renowned for his pioneering work deciphering attention. “Now I’ve changed my mind.” Inspired by their and others’ findings, he and Rothbart, a child development expert, are calling on schools to teach attention as an early learning discipline.
The second main avenue of work involves attention-training practices that are part of the 2,500-year-old practice of meditation. A subfield of neuroscience has been studying contemplatives’ brains for years, mainly in the realm of emotion and mood. But now leading scientists are beginning to show that, as practitioners long have claimed, even short doses of meditation can train attention.
Preliminary results from the largest attention-training study to date, which tracked 64 people meditating full-time for three months, reveal improved sustained attention and visual discrimination, says UC Davis neuroscientist Clifford Saron. After an eight-week introductory course in meditation, novices showed robust gains in focus skills, according to a 2007 study by Amishi Jha. As well, the gains showed intriguing evidence of carryover to a kind of focus distinct from the mindful breathing training. “If you spend thirty minutes a day and it makes a difference in your quality of attention, that is powerful,” says Jha.
Alarmed by many children’s inability to focus deeply on learning, dozens of schools across the country now have introduced some kind of mindful awareness practices and training into the classroom.
Such educational work is crucial because attention is an “overlooked” set of skills that are crucial for 21st-century success, says Ellen Galinky, president of the Families and Work Institute. “We all live in an overwhelming, overstimulating, information-overloaded world,” says Galinsky. “And unless you can pay attention, you can’t think, you can’t problem-solve, you can’t learn. It’s an underlying skill that is to me front and center to success at work, and at home.”
U.S. employers, parents, and educators are beginning to tally the costs of an inattentive culture. Neuroscientists are uncovering how attention can be bolstered. Could attention training, along with computer literacy and new forms of social collaboration, become the backbone of a 21st-century education?
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Maggie Jackson is an award-winning author and journalist. Her latest book is Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age.
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16 Comments
1. michele:Racing from activity to activity, families have little time to sit down to eat, to converse, or to be in the same room. They have no time to be together in the deepest sense of the word.
Perhaps that is the crux of the problem right there. Children today are overscheduled and overburdened with extracurricular activities. They go from school to soccer to karate to Boy Scouts. Weekends are more of the same; dance recitals, little league, birthday parties. There is very little down time, very little time spent alone, or just as a family, and very little quiet time.
I don’t understand the need for parents to put their kids into every available sport and activity. I see this with my nephew, who is only seven. Of course he is having trouble paying attention in school – he can barely focus because he’s exhausted. I don’t know if it is competitiveness or the mistaken belief that kids need to be busy every second of the day that makes parents do this. Either way, I think it is adding to the “Why can’t Johnny pay attention” epidemic.
That said, I do think you can teach kids to focus and pay more attention with the stated methods. My daughter has some focusing issues as a result of OCD, and meditation type exercises have helped her become an excellent student and a better problem solver.
Jul 29, 2008 - 2:35 am 2. Patrick Poole:Maggie makes an important point about overload. Dr. Richard Swenson’s book, “Margin: Restoring Emotional, Physical, Financial, and Time Reserves to Overloaded Lives”, brought this home to me when I first read it several years ago. He makes the case that living our lives without any margin for long lengths of time will eventually result in medical issues. A must-read book (along with Maggie’s!).
Jul 29, 2008 - 4:03 am 3. Joanna:Another disturbing phenomenon that goes with this is the “No one should ever be bored by anything, ever” idea that gets thrown about in the media (particularly advertising). One example was a radio ad for an amusement park. It featured a mom lugging her kids around on errands and having them get progressively more bored and whiny. Then the announcer said (in essence), “Why bother with all that boring stuff when you could be at Six Flags?” The unspoken message was that if a task isn’t just positively riveting, you owe it to yourself to ditch it and find something fun to do. Part of paying attention is self-discipline (I know; I have severe ADHD and I only control it through hard work), and if self-discipline goes out the window, then paying attention becomes a strictly optional activity, relegated only to those things that interest a person. Good luck balancing your checkbook with that behavior pattern in place.
I guess another reason that commercial rankled me was that when I was a kid, my mom kept a tote bag full of puzzles and games in the car for us. If we got bored, we did a word jumble or we played with whoever was in the back seat with us. “Mom, I’m bored!” wasn’t a very productive statement in my house growing up.
Jul 29, 2008 - 7:24 am 4. Bugs:When I was a kid, they taught us how to pay attention by…oh, look! A squirrel!
Jul 29, 2008 - 7:35 am 5. Cletus:My TV is on all the time, usually with me in front of it. It has been this way since I was young. If anything, this has given me the skills to effortlessly drown out any unwanted distractions. Someone could fire a machine gun next to my head and I could keep doin whatever I was doin.
Jul 29, 2008 - 10:02 am 6. Concerned Citizen:Sorry, I couldn’t read this article all the way through, I got two emails, a phone call, and my daughter is pulling on my sleeve.
Jul 29, 2008 - 10:35 am 7. Night Owl:Interesting. Reading your piece brought me back to the quotes from autistic children in the PJM piece on autism by Katherine Berry.
From her piece:
- We know, in the words of one little girl who emerged from her world of silence, that for those with autism, “reality hurts.” Their condition is not merely “all in their heads”; one autistic girl who’s learned to use a laptop for communication describes it as “a million ants are crawling up my arms.” -
Our culture is more frenetic than ever. And more kids than in past times appear to have attention deficits, some level of autism, or are hyperactive. A correlation is not necessarily indicative of causation, but it can be food for thought.
For example- We know that too little stimulation is detrimental to the developing mind of infants. For the more sensitive children- are we going too far in the other direction? How do we determine the proper amount? Are our higher stress levels being picked up by youngsters? Stress causes many medical maladies. Is it a stretch to think that too much might have a negative impact on the emotional development of some children?
Certainly a thought provoking and timely topic.
Jul 29, 2008 - 11:29 am 8. Night Owl:BTW- I am not a mental health specialist, so please do not give my off the cuff speculations above any more attention than they deserve- which is probably none.
I certainly meant no disrespect to families dealing with ADD or Autism.
Jul 29, 2008 - 11:57 am 9. John Moore:Perhaps we should build schools with no windows, so the kids wouldn’t be distracted…
Oops… we’ve been doing that for a while now, and the prisoners err kids are revolting, so we label them hyperactive and drug them.
Jul 29, 2008 - 9:35 pm 10. Learning to pay attention at Joanne Jacobs:[...] Paying attention is a lost art in our noisy, jumbled, hyperactive age, writes Maggie Jackson on Pajamas Media. We’ve forgotten how to single task. [...]
Jul 30, 2008 - 4:18 am 11. Stacy:In prior generations, mom’s stayed home with their children, kindergarten was half day, and the expectation at the elementary level were pretty basic. We keep upping the amount of time our kids spend in controlled environments, like schools, daycare and activities. Why should they pay attention? They know that every 40 minutes or so some bell or whistle will blow and they’ll be onto the next, possibly unrelated, task. And, when they’re not in these environments, they’re plugged into some electronic device via TV, computers or video games, where they DO train their attention.
Jul 30, 2008 - 7:19 am 12. Mary:It is very surprising to observe what we are teaching our kids. I am with Joanna here – that ad would disturb me as well. There is a lot to be said for getting things done and being creative as it helps kids and adults alike to have a sense of self worth and accomplishment. That takes discipline. Most of the activities that I see kids involved in do not help with communication skills but isolate them.
John makes some good points about schools and drugging our kids – did anyone stop to take a look at who is running our school systems? I’m pretty sure it is the drug companies promoting their drugs to “help” our kids.
Jul 31, 2008 - 2:42 pm 13. Wednesday morning links « Casting Out Nines:[...] importance of teaching kids to pay attention, over against the phenomenon of “multitasking”. Lord knows I’m trying to do this [...]
Aug 6, 2008 - 4:41 am 14. The Sound of Silence « Primoris Res:[...] 25, 2008 This story, How Do you Teach Kids to Pay Attention, appeared in Pajamas [...]
Aug 25, 2008 - 11:34 pm 15. Brad Ovenell-Carter:For two years now, I’ve scheduled so-called Silent School mornings, several times a year. After our morning announcements, the whole school goes quiet. No one speaks a word and the doors to the office are closed so the students and staff aren’t interrupted by phone calls. All teaching is done silently–usually this means the students are working on projects and other works in progress. But I once had my grade 6 math class construct a huge 3′ x 5′ times table wall chart out of a hundred or so bits of coloured paper without anyone saying a word.
The first time we ran this was an odd experience in a school full of 11- to 14-year olds. Part way through the morning it started to snow and I thought all was lost. You could feel the students vibrate with excitement. But no one said a thing. At lunch they all walked down to our meeting room, quiet as monks and nuns, and waited for me to speak again.
The students loved the exercise: most said they could concentrate better and that they finished far more work than they usually do. I found they asked better questions because they had to think first before going to the trouble to write down their problem. Indeed, a significant number of students wanted a weekly Silent School day. We haven’t gone that far. Not yet.
Aug 27, 2008 - 6:22 pm 16. charlene chen:My son’s teacher, who said she taught for 37 years asked us to take our son to the pediatrician . She thinks drugs work. But this is the first time I heard of the short attention span she is talking about after the school starts this month. I asked her if there is other suggestions, but she just said “see a doctor”. My son can concentrate at other outside classromms, like chess, musci and foreign language. I questioned if the class is teaching something he already knows. She interruped me. From how the teacher talks, I can see she accepts no ideas other than her own: drugs.
Sep 25, 2008 - 8:34 am