Attention spans vary by age. If you are worried that your child’s attention is too short, take a look at the age-appropriate attention spans below:
2 years old: 4 to 6 minutes
4 years old: 8 to 12 minutes
6 years old: 12 to 18 minutes
8 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
Here is an article that further details the activities children engage in by age, alone and in a group. It also explains how you can support your child’s healthy development.
Your child needs adequate sleep to focus and maintain attention. And that amount of sleep depends upon their age.
Sleep is necessary for “selective attention.” Selective attention is the ability to focus on specific information when other things are occurring at the same time.
Sleep is also essential for working memory, long-term memory, and decision-making.
You can make sure your child gets enough sleep by following these age-appropriate sleep guidelines.
Adequate sleep according to the Sleep Foundation:
Newborns (0-3 months): 14-17 hours each day
Infants (4-11 months): 12-15 hours
Toddlers (1-2 years): 11-14 hours
Preschoolers (3-5): 10-13 hours
School-age children (6-13): 9-11 hours
Teenagers (14-17): 8-10 hours
Younger adults (18-25): 7-9 hours
Here are some more resources on sleep if you want to dive deeper into the topic:
I had to quit multi-tasking. The final straw was the night I had to stop myself from spinning — literally.
I was making chili, watching my favorite sitcom, answering emails, AND doing laundry. It’s a wonder I didn’t end up with socks in my chili, screaming ”Hey Siri!” at my TV and wondering why it didn’t respond.
I gripped the counter tightly, took a deep breath, and reread the recipe out loud three times to reconnect with my body and refocus.
How about you? Do you ever find yourself or your kids spinning out of control from a multi-tasking frenzy?
My clients do. It’s hard for them to sustain attention on one activity, let alone complete it. This revs up stress and causes a perpetual state of frustration. That’s no way to live!
The good news is that anyone can quit multi-tasking and shift into sustained attention. It simply takes practice focusing on a single task. Even better news — a little more focus goes a long way.
Here are some tips and tricks to set you, or your kids, up for success:
Resist the urge to start more than one task simultaneously. Even if you’re waiting for a file to load, a paper to print, or you’re put on hold (again!). Sometimes you have to go slow to go fast.
In a single task, use the small moments between steps to pause, breathe deeply, and maybe take a sip of water. Mindfulness can calm your anxiety and increase focus.
Acknowledge and reward the feat of completing tasks you don’t like.
Time yourself doing activities you hate. They’re probably faster than you think, and that knowledge will help you break through resistance.
You can repair your brain after sleep deprivation, stress, and multi-tasking with mindfulness. It has been shown to grow the grey matter in your brain!
(Did you know that multi-tasking actually thins the SAME part of your brain that you need to focus!?!)
Here are 5 Free Mindfulness Apps to try to repair your brain:
I recently met with a student who was feeling under a lot of pressure. Let’s call her Cindy. She had multiple quizzes and tests coming up at school. She was trying to juggle studying with her regular nightly homework. Plus, she had a few missed assignments she was still trying to complete. In between all that, she had family obligations that were making her free time scarce.
Cindy had so much swirling around in her mind that she just worked on whatever came to the forefront first. This only relieved her stress for a moment. Then, all the other items on her to-do list came flooding back in and increased her stress levels and resistance.
It’s safe to say she was overwhelmed.
In this week’s installment of our 6-part series: Time Management Skills to Help You & Your Child Today, we’re going to take a look at working memory and time management. I’ll show you how they helped stressed-out Cindy gain control over her to-do list.
I like to think of working memory as a whiteboard in the front of your brain. It’s where you hold onto a variety of information while working through your day. Once you use information in your working memory, you can release it and move on to the next piece of information. However, if your brain is not well-trained to stay focused, (i.e. you start and stop a lot of projects), you will be holding in your working memory your entire ‘to do’ list for the day. Not a good use of anyone’s time.
So the first thing “Cindy” and I did was use our session time to prioritize all of her tasks. Then we began by taking action on the things she could get done right away. These were tasks that only took about two minutes to complete. Things like sending an email to a teacher to ask a question about an upcoming assignment or connecting with a fellow student about a project.
Once these quick tasks were off her list, she didn’t need to hold them in her memory anymore.
Next, we took a look at the other tasks that required more time. And then we pulled out a calendar to reference. I asked Cindy, “When are you going to schedule those tasks so you can get them done by their due dates? Where are the holes in your day? Free time you can set aside to get these tasks done?”
These questions are the crux of time management.
For middle school and high school students, their projects are typically due in a relatively short period of time. So this process of scheduling involves thinking through the immediate future to find the times when they can plug in extra tasks around their daily homework schedule.
Once you have a complete schedule, the next step is to organize it in a visual way. Online calendars are great tools, but if you’re struggling with time management, having your plan open in front of you as much as possible is a better way to ensure all tasks will get done, on time.
Time is an abstract, vague concept, so with a planner, you have a tangible record of your time, making it easier to track and manage.
In addition, the physical act of writing information down is shown to increase your chances of committing it to memory (and following through) as well.
Plus, you don’t want to be constantly checking your phone for assignments! Especially if you’re someone who is easily distracted while working or studying.
As you can see, working memory and time management are two critical skills in terms of executive functioning. They keep your student, just like Cindy, on task. This way, they’ll be able to manage everything and anything that needs to get done each day, without feeling panicked or stressed.
For the next installment of our 6-part series: Time Management Skills to Help You & Your Child Today, we’re going to focus on goal-directed persistence and sustained attention, which in simpler words means skills that help you to stay focused. These skills are essential for students to stay on topic, especially during long work periods, and to finish a long-term goal.
With so many distractions around them – screens big and small, multitasking multiple subjects, extracurricular clubs and sports, etc. – students tend to have trouble keeping their attention focused on what they’re working on, even if they don’t have a diagnosis of ADHD.
I can relate! Wondering if you can too? Do you notice, as I do, that you’ll often have a variety of unfinished tasks going at once as a way to distract yourself from doing the items you dislike doing? I notice (in myself and my students) that we struggle to finish one project before we’re pulled into another. It takes a concerted effort (and much practice!) to stick with one task to completion. It’s increasingly difficult to stay focused in our busy technological age, so these are skills we all need to practice and strengthen.
So, let’s dive into our fancy-schmancy-sounding terms and how they can help your child (and even you) with your time management.
Goal Directed Persistence
We see goal-directed persistence appear often in sports, academic achievement, and personal development, for example, being better at keeping in touch with friends. You have a goal, and in order to ensure that you see that goal through from start to finish, not only do you need systems in place to support you, but you also need to exercise consistent determination and focus throughout.
For example, if your daughter’s softball team wants to compete for the championship this season, everyone on her team needs to show up to every practice and give their all during every practice. Any shortcomings on the field need to be improved, both individually and with the team as a whole.
Perhaps your daughter is not the best batter. She’ll need to work every week to improve those skills specifically, in addition to regular practice. She might even need to spend some time going to the batting cages or working with a pitcher/trainer.
These extra steps require persistence until the goal is achieved. Visually documenting these goals, i.e. keeping track of her progress on a whiteboard, on her bedroom wall can help to keep her consistently focused on her progress, as the championship game approaches.
Sustained Attention
It’s entirely possible to go through the motions of working toward your goal without moving the needle any closer to the end result you desire. To prevent you (or your child) from just going through the motions of studying (without any real understanding of the material), you’ll want to study in a way that not only works with your learning style, but also makes it more likely you’ll be better equipped to recall the information later. This is where sustained attention comes in…making sure you keep your eyes on the prize and are working in ways that sustain and enrich your progress towards a specific goal.
For example, let’s say your son is studying for an important chemistry exam that’s happening tomorrow. We can all agree it’s not the greatest idea for him to be texting with a friend simultaneously. It would be best for him to be creating flashcards with the vocabulary and asking you (or a friend) to quiz him, i.e. engaged in only one task that has him actively engaged with the material.
Or if he’s studying with a peer, each of the students has to work to ensure the conversation stays focused on the subject matter, not what happened in school that day or their weekend plans. In other words, keeping the task in mind and finding ways to stay focused and appropriately absorb the material for later retrieval, perhaps by writing test questions for each other.
Timers are an effective tool to utilize in these types of situations. For example, you could employ the Pomodoro Technique. Set the timer for 25 minutes of study. When the timer goes off, it’s time for a 5-minute break, stretch, quick text, or to get a snack. Then, when that 5-minute timer goes off, it’s back to the books. It also helps to be in a place that’s conducive to studying, where there are no distractions like TV, video games or other loud conversations. You want to be somewhere comfortable, however, not so comfortable that you could zone out or take a nap. 😉
I hope you found these new terms helpful so that you and your child can start thinking about how to better focus on the task at hand and achieve your short and long-term goals.
What systems and tools have you used in the past to help you or your child stay focused on their goals? What questions do you have about how to fine-tune these practices?
Be sure to let me know how it goes by posting a comment in our Facebook community, My Learning Link. You’ll also connect with other like-minded parents and educators who support children who struggle with learning. You can access helpful videos and posts, share resources, and participate in live Q&As inside this group. The goal is to support you as you work with your children and students.
