Ye Zhuang’s 2014 Honorary Answer Member Privilege has unlocked a salt selection column worth ¥ 19.00. In recent years, I have paid close attention to the field of children’s concentration.
However, what I am concerned about is not the gimmicky “concentration” in the early childhood education market, but something more solid. In every family, what have the children with different concentrations experienced.
In my opinion, if concentration is not a congenital factor such as genes, parents can take more than half of the blame.
In a 2014 report by the Pew Research Center, parents were still the most eager to see “conscientiousness” and “effort” in their children. But the more noteworthy data is that parents with a college degree are more concerned about whether their children have the advantage of “persistence” than those who did not go to college, and the intuitive manifestation of this advantage is long-term persistence and short-term focus.
I have also experienced that parents care about concentration.
As a practitioner in this field, I can always receive this kind of request for help from various channels: “Teacher, I think our child’s concentration is not good, what should I do?”?
He can’t calm down when he does anything. He doesn’t do things seriously. He learns things with a hammer here and a stick there.
How to improve children’s concentration?-Zhihu Page 1 of 8. If you want to improve children’s concentration, I’m afraid you shouldn’t start with buying books and lessons. You should start with parents themselves.
Because a child who is not focused enough often has an adult who always disturbs him.
This kind of thing happens to us all the time, because the existence of “next generation relatives” is especially common among the elderly at home: a child is concentrating on playing with toys, and suddenly an adult appears next to him with a bowl: “Come on, baby, eat something.”.
The child was reading the picture book intently, when suddenly an adult picked the child up and kissed him fiercely.
The child was doodling and drawing when suddenly an adult passed by and suddenly said, “Baby, what are you doing?”? When a
child is playing with a set of toys that an adult may not be willing to let him continue to play with, the adult will directly choose other toys to divert the child’s attention: “Baby, you see, you see, this is more fun and more interesting!” One of the most common examples is that when children are exploring certain places or doing something we don’t want them to do, some parents will choose to take their children away directly and take them to a new environment.
These scenes are interruptions to the child’s “concentration,” and the child is usually powerless and passive when he is subjected to such “interruptions.”.
How to improve children’s concentration?-Zhihu Page 2 of 8 Learning, Excuse me, what else can I do?
It didn’t keep him from doing his job.
Besides, some early education experts say that diversion is a good way to get children out of the current environment.
This is a very serious misunderstanding.
Concentration is a universal skill.
Playing the piano and writing calligraphy are not universal skills. Practicing the piano assiduously will not give children any extra points in learning programming. Learning calligraphy from famous teachers will not help children learn swimming too much.
At the same time, just because a child can’t play the piano doesn’t mean he can’t learn to program. Concentration, on the other
hand, is different. When you do something a, your concentration is negatively affected, and when you do something B, your concentration is not much better. Even though things a and B may be very different in form, they use the same ability at the level of “staying focused.”. If you disturb your child’s toys
today, you may be troubled by such problems as “my child can’t read” tomorrow.
“Concentration” is a cognitive activity, not an emotional experience, so the ability to tolerate “interruptions” is weaker.
If a child is expressing emotions, such as crying loudly because he wants to buy a toy immediately, or being extremely angry because he has a conflict with other children, it is often possible to improve his emotions by diverting his attention.
However, “concentration” is a continuous cognitive activity, and once attention is diverted, it often means being forced to interrupt.
This kind of passive interruption is very harmful to the maintenance and cultivation of concentration. It is easy to feel uncomfortable when a good thing is interrupted in the middle-it will directly affect a child’s ability to maintain attention, recover from interference, and whether there is a positive subjective experience in the process of concentration.
How to improve your child’s ability to concentrate?-Zhihu Page 3 of 8 You may know about short-term memory and long-term memory, and even about the hippocampus, a brain organization that plays an important role in memory. Working memory, on the
other hand, refers to the memory module that people call when they are engaged in advanced cognitive activities. We can simply understand it as the “desktop” on which we use computers at ordinary times. We can open several software and windows that serve the current work at the same time, and then start to work hard.
But some people’s computer is a little better, at the same time open more than a dozen software is not stuck, three months in a row do not need to restart, some people’s computer a little, open three web mouse does not move, but also at any time because of hardware overheating directly crash-this is the difference in working memory.
A person’s working memory is not good from capacity to endurance, and concentration will inevitably be affected.
Our children seem to be doing trivial things: playing with toys, flipping through books, and doing little doodles, as if it’s no big deal to interfere with them. But please remember that they seem relaxed and happy, but from a more macro perspective, these seemingly trivial things are just “work to do a good job.” The essence of “one must first sharpen one’s tools”. What challenges will our children face
if their concentration is constantly disturbed and they have little chance to rub their hands in the process of growing up? According to Matthew Edelen, PhD, author of
The Body Clock Advantage (Dr. MatthewEdlund, M. D.), frequent interruptions in the focus process have some negative effects that can’t be ignored. The ability to
learn is blocked.
At the moment when the interference disappears, it is impossible for people to return to the cognitive state of full load operation immediately. The duration of
interference may be very short, but the cognitive cost of interference will be very high.
Interference makes the level of concentration jump off a cliff. How to improve children’s concentration?-Zhihu Page 4 of 8.
The same hour of study, if there is a minute of interference, may have to pay more than 10 minutes of time cost. The negative effects of a
disturbance do not depend on the duration of the disturbance, but on the time it takes to recover from it to a state of concentration.
Because they lack the ability to focus in the short term and the ability to persist in the long term.
Playing with blocks, playing chess and telling stories are all short-term focuses.
But the vast majority of people’s long-term achievements are inseparable from long-term focus-such as writing a book, running a business, raising a child.
For some people and things we care about, we need to maintain long-term connection and attention, and if we are difficult to resist in a short-term task, let alone in a long-term task.
Lack of opportunities for peak experience.
We’ve all experienced some kind of peak experience-maybe through physical activity, maybe through video games, maybe through performing on stage.
We don’t have a peak experience while riding a bike and singing, because a peak experience usually requires a high enough level of cognitive activity to provide a platform for it.
Concentration is an important fuel for high cognitive activities.
Lack of concentration will directly lead to peak experience becoming a more rare luxury in life. Increased risk of
addiction and substance dependence.
“Come and eat,” “kiss,” and “more fun toys” may become the goal of parents to redirect their children’s concentration.
Admittedly, the stimulus of these interruptions is often strong-which makes our children more vulnerable to attractive interruptions and unable to stick to the task at hand. When
children are young, these distractions are harmless snacks and toys, but after puberty, these stimuli may not be so popular: video games, high-sugar drinks, pornographic videos.
How to improve children’s concentration?-Zhihu Page 5 of 8 The most basic thing is that when a child is concentrating on a cognitive activity, don’t disturb him easily. This is not only a parenting skill, but also a respect for the child. When
you are playing mahjong in high spirits, your wife calls, but you don’t want to answer it. When you are chatting happily with your best friend, your boss urges you to go back to the company to work overtime, and you will be unhappy. Even if you are checking your moments on the subway, and someone comes to ask you to scan his QR Code, you will be impatient. The same is true of our children.
We should give our children the right to choose what to do, and we should not deprive them of the rare opportunity to enjoy the present.
You can try to join him instead of interrupting him. The original intention of
some interference is actually very beautiful, such as the affectionate kiss of parents.
But compared with these, you might as well try to integrate into your child’s concentration situation, and even become an important helper for him to overcome the current problems.
Many parents’ interactions with their children are limited to “I do something for my child,” rather than extending to “I do something with my child.” The former can easily become an unnecessary interruption, while the latter, while not affecting the child’s concentration, is likely to further enhance your parent-child relationship.
Give your child a distraction-free space to focus.
Whether it’s a writing desk, a game mat, or a game table, it can be a space for concentration.
Tell children that in this space, they can do what they want to do without interference: play with toys, read, draw, and even be in a daze.
At the same time, the space should be as free as possible from the risk of distractions: the porch where people come and go, the TV, the kitchen where the fragrance wafts out.
Here, the child can safely focus on what he wants to do, but also provide a sense of boundaries for others: he does his own thing in his space, and we don’t bother him.
How to improve children’s concentration?-Zhihu Page 6 of 8 Timer (Our family is using Google Home now, because it can be voice-controlled, which is very convenient, but it will be a little troublesome if we want to use it in China).
When we need to go out or eat, and the child is still concentrating on his own thing, we will tell him verbally, such as “We will get dressed and go to Grandma’s house in ten minutes”, and do not expect any active response, and then set a timer for ten minutes.
Ten minutes later, the timer will go off on time and people will gather in the living room. Many times, my son will voluntarily finish what he is doing, get up and start communicating with us, and I will turn off the timer.
If he is still in a state of concentration, the continuous ringing of the timer will become a neutral interference instead of us, and we will take the initiative to interact with our children more than a minute after the ringing.
Judging from my family’s situation, the effect of doing so is still good, not only will the child not be in a bad mood because of the sudden interruption of concentration, but also will provide a relatively relaxed space for him to withdraw from concentration.
As parents, sometimes there is a risk of doing bad things with good intentions, such as disturbing our attentive children.
When we are aware of the risks and feel the trend, and when we want to cultivate our children’s concentration, perhaps we can first lower the priority of “spending money and attending classes.” Instead of thinking so much about “what I want to give my children,” we should first focus our thinking on ourselves: “What else do I need to change for my children?
“. Focus on not getting lost ~”
