How children can learn to concentrate better
Concentration is the ability to consciously focus your attention on one point, for example on a task or a person. Our brain performs an amazing feat in this process: it amplifies signals that emanate from the source on which we are focussing - and weakens others.
For example, if you meet someone in a crowded café, after a few moments you will almost exclusively hear this person and block out all other stimuli. If you were to record the same situation with a normal microphone, you would hardly understand anything due to all the background noise.
If you get enough sleep, exercise regularly and eat healthily, you can also focus better.
How well our brain is able to perform this task depends on many factors. Firstly, the stage of development: the older a child is, the longer and better it can focus. However, there are major individual differences. In children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), for example, this ability develops with a delay and not to the same extent.
Our habits also have an effect on our ability to concentrate: Those who get enough sleep, exercise regularly and eat a healthy diet can also focus better. However, we can also consciously train this ability and strengthen it in our children and pupils.
«Concentrate!», «Stop daydreaming!»: Children are repeatedly told this when they are unable to focus on something. This is rarely helpful and can lead to a self-fulfilling prophecy for some children, where they believe that they won't be able to concentrate anyway.
Concentrate on successful moments
Children who are easily distracted in particular benefit when we point out moments when they manage to focus on one thing: «You are very focussed right now.» This strengthens their self-efficacy: I can't always focus, but I always manage to do so. The children also notice how it feels to get involved in something and they feel more motivated by recognition than by negative feedback.
Especially with children who are less able to concentrate, I see time and again that they spend hours on homework, even in primary school. They often don't even take breaks, with the reasoning: «If I let the child take a break, I won't be able to get them to start again afterwards.»
However, children do not learn to consciously control their attention if we force them from the outside to constantly go beyond their limits. It is more helpful if we adapt the situation to the child. For example, a child with attention problems often makes faster progress with their homework if they work for three times ten minutes than if they sit in front of their exercise books for an hour without a break.
The child can consciously train themselves to focus on the task and then take a short break from it. As a parent, you can support them by asking them: «What do you want to achieve in the next ten minutes? Do you know how to solve the tasks? Are you ready? Go!» After ten minutes, you can take a short break - just two to three minutes. The child should not get involved in anything else, but simply let their mind wander for a moment by looking out of the window, going to the toilet, eating or drinking something small, listening to a song or moving around.
If children have to do homework for hours on end, they lose all motivation.
Don't let homework get out of hand
In primary school, homework contributes little to academic success. And for children with attention problems, it often does more harm than good. If children have to do homework for hours on end, they lose all motivation, are unable to relax enough and often work even less at school because they take much-needed breaks there.
Do not allow this to happen. If your child is spending far too long on homework, report this back to the teacher and ask for help. The vast majority of teachers do not want homework to take so long in primary school.
The following agreement is often helpful: Together with the teacher, it is agreed that the child may cancel the homework if he or she has worked on it with concentration for a certain amount of time. It could look like this: A third-grade child completes 30 minutes of homework. These 30 minutes are divided into three ten-minute sprints. Once the child has completed the work, the parents note «worked for 30 minutes» on the worksheet and the child is allowed to stop. Very often, children develop more motivation through this approach and work more quickly and with more focus.
Mindfulness training improves concentration
Several studies have now shown that mindfulness training can improve concentration - especially in children with attention problems. During mindfulness exercises, we practise exactly what concentration is all about: we focus on a single thing - for example, our breathing, a sound, the taste of a fruit or how our body feels. After a short time, our attention involuntarily wanders off.
Try it out, close your eyes and focus on your breathing. Don't think about anything else. How long does it take for the first distracting thought to pop up? Usually no longer than two or three seconds. In mindfulness training, you practise registering this and redirecting your attention back to this one thing. This trains what is known as meta-attention: the awareness of where your attention is at the moment in order to consciously redirect it.
Changes in the brain
After a few weeks of regular training, changes in the brain can even be detected using imaging techniques. The areas responsible for directing attention become more interconnected and even increase in size.
To get children involved in such exercises, it is often helpful to work with attractive models. In the book «Lotte, are you dreaming again?», which I wrote together with Stefanie Rietzler, the wise she-wolf Sakiba teaches Lotte the «wolf's eye view»: the ability to be completely in the here and now and to focus on one thing. Other children are more interested when they learn that mindfulness exercises were once practised by samurai in the form of Zen Buddhism in order to gain clarity, strength and focus, and are still practised in many martial arts today.
