Why Do Children Today Struggle With Concentration?
Being a child is not as easy and hustle-free as it seems. A plethora of distractions can make it extremely difficult for kids to focus on their studies, such as other kids laughing, a funny memory popping up in their mind, a heavy vehicle moving by on the road, some street-vendor’s call, or just the whistling of the pressure cooker in the kitchen. To add to all these, children today struggle with concentration for some more serious reasons such as the continuous exposure to digital screens in some form on the other, that continue to leave behind the mental impact even after the child has stopped looking at the screen. The average span of attention in kids nowadays has significantly diminished as a result of these distractions.
Often parents just scold the child for not being able to focus on studies, or the work they are doing at the moment. But if we dive a little deeper into the problem, we realise that it is often not the kid who is alone at fault. The circumstances and the surrounding environment, including the parents are most often responsible for the lack of concentration in toddlers. Let’s first look at how children actually develop the focus.
How Focus Develops in the Brain for Children
According to research studies, the child’s brain reaches 90% of the adult size between 0 to 6 years of age, and during this period, connections between brain cells (called synapses develop). These connections are largely influenced by the child’s parents and immediate guardians, the external environment and metabolic factors. The number of synapses reaches a peak and then start declining once the brain figures out which cells perform which tasks better and more efficiently.
Children start to develop the ability to focus on a particular task between the ages of 1 to 5 years, and the processes of focussing and understanding develop in parallel. During this phase, kids learn to make sense out of jumbled information that they imbibe from multiple sources around them, and select only a few items out of these that they act upon. Thus focus and concentration in children is a very complex mental development that should be shaped in the right way from the early stage.
6 Effective Ways To Help Your Child Focus
While parenting experts have time and again suggested different ways of developing focus and attention in children, we have tried to cover some of the most commonly suggested and effective ways to help your child focus.
Ensure Adequate Sleep For Child
To help your child build focus, you must ensure that they get at least 9 to 12 hours of sleep every day (though in relatively cold regions, 8 to 10 hours of sleep is usually enough for school-going children). For this, kids’ sleep cycle should be monitored, which includes following a bedtime routine, regular sleep schedule and timing, dietary regulations and physical exercise. Limiting usage of screens just before sleep, using less bright lights in the living rooms a few hours before sleep time, maintaining ambient room temperature to a pleasure level, keeping the bedroom dark and quiet, avoiding day-time naps for your child – all these play a major role in ensuring quality sleep for children.
Deep sleep helps clear the distractions out of the kid’s mind, and helps improve the kid’s concentration on new information or tasks.
Provide Kids Balanced Nutrition
Balanced nutrition for kids not only helps in their brain development, but also builds immunity and helps the digestive system function with less frequent ailments – thereby minimising distractions in the day to day life of children.
Kids’ weekly diet should consist of a balanced amount of micronutrients, including antioxidants, Omega-3 fatty acids, iron and folate levels, vitamins, which help improve the levels of concentration in kids.
Take Care of Regular Hydration
Dehydration may cause fatigue, reduced concentration in kids, and induce mood swings in children. Hence, ensuring adequate levels of hydration in kids is crucial for parents. But at the same time, parents should take care that their children do not consume sweetened drinks such as colas and lassis too frequently, as such drinks cause an immediate ‘sugar crash’, which induces drowsiness, and directly impacts kids concentration.
Eliminate Distractions from Learning Space
Improving attention in kids involves giving them a screen free experience in their learning space, and ensuring a distraction free environment throughout. Even during their playtime, kids focus on their toys and playing kit, which helps improve concentration in toddlers. Ensuring proper lighting of the room, minimising surrounding noise levels, removing unnecessary electronics items and gadgets, keeping the study table and toy-boxes organised, can help reduce mental clutter – this thereby helps to improve kids’ concentration.
Use Brain-Boosting Games and Screen free Play
Brain boosting games significantly boost concentration in kids by enabling a distraction free open-thinking environment, which thereby improves kids’ attention span. Screen free open-ended play also builds critical thinking skills in kids. That is why, parents across the world are trying to minimise kids’ screen time, while arranging for alternative creative toys and playing kits, such as the Magnetic Tiles collections by Circus9.
Set Screen-Time Boundaries
Excessive screen time only impacts kids’ attention span and the ability of kids to focus on their tasks, but also paves the way for physical health issues such as obesity, imperfect sleep schedule, violent and arrogant behaviour, and diminished body flexibility.
Hence, doctors and medical professionals across the world are now recommending explicit screen-time boundaries for kids that help improve focus in children. Such screen-time boundaries include screen free play, using parental controls for mobile devices, manually supervising the kind of content children watch, and avoiding fast-paced addictive programs. Experts also recommend parents to use ad-blockers in devices that their kids use, to provide a distraction free watch-time for kids content, because kids cannot distinguish between the ads and factual information.
Build Kids' Focus That Outlasts Screens
While over the last two decades, experts have recommended taking children to abacus classes and audio-books to provide a screen free early-stage learning environment, these tools also limit the ability of kids to think openly. Somehow creativity stagnates due to the routineness and lack of interactivity in these tools. Hence, nowadays children’s mental health experts are suggesting parents to deploy open-ended play for their kids. Kids can independently play with such toys and kids at their own pace and discretion, without any instructions or guidance from parents. This helps build their creative thinking skills, the urge to build bigger things as per their imagination, and focus on the toys within a distraction free play-space.
How Circus9 Magnetic Tiles Helps Improve Concentration in Kids
At Circus9, we always focus on how to make playtime a meaningful opportunity for kids - something that builds children’s focus, and elevates the level of concentration in kids. As kids connect Circus9 Magnetic tiles, they bring their imagination to reality by creating structures and experimenting with different designs. In this play-process, they practise staying engaged, solving critical problems and paying attention to details. These open-ended activities also encourage children to try again when something does not work, helping them develop patience and persistence. Parents have been trusting Circus9 for magnetic tiles ideas that make creativity and fun an essential part of the kids’ concentration building journey.
