An Easy Tip For Easily Distracted Children
If you find yourself asking “why is my child so easily distracted?” and wondering how you can help – you’re not alone. All parents at one time or another wonder about their child when you find them doing something totally different when you know that they know they’re supposed to be doing something else. It can be frustrating and a source of conflict when it happens frequently.
More often than not the culprit is sensory overload.
Parents are taught to make plans with their children that can range between the typical morning or bedtime routine, to going to school or the park, or a change of schedule. But I find that parents over talk to their child. I am in no way saying stop communicating the plan with your child. No! They need to know those plans but how we go about it may be too much for their brains to handle.
The adult brain’s short-term memory can handle seven to 10 chunks of information at a time without having to work too hard – think phone numbers, social security numbers, etc. Because of this, we also tend to break down tasks or plans in a similar fashion – a lot of chunks of information. But if you find your child has a hard time making those plans actionable items, getting distracted along the way, it could be too much information at once.
If you are, for example, getting ready for bed, and we say “ok, go upstairs, clean up your Legos, change your clothes, put them in the hamper, jump in the shower, dry off, find new jammies, brush your teeth and feed your fish,” that’s a lot of information for a child to compute – even when they have gone through the motions a million times. What is happening:
- They are listening to your words
- They may be reacting to the plans or a step in the plan
- They are thinking about or fixated on an item or items with the plan
- Still trying to listen to the sequence of events
- Comprehend that sequence of plans
- Remember those sequences of plans
- And then execute
All while there may be other sensory events going on – a dog barking in the background, they’re looking at all the Legos on the floor, they may be tired, they had their own plans that are being thwarted by ours – there are a plethora of scenarios that add to the sensory input that could also be at play in your child’s brain. The brain is conditioned to sift through unnecessary sensory input, something we do unconsciously all day. But for children, their young brains are still learning to sift, still determining what is “unnecessary,” then we pile on all these things for them to do, and the brain gets overloaded and focuses on what may be novel, exciting, colorful, or loud. The child may also have a hard time sequencing the tasks. This is a skill learned and perfected at an individual pace, but the younger the child, the more you may need to help your child sequence events to make a larger goal or event happen. You are left looking at your child doing the total opposite of the plan’s intricate details. Cue repeating the plan, or frustration when these are tasks they know how and what to do.
So instead of laying out the whole plan, we are going to take away some of the sensory input by scaling down the requests to just two things at a time using the “this, then that” approach. So you would now approach your child and say “go upstairs and then clean up your Legos.” When that has been completed, then you would say “change your clothes and then put them in the hamper.” Once completed, you would tell your child to “jump in the shower and then dry off…”
By breaking down tasks like this, children know clearly and concisely what to do first and then what to do next. There aren’t a lot of sequences to remember, not a lot to listen to and remember because you are helping them step by step. You are helping them stay focused and work on natural sequences to help them for the future. It takes more work on your part and may be hard for parents of older children, but you will find that this will help your child stay more focused, you will redirect less, get frustrated less frequently, and your child will develop the skills to drown out the noise (literally and figuratively) to be able to focus on tasks at hand.
