Focus, concentration, and determination are the foundation of all sorts of learning. Strong concentration is a sure guarantee for the academic future of your child. So, if their focus or concentration is off, you, as a parent, need to cultivate it. The older the child, the more the importance of this cultivation shows. The age range of 5 to 10 years is the ideal time to cultivate concentration, as any later would be ineffective due to brain developmental ages.

What is the child’s concentration?

Concentration is the focus we often talk about. For children, it means that they can focus on the senses such as sight, hearing and touch on one thing and achieve the purpose of knowing it.

How long can a child’s concentration stay?

2 years old: 7 minutes

3 years old: 9 minutes

4 years old: 12 minutes

5-6 years old: 14 minutes

7-10 years old: 20 minutes

10-12 years old: 25 minutes

13 years old or older: 30 minutes

It can be seen that the younger the age, the weaker the concentration. It is unscientific to try to ask a 3-year-old child to concentrate on one thing for 15 minutes.

Why is the child’s concentration time short?

Physiological reasons:

The brain and nervous system of infants and young children are not mature, and the brain and nervous system are organs that integrate advanced adaptive functions—thinking, wisdom, and language.

Other factors:

Causes of the disease: auditory/visual impairment, lead poisoning

Physiological reasons: lack of sleep

Environmental reasons: chaos/noisy/excessive interference

Food reasons: eating foods containing too much caffeine, uneven nutrition

Reasons for parenting: excessive love, too many toys, frequent socializing

Cultivate the critical period of concentration

Develop concentration, starting at age 4. Before the age of 4, it is the key period for cultivating baby’s learning ability. 5-10 years old is the key period for developing attention. The early education of the child is not to learn ABCs, but to cultivate the quality, character and concentration of the will.

How to cultivate your child’s concentration

1. Make the most of your child’s curiosity

In this world, there are many new things that children have never seen or heard of, and their unique charm attracts curious children and arouses their great concern. Therefore, we can make full use of the child’s curiosity to cultivate concentration.

2. Combine the interest and concentration of your child

Interest is the best teacher. When people are doing things they are interested in, they will always be very dedicated and focused. For young children, attention is directly controlled by interests and emotions to a certain extent. Therefore, we should pay attention to combining the broad interests of the children with their concentration ability. The more children’s interest in things, the easier it is to form stable and concentrated attention.

3. Train your child’s concentration in the game

Former Soviet psychologists have done such an experiment: let children in different activities of the game and simply complete the task, the paper of various colors is placed in the same color box, observe the child’s concentration time. The experiment found that in the game, the 4-year-old child can continue for 22 minutes, the 6-year-old child can hold for 71 minutes, and the number of paper strips is 50% more than when the task is completed. In the form of simply completing the task, the 4-year-old child can only adhere to 17 minutes, and the 6-year-old child can only adhere to 62 minutes.

The experimental results show that the child has a strong concentration and stability in the game activities. Therefore, we can let children carry out more game activities and cultivate their children’s concentration in the game.

4. Let the child clarify the purpose of the activity and consciously concentrate

The more deeply the child understands the purpose of the activity, the stronger the desire to complete the task. In the course of the activity, the more concentrated the attention is, the longer the attention will be maintained. For example, a child who is always eating and pulling is always a careless child. If you promise him to eat well, give him a reward after completing the task, he will definitely let go of his heart and concentrate on eating seriously.