Role of parents

How to overcome poor attention span of children

It makes better sense to discuss this question with parents. The discussion that follows could be shared with parents, without any need to edit.

Hope you are a brave heart and really love your child to read the following and yet get a feeling of gratitude – the poor attention span of your child is more likely the result of actually weaker academic knowledge of your child and not the other way around! This is a happy news too – your child is not likely to have any attention problems. However, the scenario where your child does not feel challenged enough in the classroom which makes him feel bored and distracted, is also possible.

Let us explore why children fail to achieve high academic performance. We will go back to the basics to understand the issue of academic achievement; there are only three primary reasons for a child to not achieve academic excellence (till class VIII) as listed in the table:


*Please give ‘1’ mark in this column against each of the ‘secondary reason’ that seems to be true in the case of your child and ‘0’ if not really true.

On the basis of the above mentioned evaluation, two scenarios are possible:

a. The total ‘Your Status’ score is equal to or less than 6
or
b. The total ‘Your Status’ is more than 6

In the first scenario, please work on the specific secondary reasons and you would see a significant difference in your child’s academic performance.

The second scenario calls for major changes in the practices and processes at school, home and peer community. And among other things, the following changes in your child’s context would be mandatory:

  1. A reading home – read along with your child every day; start with 30 minutes of short reading and take it to 2 hours every day of long reading (any work of literature), TV must be switched off in that period.
  2. Teach maths and science in terms of concepts and bring more and more of language in maths and science learning (introduce more ‘stories’ in maths and science education)
  3. Build a better relationship with your spouse (of course, this is meant more for men but women are not left too far behind men now); a happy home is the first condition for a happy child. Parents must seamlessly ensure ‘quantity time’ with children. Quality time is quite a misnomer, with children high quantity time with good amount of commitment becomes quality time.
  4. Use an independent assessment, progress reporting and remedial system that compensates for the weaknesses of the progress measurement and reporting system of the school; ‘Mentoring Million Minds’ (www.panIITalumni.org /mmm) is one such alternate independent system to properly evaluate progress in maths and science.
  5. Stop supplementing your child till class VIII; no tuition at all till class VIII. Many parents can teach all the subjects till class VIII; ‘Mentoring Million Minds’ is a digital platform where parents can easily educate themselves on Class V-X maths and science concepts.

We must add that after Class VIII achieving academic-level reading skills cannot be developed except for a highly self-motivated child; it takes a lot of reading over a couple of years, at the least, to achieve academic-level reading skills.

Further, a child well-placed by the end of class VIII – in other words, a child with command over the academic language and without any backlog in prior class concepts – will never need tutoring support for excellence in curricular academics.

We also recommend that in case the attention of the child does not show satisfactory improvement within six months of the aforementioned changes, a well-recognised child psychologist must be visited, to check for clinical evidence of ADHD, if any.

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