Welcome to Boldschoolers! Today, we’re talking about attention. Why is attention important anyway? If our kids are going to be learning, they will need to be paying attention so that learning can stick. As we all know, we are living in a distractible world, with the pings, beeps and buzzes of our technology, added to the noise and disruption around us, in addition to the pull of the many tasks we are trying to accomplish, all on top of our own wandering minds and often negative self-talk. It’s amazing we get anything accomplished and for many of us it’s a struggle.
Why is attention so hard to maintain?
The young minds of our children have an even more challenging time focusing because their brains aren’t fully developed yet and still, focus is essential to any type of learning. Kids often don’t know where their attention is…it’s not that they don’t want to pay attention. Without judgement, you might ask questions such as, “Where are you right now?” “Is that where you want to be?” Those types of questions can help kids befriend their minds, rather than feeling badly about a brain that is simply doing what brains do.
We have an incredible number of bits of information coming in through our senses at any given time that the brain simply can’t process it all. We can actually only process a very small amount, so the brain has to have a way to filter out what’s least important and focus on what’s most important to keep us alive and thriving. We miss about 50% of what’s happening in our lives, meaning we only pay attention to 50% of what we are trying to pay attention to at any given time (Jha, 2021). So, if our baseline is 50%, what can we do to increase our probability of focusing? Attention is the gateway to memory, meaning you must pay attention if you are going to remember what you learn.
Today, we’re going to focus on the internal landscape of attention. We can quiet our children’s surroundings and eliminate as much noise and distraction, as possible, but if our children’s minds are racing or scrambled, it’s going to interfere with learning.
Look Squirrel!
If you’ve decided to start your child on the superpower practice of deep learning and focus, you just might see children wiggling in their chairs, eyes darting around the room, unrelated conversation erupting and great effort being expended to just move beyond a few minutes or even seconds of true attention. This is completely normal. If we’re honest with ourselves most of us can only grasp snatches of true focus without other thoughts, ideas, or distractions wandering through our mental landscape. This is the human brain and we aren’t going to change that, but what we can do is get better at bringing our brains back to the focus that we want.
You might be wondering how you might make it better? How can we help our children pay attention without relying on coercion, bribes or threats to try to forcefully bring focus front and center? Or perhaps, you might be wondering how on earth you can help your child pay attention, when we parents seem to have squirrel brains, struggling to juggle all of life’s responsibilities?
If we are going to approach education differently, we have to approach all aspects of the learning process with an open, curious mind. With that intention, I started to look at what we know about attention, to understand what the science has to tell us and what diverse fields of study have to offer us that we can apply to the front lines of homeschooling.
I have found that there are indeed ways to positively impact our attention. Some of these methods rely on technology, such as neurofeedback and brain imaging…now available to us all, for a price. But, I also found a powerful argument for low-tech interventions that were also supported by current neuroscientific research. Because of the ease, simplicity and effectiveness of options that require no special technology or financial investment, I’m focusing on those models in our discussion of attention today. If you would like to focus on some solutions involving technology, I’ll include some of those resources in the notes section.
Improve attention through improved awareness. Grab your flashlight!
Helping our kids understand how their attention works will help them raise their awareness, harness control and be able to develop the ability to direct that attention where they want, when they want, and how they want. The framework that I’m going to share with you comes from the work of Amishi Jha (2021), a leading neuroscientist that that has spent decades studying our attentional systems. You might help your child to understand attention in three memorable parts: The flashlight, The floodlight and The juggler.
When your child is using her flashlight, she’s focusing in on a thought, an activity when learning or on other people when in conversation.
When your child is using her floodlight, she’s widening her view to notice what’s going on in the environment around her…maybe noticing a missing ingredient sitting on the counter in a cooking recipe or bringing attention to other people’s perspectives, or the tone of someone’s voice, in conversation, for example.
The juggler keeps all the balls in the air, holding it all together. The juggler is our executive functioning, like the CEO of a business, that helps each employee meet the company objectives. For us, the juggler helps us follow our goals to completion, while keeping distractions at bay. And in conversation, the juggler filters relevant comments or conflicting opinions, making sense of the whole of the dialogue.
These three parts of attention typically happen in the background, but bringing awareness to each of them will help us…and our children…get each part working for us, rather than against us.
Knowing of these attentional systems is a great start, but there’s a much more exciting part…we can actually improve the workings of each of these systems through a mindfulness practice. Raising our awareness in this way has been shown to increase our ability to pay attention, as well as limiting mind wandering and impulsivity.
Somewhere in the day, perhaps at the beginning, you might want to incorporate a brief mindfulness practice with your child. That might look like just a few minutes of directing the flashlight (attention) to the breath and feeling some sensation of the breath moving in and out of the body. Your child isn’t controlling the breath, but rather just noticing it. Your child might feel the cool air in his nose or notice his lungs expanding and contracting. The focus point doesn’t matter, as long as there is one. You might start with just a couple minutes and then gradually raise the amount of time to 10-12 minutes of mindfulness.
Throughout the day, you might help your child bring mindfulness to things he’s already doing, such as brushing his teeth or eating a meal. Your child can practice bringing the flashlight back to the activity being accomplished. How does the warm soup feel in his mouth or the crunch of the popcorn crushed between his teeth, the feel of the jaw muscles working? How do the stiff bristles of the toothbrush feel moving across the gumline, the peppermint burst of toothpaste on the tongue? A few moments of mindfulness sprinkled throughout the day has been shown to have a compounding effect on awareness and attention and it adds zero time to a busy day.
If you’re alternating focus time with brain breaks (i.e. the pomodoro) during learning, you might have your child find the flashlight as they settle in for each session of focus time around clear goals. Let the snow settle at the bottom of the snow globe before your child attempts to focus in again.
In my own life, I’ve started asking myself several times a day, “Where is your flashlight? Where is your floodlight?” As my mind wanders into the past and into the future, I’m becoming more and more aware and able to have the juggler bring my lights back to the present moment. It is sometimes valuable to reflect upon events of the past to gain an understanding and it’s valuable to plan events in the future, but I’ve noticed that some of the time I spend in the past is replaying events over and over without any positive intention. And time I spend in the future is sometimes just worrying about events that haven’t happened and will probably never happen. This is typically not a good use of my time and energy, so with awareness I can ask myself if it’s where I want to be and if not…I gently bring my flashlight back to my breath, to the present moment and reframe. It is the noticing that is the success. It doesn’t matter if your child brings her mind back to the flashlight focus point 100+ times. That’s a success. That’s noticing and becoming aware.
Harness attention in the empty spaces.
Those that know me, know that I love the empty spaces in life, those juicy bits of nothingness before something happens. There’s an empty space, a gap, between something we hear and something we say; something we experience and something we do. I think we often just skip right over that gap into action and don’t even notice that it’s there, but I believe there’s power and insight in that empty space between all the action. If we can pause and lengthen that space because of our awareness, we can better choose what comes next.
We wield choice in that moment of quiet space. With awareness, times slows down and we can craft a better response, decide to remain quiet or gently impact the world around us with what we say or do. That beat, the pause, gives us time to respond, rather than to react. We often see this magnified in our children. They burst into conversations, they may say inappropriate comments, or insert themselves in ways that we wish they wouldn’t. They have a harder time reading the room, responding with thoughtfulness, and traveling lightly to share the space around them with others. Our kids haven’t yet learned how to elongate the gap and the juggler is still dropping a few balls during the show. A mindfulness practice on attention will help develop those skills.
Attention through mindfulness
There are many types of mediation practices, and most are beneficial, but if you want to focus on attention, then choose to practice attention through mindfulness, helping your child find and direct the flashlight, become aware of her surroundings through the floodlight and start noticing where the mind goes throughout the day. There’s no judgement in any of this, but rather simple awareness. You might use the STOP practice throughout the day. S-STOP; T-Take a breath; O-Observe; P-Proceed. Basically, your child is finding the flashlight in many different ways throughout the day, so that the awareness of the attentional system becomes quickly accessible.
Your child’s superpower is an ability to focus, and within that superpower there are skills to develop, as well. If you want your child to learn to become better at paying attention, then practice paying attention through a daily mindfulness practice; maybe alone and maybe with you. Starting any new habit takes time and effort. You might consider deciding upon a consistent time of day to practice and then pair the practice to something your child already does. Maybe you start each day with a brief scrum meeting (i.e. a time for connecting with you, with siblings, with friends, often wrapped in a game or physical activity, as well as a time for setting intentions for the day) or maybe you want to pair a mindfulness practice to brushing teeth or eating breakfast or anything else that your child already does each day. Habits are much easier to establish when we stack them on top of things we already do.
If you think someone would benefit from this content, please send it their way and if you're interested in learning more about developing attentional awareness, please head on over to join us in Boldschoolers Blueprint.
I’d love to hear from you, so let me know how it goes when you incorporate the flashlight, the floodlight and the juggler in your conversations and daily practice.
