The short attention span myth

Dave Ramsey says if you spread a lie loud enough, long enough, and often enough, eventually it becomes accepted as truth. I was going to call this post the short attention span lie, but that sounded a bit harsh and I don't think it's actually intended that way, so we'll stick with myth.

I hear all the time that children have short attention spans. I can't be the first person who has figured out that this is completely false. In fact, I as the parent am the one with the short attention span. I am the one who is ready to leave the park first, who gets tired of feeding grass to horses after 30 stalks or so, who doesn't want to read the dinosaur book "one more time". I have to make myself wait patiently for an hour while my son sits inside the cab of a currently unused excavator or wait by the river while my kids throw 217 rocks in, one at a time, for forty-five minutes. And the next time we go out they want to do it again. There is nothing short about my kids' attention span.

What children seem to lack is the ability to be extrinsically motivated to pay attention for an extended period of time to something that is not inherently interesting. That is, most kids I know will engage in an activity that a trusted adult suggests or chooses for a period of time to see what it is like. If it does not capture their attention, if it is not exciting to them, they will not be motivated to "sit still" and "pay attention" to please an adult, to avoid calling attention to themselves, or even for the hope of reward or the fear of punishment.

As a child my husband escaped the diagnosis of A.D.D. because he was able to pay attention to things that were intereresting to him. He found school boring, but this is not a disorder. It is a sign of a mind at work.

Kids pay attention to what is interesting to them. They are capable of sitting still for long periods of time to watch a caterpillar crawl on a leaf but not to listen to an adult talk about caterpillars. Their brains must be made this way for a reason. What is interesting to children helps them learn the best. The period of childhood is so short and so important for learning that kids are hard-wired to engage in activities that help them learn best, which are activities of their own choosing and that they can control. They are also likely to be activities that are real. The younger the child, the more real the activities need to be.

I am not sure why someone decided to say that kids have short attention span or why so many others choose to believe it. It seems to me to have something to do with the kinds of developmentally-inappropriate learning that is expected in almost all schools. In schools children are separated from the real world and expected to learn through models and symbols, which are generally not as educational or as interesting as the real thing. They are also expected to learn the same things at the same time as not only the children in their class, but increasingly in a time of standardized curriculum, children all across the country. If a child or group of children becomes interested in oceans and fish, but that is not in the curriculum for that grade, the teacher cannot teach it. Instead the children must wait until it is in the curriculum and then they have to learn it, whether they are interested in learning it anymore or not. It is the trial period during which a child is willing to engage in an activity in order to find out if it is interesting that is short, not the attention span itself.

So instead of saying that children have short attention spans, I believe it is more accurate to say that people (not just children) have trouble paying attention to things that they do not find interesting. As we get older we find ways to force ourselves to pay attention and extrinsic motivation becomes more meaningful (if you do not pay attention to what is said in a work meeting about some policy changes, you risk doing it wrong and possibly losing your job). Being able to force ourselves to pay attention to something that is not inherently interesting is a great skill to have, and one that children will develop in time. But while they are little, the more they can choose their own activities and the more we let them do, the less we come up against what seems to be a short attention span.