The Inattentive Child: Parenting Strategies

Parenting Patterns to Avoid with an Inattentive Child
Many parents (and educators) focus so hard on problems of attention that they ignore or downplay the child's many assets. By stressing her weaknesses, they undermine the very abilities that may help her compensate for her challenges. Imagine if you had to spend 80 percent of your adult life doing tasks that were extremely difficult for you. For instance, think of being a poorly coordinated person spending the day shooting baskets, or a right-handed person spending all day writing left-handed. Needless to say, it would be hard to concentrate. You would probably daydream or even want to run away.

That's how a child with these challenges can feel. For example, the parents of a child who is good in math but a slow reader may work with her exclusively on her reading. At school, her teacher gives her extra reading assignments so that she can practice. No wonder this child has trouble concentrating on the assignments. She ends up looking inattentive because she is spending most of her time practicing a skill that is hard for her. It's easy to see how she could mistakenly be labeled as having a general attention problem when, in fact, her attention problem may be specific only to the areas that are hard for her.

When parents or educators aren't balanced in their appreciation of the child's strengths and vulnerabilities, they may not only overemphasize the child's vulnerabilities, but also use the vulnerable area as a mode of general communication, further compromising the child's ability to attend and comprehend. For instance, a child who has an auditory processing difficulty may find it hard to attend to sounds and words, but she could be quite gifted in attending to visual input and to interactive opportunities, as well as hands-on doing. A constant stream of spoken advice and directions that this child is less able to comprehend will thereby exaggerate her difficulty.

Another hazard in dealing with inattentive children is treating them in a mechanical and inflexible manner. Since such children are not viewed as being very reflective or motivated, they are simply told what to do. Rather than helping the child develop motivation and a reflective attitude about her behavior, parents tend to deal with the child in lots of "do's and don'ts" and avoid debates. They don't help the child ponder her behavior so she can figure out better strategies. Rather than supporting the child's particular interests and encouraging her problem-solving ability, they stress rote approaches and fixed, repetitive behaviors.

With a child who is struggling yet apparently not paying attention, it is all too easy to humiliate or frustrate her with unrealistic demands rather than realizing that the child wants to understand but needs to develop her own unique pathway to concentrated attention. There is a tendency to want a child to learn like other children. The demand for immediate conformity also may push the child into more rote, mechanical ways of doing things, rather than developing and using particular strengths to bypass the processing or motor challenges.

How Parents Can Help an Inattentive Child
Children with attention and learning difficulties require more practice and work to master basic emotional milestones and skills than other children. Like teaching a right-handed person to throw a curve ball with her left hand, it can be done, but only with patience and practice. Such a child also needs help in learning to use her strengths as an ally in overcoming her vulnerabilities or weaknesses. She needs to be able to reflect on her own behavior, feelings, and tendencies more than the average child. If she knows what her challenge is, she is more likely to be able to observe herself and develop compensatory strengths. She also needs to be able to collaborate constructively with parents and teachers, rather than escaping or withdrawing her attention. The inattentive child requires a greater degree of self-acceptance and patience with herself than most children because of the frustrations she and her parents often encounter.

Building on Strengths
The principal task for parents of an inattentive child is to develop a sense of mastery around her natural strengths. Rather than spending all their time trying to correct her weaknesses, they need to spend at least 50 percent of their time on her strengths. A child has to want to learn; it has to be fun and pleasant.

Even during a child's early infancy, we can begin to note attentional challenges and work with the child's abilities. In the first stage of development - that of being able to focus in on the world and stay calm while looking and listening - the parents may notice that certain types of sensations tend to distract their child. Talking or singing rapidly to a child with auditory processing difficulties, for example, may cause her to tune out. Communicating more slowly and calmly and in shorter segments may help her to focus better. With a baby, you might hum and sing in simple rhythms to get and hold her attention rather than in more complicated patterns. With a toddler, you would keep your questions and instructions simple at first: "Please pick up your truck" instead of "Please pick up your truck and ball and put them in your toy chest." With a preschooler, you would focus on simple questions (such as "What do you want to eat?" or "What do you want to do next?") before asking more complex why, how, and what questions (such as "Why would you want to do that?").

Many children with auditory processing difficulties are strong visually. If so, you may want to relate to this child both visually and verbally. With a baby you would use animated facial features. With a toddler, you could gesture to your toddler a lot (instead of asking your child if she wants "juice in your favorite big orange cup," for example, you might pick up the cup, point to it, and then point at the juice container, while asking "Juice?"). While playing with a preschooler, you might communicate visually. For example, if your doll is going to drive her car, in addition to saying, "I'm going to take the car for a ride," you could have the doll point at the car and make driving-type gestures as she enters it. In this way, your toddler sees and hears the key elements of the drama and can respond, perhaps by having her lion chase and eat up the doll and the car! An older child may benefit from having pictorial instructions as well as verbal ones, or from having some schoolwork, such as math problems, presented both verbally and with visual symbols.

With a child who is the reverse - strong in auditory-verbal skills and weaker visually - you would focus more on talking and less on showing. With a baby, use lots of babbling, singing, and chattering. You would use more complicated sentences with a toddler ("Would you like your juice in your favorite big orange cup?"). And with a preschooler or a school-age child, you could expect longer and longer dialogues.

If you ask this child to draw a map of how to get to the playground, or to build an intricate structure, you might suddenly see a very inattentive child. When this happens, a useful tactic can be to have your child talk her way through the task. In other words, because the child may not see it or picture it easily, she may be better able to find her way to the park through a series of verbal statements than to picture it graphically. If you then help your child practice going from the verbal to the visual, she can strengthen her spatial reasoning abilities. For example, a child who knows all her math facts, but doesn't have a good internal spatial sense of quantity, may say quickly, "two plus three equals five" because she has memorized it. Then you could say, "Show me with your hands how much two apples would be if you put them side by side. And now show me what three would be. And now show me what five would be." Then you could add, "And now can you close your eyes and actually picture five apples end-to-end? Then can you put two away and picture three?"

Such an exercise will help a verbal child become more attentive to her visual-spatial world. Without such an ability, she most likely will become more inattentive as she gets into higher-level math, where picturing a problem is essential to a solution.

With a child who has vulnerabilities with motor skills - motor planning or perceptual motor skills, for example - the same principles apply. Look for an area of strength (if your child is weak in motor skills, she may be strong in either auditory or visual skills) and use that strength to help her over developmental hurdles. This strategy helps avoid endless frustration to both child and parent. A child who has trouble getting dressed or tying her shoes or copying a sentence off the blackboard can easily get frustrated and give up. Power struggles ensue between the understandably frustrated parent or teacher and the increasingly recalcitrant child:

PARENT: Come on! I've shown you how to tie those shoes a thousand times.
CHILD: I can't! I get all messed up. These are stupid shoes anyway. I hate them!
PARENT: I paid good money for those shoes. Don't throw them like that!
CHILD: I won't wear them. They're ugly!

Instead of such an impasse, I've seen one such child who has strong verbal skills learn to talk herself through tying her shoes after her father described it to her beforehand. "Now I grab the right lace with my right hand and the left lace with my left hand," she would mutter as she bent over her shoes. "Then I cross the right lace over the left lace and tuck it under ..." and so on. With a child who is strong visually, you could diagram the process for her. She then follows the diagram until she feels comfortable tying her shoes without it.

As you can see, this approach is based on the idea that many children do not have a problem with paying attention in all areas. Rather, they are relatively more attentive or less attentive depending on their ability to process information in a certain area. With flexibility on the part of the parents, children can usually compensate for some of their areas of vulnerability. Remember, in an area where a child has a processing difficulty, always use infinite patience (as hard as it may be!) and practice. Power struggles over the child's vulnerability will only make the challenge greater. Children can handle pressure in areas where they are, relatively speaking, strong. Vulnerabilities, however, require "P & P" - Patience and Practice.

As I discussed earlier, in addition to the processing of information, children can also be inattentive because they are either over- or underreactive to information presented to them through one or another of their senses. In this case, parents can adjust the type and level of sensory information they provide. If the child is underreactive, the parent attempts to energize the mode of communication and make the information richer and more salient, as if to say "Hey, pay attention!" For the overreactive child, the parent may lower the level of stimulation. Words may be spoken more softly and slowly. Less color, brightness, and texture may help with visual information. One-on-one teaching or small groups may be preferable to a noisy classroom all the time.

Sometimes, as a usually attentive child enters preschool, she is suddenly labeled inattentive. The child hasn't changed, but instead of dealing with one-on-one relationships or just two neighborhood friends, she is now coping with ten to twenty children in a busy, noisy classroom. If she is sensitive to touch and sound, being jostled by other kids, coupled with their loud chatter, is enough to make her easily distracted. Even during an activity that seems to be very structured, like circle time, the mere physical proximity of the other children may be enough to overly stimulate the highly sensitive child. Simply creating a smaller group within the larger group (one to three children in a corner of the room) settles some children down and helps them be attentive. This child may also be helped by rhythmic motion (swinging) or steady, firm touching, such as a back rub.

Harnessing Emotions
The most important helpers a parent can have with an inattentive son or daughter are the child's own emotions and desires. This is often overlooked. Simply talking to a child or presenting certain tasks without harnessing the child's natural desires and emotions can be a dead end.

For children (both young and older) who have difficulties maintaining their attention because of motor planning, auditory processing difficulties, or any other reasons, it's worthwhile to try to maintain their attention through behavioral and emotional interactions, allowing the more difficult, symbolic verbal, visual, or motor acts to "tag along."

You have probably noticed that if you try to just talk to a child, she may fidget, daydream, look out the window, or ignore you and start playing. Similarly, if you ask her to draw a picture of her family and she is not very gifted in motor sequencing or in picking up visual details, she may also tune out. But if you start playing with her, stealing her favorite Barbie and hiding her under the rug, the formerly verbally inattentive child becomes verbally attentive and interactive: "Give her back to me! I want her now! She's mine!" Sometimes a lively tea party or a great car race provides the subtext for what I would call higher-level symbolic dialogues. Combining behavioral interactions with higher-level symbolic activity works well to harness attention because emotion or desire plays a critical role in focusing. When you talk to a child and she seems to tune you out, talking instead about what's for dinner, or going back to events of three days ago, or interrupting you with "Where's Aunt Anne?" it is easy to assume that her attention is wandering. In fact, what's happening is that she is attending to ideas other than the ones you are presenting to her. She is attending to what happened three days ago, her own hunger, or her aunt's visit. Her desire is not with you, but with these other interests. Focused attention is in part the persistence of desire or affect. If we want our child to pay attention to what we are saying to her or doing with her, we must then help her become emotionally involved with us. Nothing does that better than creating a state of behavioral and emotional interaction. The more we are "doing" with another person, the more involved we become. Stories, pictures, and games capture a child's undivided attention. I often see a child who completely tunes out math but, in negotiating how many more minutes she can stay up to watch her favorite TV show, appears to be a master mathematician. "No, No, NO, five minutes isn't enough. I need at least twice that much because the commercial takes three minutes, and the show has at least twice that many minutes to go!"

While the child who finds it easy to pay attention is often thought of as having a "better" attention span, it may be that she really has a much greater desire to please or a much greater sense of satisfaction from listening and responding verbally, so that there is more emotion generated in routine situations to harness her attention. Our seemingly more inattentive child may get turned on by something other than conversations with her parents. They will need to be especially mindful of her motivations and create situations that are charged enough to capture her attention. Students who learn best by doing hands-on work or through active debate, rather than by listening or reading, are examples of the need for this flexible approach.

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