Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy Attention span in preschoolers?

He's now a very different child than he was 5 months ago when we got the officially diagnosis. And the therapists he's working with don't agree with his diagnosis. Severe anxiety, yes but not autism. So I guess the jury is still out. We're not pushing the issue for now. We'll know more as he gets older. Pulling him out of most therapies and keeping him in just short ST for feeding issues and joint OT for DS3 and DS4.9 where they are learning to tolerate being in each other's space is turning out to be the best thing we could had done. He's becoming chatty, with great eye contact, interested in everything around him ... The only issue that remains is social anxiety. So from what we can tell, his focus level is truly interest driven.

Is this your child with food allergy? Don't underestimate the impact of that fear on social anxiety in a child at preschool age. Most NT kids with food allergy go through something similar at 7-10 yo, but HG kids with food allergy seem to undergo a really different developmental experience, because they are processing mortal danger from sources that they can't avoid/control at a much younger age-- an age when most contemporaries can't really understand what that kind of risk means.

KWIM?

My DD presented as VERY socially reticent at this age-- with peers, that is, and very much more socially gregarious with adults. She, too, had a lengthy attention span (hours, if she was interested). She had a lot of the superficial markers for an ASD. But it was almost entirely HG + anxiety, and not all of the anxiety was maladaptive or irrational, frankly.

That's partly why I asked. I don't really notice other kids having the short attention spans they are supposed to have but I don't really pay close attention to this.

Now that I'm paying more attention to this with my own child I've noticed that usually after my child has done something for about 30 mins I change the activity for her or take her out of the house because it just seems like "she should do something else now". I don't really have a good sense of how long she stays focused regularly if I don't interfere but I've seen her stay focused for more than two hours when I've been busy.

Another thing I don't understand is when people talk about listening to books and attention span in children. My child will listen to books for as long as I'll read to her but I don't see how that is the same as having a long attention span when we are looking at a lot of different books so the focus of her attention is changing regularly throughout the hour. If we were in a toy store for an hour playing with each toy for 5-10 minutes I wouldn't say her attention span for toys was an hour so why should books be *counted* differently? I know it doesn't matter, I'm just trying to understand what people are talking about when they talk about attention span.

He's the less allergic child but also on a restricted diet. He is the one who most benefited from being put on the gluten / casein free diet. I might just be one of those mothers "imagining" things but I am suspecting that he is even more gifted than we thought at first. I am now leaning towards the HG+/PG category with him. Everything he looks at, you can tell he sees with a very different prospective. When you watch him closely, you can see he's not zoning out but it's more about being so overwhelmed with all the information around him that he tries to channel it in certain directions to be able to relax. He seems to be completely "out" not paying any attention to anything around him and doing his own thing but he's always quietly paying attention and suddenly very quietly answers our question that we may had asked or says something very relevant to whatever we're doing or talking about. It's as if he's always tuned in but is masking it. He's also extremely sensitive to people's voices and moods. I was like that when I was little and I still remember how hard it was to try and turn it off. I would start crying for seemingly no good reason just because somewhere around me there was someone in a sad mood. Another reason for him to hide. Not to mention, I just know a lot of his behavior is part due to trying to ignore his always talking and sometimes obnoxiously loud big brother who's like the energizer bunny that never stops. We tend to underestimate DS3 because of his speech delay (the main reason why Autism was suspected at first) but he's really trying hard to talk to us these days (not in public, just when he's comfortable) but is very hard to understand. And I noticed he keeps putting things in his ears and he loves it when I put my hands over his ears to release the pressure (like when you want to pop your ears) so while his initial ENT check up about a year and half ago didn't show anything wrong, I am taking him back in next week to see if maybe there IS an issue with the pressure in his ears and maybe he needs tubes put in (just like DS4.9 did just before he turned 3). He's this amazing little guy who keeps hiding all his abilities. He's our "closet giftie"

I really hope the ENT next week will have some answers for us.

Maybe I'm wrong but I don't think it's as much about attention span as it is about simple interest. They are interested = they pay attention, they are not interested = they couldn't care less. Honestly, how good is your attention span when it comes to things you have zero interest in? I'll be staring through the window and someone will have to kick me hard to let me know it's over! lol DS3 will spend zero minutes listening to me or anyone else read books to him. He sill spend hours reading by himself or browsing/reading/listening to ebooks on my Kindle. He has no interest in me reading to him because he can't manipulate me the way he does his own paper or electronic books. He's interested in pressing the more difficult words repeatedly so he knows how to read them. He's bored to death by just listening to a story. Reminds me of his Early Intervention evaluation. We have this set of Melissa & Doug stackable alphabet boxes/blocks and they wanted him to stack 3 and he wasn't looking at them at all, doing his own thing but I could see him just kind of side watching them and then he came and stacked the whole set of 10 or how many, alphabetically and turned each one 90 degrees. He was very proud of his work, yet he failed to do the challenge because he didn't copy the lady stacking the 3 blocks. He has no interest in copying anyone or anything and always does things differently. And it's what we love about him. No reason for us to try and change this about him at this point. Yes, he'll be the child not paying attention at school and in the end turning in homework with results only and no explanation of how he came to the final answers. Who cares. I'm not ready to raise a sheep that does nothing but follows and copies

IME attention also has a social component. Often an NT little kid, shown something with enthusiasm by an adult or a peer, will become interested not because of the intrinsic interest of the item, but because of a social impulse to share the interests of others.

Obviously, some people are more other-directed and some are more inner-directed-- but for a person with autism, the impulse to be interested *in order to share a social experience* is often just not there. So intrinsic interest can become the only kind that's operating.

DeeDee

All true. Though, I think in our case a lot of the issues are genes. I remember how I found kids around me very "weird" to want to pay attention to things and people that I found utterly boring. I didn't understand my feelings back then but I learned to cope with them by always insisting on sitting in the front row right in front of the teacher so I could try my hardest to pay attention. Anything beyond front row and I'd spend all day with my mind wondering around, while drawing little evergreen trees all over my notebooks! lol

tornadoes or tornadoes with Looney Tune Tasmanian Devil feet and ears sticking out. But my wandering attention was due to uncorrected nearsightedness (until age 12)...I couldn't see what was going on so it couldn't be that interesting to me. And everyone knew I couldn't see the doctor didn't believe in correcting it until it got worse...It got corrected when I finally got a spine and told my mom I wanted to see!

I think it's easy to accept that attention is related to interest merely because that's how we define interest - a child is perceived as interested in something if he is paying attention, and perceived as uninterested if he is not paying attention. I don't think this observation really brings us closer to understanding what attention is or how it's regulated.