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

How variable is attention span among children and at what point is an attention span unusually long for a 2 or 3 year old?

I've noticed my child isn't having a lot of success in structured classes and part of the reason is that the activities are always too short and change rapidly, so it's just really frustrating for my child. This made me wonder how long kids normally stay on one task and when I read that it was normally just 5-10 minutes for 2-year-old it made me wonder how unusual it is for a child to spend over 2 hours playing with a new toy, or 30-60 minutes regularly. I know everything is variable among children so just because the majority have shorter attentions spans I wondered if maybe 30% of kids have long attention spans or if maybe this more unusual. Really I feel like I must be misunderstanding something when I read about typical attention spans.

I don't have any strong predictions about my child's IQ and don't think this is a gifted issue but I was curious and this forum seems like a logical place to ask about attention spans in children so I hope you don't mind.

Keep in mind that in this forum, you're not likely to get information on what's typical.

My DD was able to watch an entire 20-minute TV show as an infant.

I'm not sure of the date, but I know she was definitely not older than 2.5 when we took her to see a Disney on Ice presentation. She was absolutely transfixed, and completely speechless, from the beginning through the intermission. She maintained her focus on the second half, though she recovered her powers of speech. I have to think it was at least an hour for each segment.

My just turned 3-year old son has zero and I mean ZERO attention span for any structured activity but can focus for hours on items / activities of hist interest. Part of our problem is that he has no interest in "age appropriate" things and activities so he'll run, cry, scream, kick or go into a silent blank face shut down mode. He does have High functioning autism diagnosis but from what we're seeing at home, the attention span thing seems to be unrelated to his diagnosis. He is right now into trying to force ME into HIS structured activities! lol

I hoped people who regularly post on this forum may have had read about this topic, I wasn't just hoping to hear about personal experiences.

Maybe I really don't know what asking for. My gut tells me my child might be doing things that aren't typical. Earlier today my child was spelling words with her fridge magnets and while I know most 2-year-olds don't do that, they were just small words and we read a lot so why wouldn't she have learned to spell a few words or read a little? I feel like I have a lot of hunches about my child but then I talk myself out of thinking the signs I see mean anything because there are other kids who are reading more or spelling bigger words or who have longer attention spans or who do harder puzzles. Then there's the "why do I care about this?" question and I don't really know the answer to that other than I'm just curious. I don't want to be one of those people who reads into things too much.

FWIW, when I enrolled my DD in a gifted pull-out program, I had to fill out a questionnaire for her, and one of the questions was about attention span. These were the options for answers:

* Was easily distracted, rarely concentrated for more than a few minutes at a time
* By about two years could concentrate on activities such as drawing, playing with
blocks, for up to ten minutes by self
* By about two years could concentrate on activities which caught his or her interest for half an hour or more

So I'd say anything more than a half-hour attention span (not to mention basic spelling) at 2 is really unusual. You're not missing anything or reading too much into anything, and you're right to care about it. If you're correct and your child is gifted, that is important information to know! Maybe you won't need to do anything with that information but it's crucial to know so you can keep an eye out down the track! No point driving blind. I know what it's like to be in denial, or think that you're over thinking things - believe me, it's a relief to know for sure then you can stop wondering, so if I were you I'd consider testing in a few years

I use age-linked media as my proxy for attention span expectations:
-The average toddler book takes about 2 minutes to read without dialogic reading.
-The vignettes on one the two children's TV show I watch with DS (Between the Lions) are only a minute or two long.
-Our music classes have segments grouped into about 2-3 minutes each.

DS20mo has no trouble focusing on an activity for half an hour or more at a time. At the extreme upper end, he's asked to read one book after another continuously for 4 hours on more than one occasion.

Both my boys, 3 and 5, have had amazing ability to focus on tasks interesting to them. At school they are the kids that sit quietly and listen. Their focus is one of the things about their giftedness I appreciate the most.

I agree 100% with AvoCado. I was in denial myself with DS5. Kept questioning myself thinking I was over thinking etc. Once tested it was clear that the signs were there from a very early age. It was so nice to finally "know" my boy on all levels. Get an understanding for why he did things the way he did.

Of course, now I am in the same boat with DS3. Questioning myself, being in denial. My younger is so different though it makes me pretty sure he is a visual-spatial learner. So if having this other puzzling child isn't confusing enough, I can't even compare him to my older since he is not following the same track...

Actually, that's pretty classic preschooler autism. Happy to put you into his structure, not so able to pay attention to yours.

Remembering with not too much fondness the day when my DS (perhaps 2) asked me to draw Elmo about 150 times.

Autism typically comes with lots of effects on attention; it can improve with systematic practice...

DeeDee

I have never managed to relate what I've read to what I've experienced. I feel like any child is capable of spending the whole preschool free play time at one station, and they all struggle at least sometimes with circle time.. The key, as I understand it, is that attention span is related to whether they are interested or not.

Thank you.

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.

Now that I think about it, maybe the ability to regulate attention versus the ability pay attention to things of interest are two completely different things, and the first would probably be more tied to working memory? I'm not sure.

hmm, not sure? To me they are completely unrelated (the attention regulation and working memory). At least with our two sons.

I am thinking there are a lot of components...acuity of vision and hearing, physically orientating towards the activity, visual and auditory processing, comprehension and appropriateness of the activity you are supposed to be attending to, interest, stamina, the basic needs having been met (food, drink, sleep, shelter, attention, exercise, etc.) and on and on.

ADHD is not about paying attention, it's about regulating attention, and yes it commonly comes with working memory deficits - specifically with auditory working memory deficits. But not always.

For us, it would be about 5-10 minutes per book in sets of 6-10 several times throughout the day. So we're on the same page (ha).

I would argue that reading is about more than just processing different storylines, especially with dialogic reading. There's a dance of social reciprocity between the reader and listener, basically a text-linked conversation, that remains continuous across books. Playing with different toys at a store might also be considered one continuous activity if the child is using an informal sort of scientific method to study each toy similarly in sequence. It really comes down to trying to understand what the child is perceiving which, I'm learning, is often different from what adults view at face value.

To my unresearched mind, attention span isn't so much about doing any one activity for a fixed period of time so much as engaging in a fluid thought process or manner of thinking. But that's just my opinion.

quite honestly, ADHD did not even cross my mind when I read your original post. DS4.10's attention span is all over the place, mainly because of the interest problem I mentioned and he was evaluated for ADHD and it was ruled out. His therapists over the years never suggested ADHD either. They suggested gifted with too many different interests not necessarily in what we or the school would like to see.

I wasn't suggesting anyone's child has adhd! I was just pointing out that there is indeed often a connection between regulating attention and workin memory, particularly auditory working memory.

As it happens my child with Aspergers has major WM problems and CAPD, my child with ADHD has HG working memory... So my child with ADHD is not typical in this regard... My child with Aspergers has major attention regulation problems too.

Since working memory develops with age, it seems like one could have poor working memory relative to peers as a child and still have good working memory as an adult.

Does anyone know:
1. Are there any known early childhood predictors of adult working memory? I would assume musical ability would be one predictor along with attention span but again, I don't know much about this.
2. At what earliest age can one identify working memory deficits? It seems like preschoolers have such undeveloped working memory that it would be hard to identify deficits.

I'm not asking for personal reasons, just curious.

In Deborah Ruf's book, 5 Levels of Gifted, she has an Appendix entitled: Developmental Guidelines for Identifying Gifted Preschoolers. It lists various tasks and the age normally developed vs. a 30% more advanced example.

An example:
Task: Looks at pictures in a book.
Normal months developed: 10
30% more developed: 7

She lists 26 tasks starting at one month with, "Smiles socially at people" through 50 months with, "Draws person with neck, hands, and clothes".

Is this what you're looking for?

I have learned a lot from her book, btw.

Deborah Ruf's LOG and checklist are a load of pig's intestines IMO. It's hard, but really you just have to wait it out to see what sort of brain and child you have on your hands. No simple checklist is going to replace maturity, observation of the child and real testing once they're old enough.

LOL, I googled the RUF's checklist before you replied and wondered if there was any science to back it up. OK, back to waiting and trying not to think about it too much.

I think this is really good advice. And, I agree about the LOGs.

I don't think attention span in preschoolers is linked to intelligence. My child's temperament is so reasonable, calm, and easy going. Her attention span has always been limitless. That is not the temperament I think of when I think of gifted children. I do think it helps. I actually think it is this temperament, and not intelligence, that makes her look so advanced at a young age. Most toddlers do not sit still and let you read anything to them all day thereby learning heaps of information. (In this case it really comes down to the caregiver's attention span, right?) Most four-year-olds are not able to sit and read books to themselves in 2 and 3 hour stretches daily.

I think it is a great advantage, but long attention span has only made me doubt more. I will say that it was clearly evident to many that have met her that DD's attention span was off the charts loooooong. I never had any doubt in that.

All gifted children have the same temperament? I don't think attention span contraindicates giftedness! As demonstrated by my always-attentive kids tested as MG-HG.

I found the Ruf Guide reasonably accurate, but can see how that could also be a fluke

I have to turn away from any lists that talk about early talkers, early walkers, early everything. Both my boys were very late sitters (11 & 9 months ... though both crawled before sitting unassisted) late walkers (18 & 15 months) late talkers (3 years and ... still waiting at 3.3 years for the younger one), so definitely not the "usual gifted path". But out of curiosity, I did do the assessment for both of them online and they placed in level 2-3 even with the late developments in speech and motor skills. With the younger one I had to lie on his age since he only just turned 3. So until the boys are old enough to get them tested with some reliability, we know very little.

I guess you just can't pigeon-hole people. I always think of gifted kids as being non-sleepers because mine definitely fit that stereotype and yet a friend of mine has a gifted boy who took 2-3 hour naps until he was four! My mind boggles at that

I have those non-sleepers! lol They can function on 4hrs of sleep / day!

My five-year-old doesn't nap every day now, but when he naps, it's generally for 2-3 hours. At four, he needed 2-3 hours every day without fail. We made my daughter stop napping two weeks before she started kindergarten, but I think we would have gotten another year of them if we hadn't.

DD spent 4.5 minutes when she 4.5 months old successfully kicking the insect net we had on her. She hated the dome blocking her view and had been trying for a week to get it off her. She finally just decided the trick was to not give up. She used her feet and legs first and once she lifted one end up, she used her hands to finally throw the stupid thing behind her head. Then, she gave that "i have accomplished" smile that was priceless. I recorded the whole thing as I watched in disbelief. She continues to have that kind of persistence when she puts her mind on something. Her attention span at 3.8 years now is regularly 1-2 hours (sometimes more) doing things she enjoys such as drawing, clay sculpture, or messy independent play. Her span for adult-directed activities is max 15 minutes unless she finds a way to take it her own direction. Regarding sleep, she sleeps 9 hours at night and still takes 3 hour naps almost everyday. I am LUCKY but she inherits that from me. I still need 10 hours/night to function properly.