How to help a child focus: what you can do today

Why focus comes and goes in children

Focusing means staying with one thing, tuning out distractions and holding back the urge to do something else. Researchers group these skills under the name executive functions. They include holding back impulses, working memory and switching between ways of thinking (Diamond 2013).

These skills mature slowly. A six-year-old can stick with a task for a much shorter time than a ten-year-old. That is normal. It is not a sign of laziness or a bad attitude.

Then there is the day itself. A child who slept badly, is hungry or just had a fight with a sibling will find it harder to concentrate. Adults are no different. So before you go looking for exercises, it pays to notice when things get hard.

Look first: when, where and for how long

For one week, watch without judging. Jot down when your child drifts off and when they are fully into something. Often a pattern shows up that you had not noticed before.

• Time of day: right after school, before dinner, late in the evening?
• Place: at the kitchen table with siblings, in their own room, in front of the TV?
• Task: only during homework, or also while playing and doing crafts?
• Length: after how many minutes does the fidgeting start?

If your child spends ages building with Lego or drawing but gets up after three minutes of math, that is a different picture from a child who can't settle into anything. Both are worth knowing, and both will come in handy if you later talk to your pediatrician.

Five things you can change today

Small changes to the setting often do more than any exercise. You don't have to do everything at once. Pick one thing and try it for a week.

1. Shorter stretches: three rounds of ten minutes with a real break in between, rather than half an hour in one go.
2. One instruction at a time: “Get your notebook” instead of “Get your notebook, sharpen your pencil and turn to page 12.”
3. A quiet spot: phone away, TV off, toys out of sight. What isn't there can't distract.
4. Movement first: a few minutes of running around or a movement game before it's time to sit at the table.
5. Praise the effort, not the result: “You kept going even though it was hard” stays with a child longer than “Great, all correct.”

Check the basics too: enough sleep, a snack after school, a glass of water on the table. It sounds obvious, but it often makes the biggest difference.

How to help a child focus with three short games

Games where children have to watch closely, remember something and stop themselves practice the same skills they need to concentrate. A review of programs for children aged four to twelve found that what made a difference was mostly regular practice that slowly got harder (Diamond & Lee 2011). Each game here takes only a few minutes.

To get moving: in the Cross Crawl March, elbow and opposite knee meet in a calm marching rhythm. Your child's body gets going before the sitting starts. Twenty repetitions are enough.

To practice stopping: in Red Light, Green Light, your child walks on “green” and freezes like a statue on “red.” This practices stopping an impulse in the middle of a movement. Stop-and-go games like this have been studied with preschoolers, with mixed results. A program in the US showed an effect (Schmitt et al. 2015), while a study in Kenya did not (Willoughby et al. 2021).

To wind down: with Shape Breathing, your child slowly traces a shape with one finger and breathes along with it. It fits well after rough play or before bed. One study with schoolchildren looked at slow, deep breathing and measured short-term changes in the body (Obradović et al. 2021). It doesn't show more than that.

If your child enjoys these, try Clap Echo next: you clap a rhythm, and your child claps it back. You'll find more ideas among the attention and focus activities for kids.

Talking with your child about it

Children pick up on it when adults are worried. A child who keeps hearing “Just concentrate!” may start to believe something is wrong with them. That makes getting started even harder.

Instead, ask your child what it feels like when they get stuck on a task. Some kids say their head is too loud. Others find the task boring or too hard. Answers like these often tell you more than any checklist.

Treat the games as time together, not as a chore. If your child isn't in the mood one day, skip it and try again tomorrow.

Movement before sitting still

Many parents try to get a restless child to sit still. The opposite often works better: move first, then sit. Several meta-analyses suggest that regular exercise may slightly improve executive functions and attention in children with ADHD (Song et al. 2023, Li et al. 2023).

The effects in these studies are moderate, and the programs usually ran over several weeks. A movement game before homework is not a switch that turns focus on. It is an easy place to start that takes almost no effort, and most kids enjoy it.

In practice, plan three to five minutes of movement before any sit-down task: jumping jacks, up and down the stairs, a stop-and-go game in the hallway. Follow it with a short breathing round so the move to the table feels less abrupt.

Screen time: an honest look

A meta-analysis of children up to age twelve found a link between more screen time and more behavior problems, including inattention (Eirich et al. 2022). The link is small, and it does not tell you which is the cause and which is the effect.

For young children, the World Health Organization advises against sedentary screen time before age two and recommends no more than one hour a day for two- to four-year-olds, with less being better (WHO 2019). For school-age children there is no single number. The American Academy of Pediatrics offers an online Family Media Plan where you can write down screen rules that fit your family.

You don't need to ban screens. It helps to keep them away from the time right before tasks that need focus, and to agree on set screen times so you are not negotiating from scratch every day.

When to get help

The ideas in this article are meant for everyday family life. They do not replace a diagnosis or treatment. Talk to your child's pediatrician if any of these apply to your child:

• The difficulties have lasted more than six months and show up both at home and at daycare or school.
• Your child is unhappy about it, withdraws or has hardly any friends.
• The school keeps contacting you, or grades drop noticeably.
• You have a feeling that something is off, even if you can't quite name it.

There is no single test for ADHD. The CDC says the first step is to talk with a healthcare provider, who gathers information from parents, teachers and other caregivers and checks whether something else explains the symptoms, for example with hearing and vision tests (CDC). In the UK, the NHS explains how a GP or the school's SENCO can refer a child for an assessment (NHS). Information and local support groups for parents are available from CHADD.

You won't find a self-diagnosis checklist here, and that is on purpose. Inattention has many possible causes, from lack of sleep to vision problems to worries a child can't put into words. Telling them apart is a job for professionals.

Frequently asked questions