|
 That’s because when parents stop focusing on playtime with their
baby to concentrate on other things like tiny screens, their infants
may mimic this behavior by also focusing on toys and other objects
for shorter periods of time.
In other words, babies learn to focus better when their parents
aren’t distracted, said lead study author Chen Yu, a brain science
researcher at Indiana University at Bloomington.
“If parents join a child’s attention on a toy object, children are
more likely to show longer attention on the target object compared
with cases that parents don’t show any attention or interest,” Yu
said by email.
This works best when parents follow their baby’s lead, Yu added.
“If parents try to lead by getting the child’s attention on the
object of the parent’s interest, this effort may not be successful,”
Yu said. “But if parents just follow the child’s attention/interest
it is easier to be in joint attention with their child.”
To understand how parental distraction influences babies’ attention
spans, Yu and colleagues outfitted 36 infant-parent pairs with
head-mounted gadgets that tracked their eye movements to measure how
long they focused on different objects.
The babies were around 11 to 13 months old.
Researchers put parents and babies in a room with several engaging
toys and then sat back to see what happened when the parents didn’t
get any instruction on how to interact with their kids.
Generally, care givers fell into two groups: those who let infants
direct the course of play and those who tried to guide babies toward
specific toys.
When parents looked where their kids did, they typically both paid
attention to the same object for more than 3.6 seconds. Then, the
infant’s attention lingered on the same object for another 2.3
seconds after their parent turned away.
While that may not seem like much time, the babies whose parents
followed their lead focused on objects for about four times longer
than did infants whose care givers’ were quickly distracted.
Babies whose parents made little effort to focus on what their kids
were playing with during the study had even shorter attention spans
than the children whose parents focused briefly before looking away.
[to top of second column] |
Beyond its small size, other limitations of the study include the
lack of information on other parent and caregiver behaviors that may
shape children's attention spans, the authors note in the journal
Current Biology.
Talking about toys during playtime and reading stories about toys,
for example, may increase young children's interest in these toys
and help them focus on these objects for longer periods of time,
they write.
The paper also didn't address how a parent's own history of
attention deficit or hyperactivity disorders might influence the way
their children learn to focus on objects.
The study only looks at how well children follow what their parents
look at second by second, and not at every way that kids mimic the
focus they see in care givers, noted Dr. Sam Wass, a researcher at
the University of East London and the University of Cambridge in the
U.K. who wasn't involved in the study.
"This paper isn't looking at attention span per se," Wass said by
email. "Rather, it is about how second-by-second changes in a
parent's attention influence a child's attention. So if I choose to
pay attention to nice things, my baby is more likely to pay
attention to them too."
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/1OeDEBD Current Biology, online April 28,
2016.
[© 2016 Thomson Reuters. All rights
reserved.] Copyright 2016 Reuters. All rights reserved. This material may not be published,
broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
 |
