Jonathan Wilhoite Blog: Does Your Child Develop Early Through Proper Attention?

Friday, April 29, 2016

Does Your Child Develop Early Through Proper Attention?

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You may be able to tell if your husband or wife is not carefully paying attention when taking turns watching over the baby, as there is a way that this can be found out, according to studies.

If you are taking your turn watching over your baby, then better pay full attention and make every effort to set aside your smartphone, gadget or your favourite game show, after studies revealed that getting distracted or doing something else during playtime with your kids would rub off your impatient behavior on them and cause them to lose focus and shorten their attention spans.

This, after a recent study by a group of psychologists from Indiana University was published in the journal Current Biology, where the researchers were able to determine a direct link between how long a caregiver focuses on an object and how long a baby stays focused on the same object.

Study author Chen Yu said that a child’s ability to sustain attention becomes a strong indicator for future success in their cognitive development milestones, problem solving and language acquisition.

Yu, a professor of the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences of the Bloomington College of Arts and Sciences of Indiana University, pointed out that caregivers who appear distracted or whose eyes wander most of the time during playtime with their children appeared to have negative impacts on an infant’s attention span while in the early years of physical and mental development.

The study’s co-author Linda Smith, a Distinguished Professor and Chancellor’s Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences, pointed out that it has been a long believed hypothesis that attention is a property of individual development and that their study showed that attention is in fact affected by social interaction.

“It really appears to be an activity performed by two social partners where it showed one’s attention significantly influence another’s,” Smith said.

The test was conducted by mounting cameras on the heads of both caregivers and infants in the study where it provided a view on children and parents playing together in a carefully designed environment that resembled a play area.

As both children and parents played with physical toys, the eye –tracking software integrated in the camera showed and simulated several scenarios where the parent leads the play, then the babies guided to play and the children being allowed to ‘lead’ the play.

The children that were able to focus intently and lengthily on their parents were those given the role to lead the play, where they developed a more intimate attention with both parties.

The researchers also added that this could help develop more scientific approaches to developing young minds for growth and progress.

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