Are We Teaching Attention Skills?

Are we teaching attention skills?
By Jessica Garrett, PhD


We know the human brain is capable of remarkable plasticity. New research suggests that the brain continues developing into adulthood. One of the last regions of the brain to develop is the pre-frontal cortex.

Recent research also suggests that ADD and ADHD have a basis in the brain. In particular the pre-frontal cortex and the motor cortex seem slower to mature in the brains of people with ADHD. Diet, exercise, and a lot of stimulant drugs are used to cope with the symptoms of ADD & ADHD. Stimulants in particular can be a god-send to people and families coping with ADD/ADHD. But are these drugs used in concert with learning SKILLS and STRATEGIES for focusing attention and other executive functioning skills.

Let's back up a step. Executive functioning is the name we give to all the "parenting" tasks accomplished by the brain -- specifically the pre-frontal cortex. This includes planning, thinking flexibly, thinking abstractly, acquiring rules, initiating appropriate actions and inhibiting inappropriate actions, and selecting relevant sensory information. I think of the pre-frontal cortex as the most "adult" portion of the brain, not only because it doesn't complete it's development until well into young-adulthood, but also because these tasks of executive functioning seem particularly "adult."

These executive functioning tasks are some of the tasks that kids with ADD/ADHD have most difficulty with. But here's the thing: all kids have trouble with these things until they LEARN HOW TO DO THEM. What three year old can think abstractly? Not a one. What 8 year old doesn't occasionally behave inappropriately (can I get a fart joke?)? These are things we teach kids as their brains develop. It's a back-and-forth between the development of the brain's capabilities and the demands of the environment. If we never work those attentional muscles, they will not develop. This isn't to say that we should expect any kid to be able to, for example, plan an elaborate project without any support. But it does mean that we should help them break the task into manageable pieces and support them until they can do it themselves. In the words of the great educational psychologist, we should scaffold their thinking (okay...those aren't exactly Vygotsky's words. He was Russian, after all. But that's the gist). We should treat them as cognitive apprentices (Vygotsky, again) or thinkers-in-training. That's for all kids, including, maybe especially, those with ADD/ADHD.

If we reconceptualized the deficits of ADD/ADHD as areas that needed more training (planners-in-training? concentrators-in-training?), would we change how we treated the condition? I think we would.
In fact, I suspect that by allowing our executive-functioners-in-training to rely too strongly on drugs to alleviate the symptoms of their problem, we're denying them the opportunity to develop those skills that will allow them to be adult thinkers -- successful executives of their brain.

Source URL: http://www.psychologytoday.com/node/38677