When you see Occupational Therapists doing fun activities with kids, you may think that ‘oh! Their job is so fun because all they do is play with kids!’ while this statement rings some truth, it’s just the tip of the iceberg.
Some of the things that we observe when a kid does an activity is their work behaviors, which are behaviors that a person shows when doing a task. It’s really good to see children playing or doing activities that interest them, but what concerns me most is how will kids react when they are given tasks that are structured, non-preferred, changing, or is difficult.
The behaviors that OTs observe can be grouped into four: attention span, concentration, frustration tolerance, and impulse control.
Attention span is the duration of how long a child can focus on an activity. It answers the question ‘how long can you sustain your focus in doing the activity?’. The attention span for adults and young adults (think university students) can range for 45 minutes to an hour. For kids, it can be lesser. To quantify this, we multiply their age by 3, to get the expected timespan for their age. For example, for 2-year-olds we expect them to focus on a task for at least 5-6 minutes. This formula works for kids up to five years old. For concentration, it’s closely linked to one's attention span that’s why sometimes people use these terms interchangeably. However, for concentration, what we deal with is the child’s ability to redirect himself or herself back to the task despite being distracted. This answers the question of ‘will the child be able to go back to the activity when his or her attention is taken away, for example by the sight of his or her favorite toy?’
Frustration tolerance shows how a child deals with frustrations while doing an activity. Frustrations may arise when there are increased demands or challenges for the activity, repetitions for the activity, immediate changes, or when the activity itself is non-preferred by the child.
Lastly, impulse control is the ability to control one’s impulses to continue and finish doing the activity despite conflicting interests. For example, choosing between playing a computer game and studying for an exam the next day, impulse control makes sure that what needs to be done is done.
Over-all, these behaviors improve over time with your child’s maturation, which is a normal and developmental process. You don’t expect your kids to be able to sit down and finish algebra when they’re only 6 years old. Do you?
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