(ANSA) – ROME, SEPTEMBER 20 – Attention problems are increasingly common among school-age children, who are often overstimulated, poorly motivated, and sleep deprived. We must not exaggerate with apprehension, but we must not underestimate the problem either. The experts of the Italian Society of Child and Adolescent Neuropsychiatry (Sinpia) explain how to behave during the thirtieth national congress underway in Verona.
“The mechanisms for maintaining attention that worked twenty years ago can no longer work now. We must adapt to the paradigm shift, aiming for a less invasiveness of digital devices in our lives and working on cooperative learning, which stimulates emotions”, explains Elisa Fazzi, president of Sinpia and director of Child and Adolescent Neuropsychiatry at the Asst Spedali Civili of Brescia.
First of all, however, we must distinguish between a real disorder and a problem. “It’s one thing – explains Massimo Molteni, head of developmental psychopathology at the IRCCS Eugenio Medea in Lecco, to ANSA – to talk about Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), a condition that has precise characteristics and prevalence estimates of 2-4% of children, according to Italian studies. This requires treatment by a specialist and adequate therapies in relation to the severity”. It’s another thing to talk about attention problems: “the difficulty in maintaining attention – specifies the expert Sinpia – is an increasingly widespread problem in all age groups, but among children in the learning phase it can have more serious consequences”. In this case, external factors have a significant weight. “For example, the use of digital devices, social media and video games leads to a limited attention span and continuously shifted from one segment to another”. The first piece of advice is therefore to limit children’s exposure, but parents should also reduce the time they themselves spend in this way.
Tablets and smartphones should be used less in front of children.”
A lack of attention can also depend on motivation. “We underestimate – observes Molteni – that in children the motivational life is central. The lack of motivation is linked to the fact that the proposals of adults are often not very attractive compared to what they would have on the web and social media, where everything travels quickly: when they are faced with a written text and a single stimulus, attention becomes labile.
This can become a hindrance to academic performance.”
The advice, in this case, is to “increase experiences with activities aimed at cooperative learning, where the added value is the group: in this context, attention broadens and competition, which is prevalent in social media, decreases”.
Finally, the lack of sleep also weighs, conclude the Sinpia experts. Therefore, in the evening, all stimulating activities, especially visual ones, should be eliminated because they worsen the quality and quantity of sleep. (ANSA).
2024-09-21 03:10:34