Can parents help prevent ADHD by teaching young children attention-building skills?
If you engage you preschooler in activities such as games, blocks, and puzzles, you can teach your child attention skills. Reading to your child is another valuable tool for teaching your child how to pay attention. You can also use nurturing techniques to improve attention. Frequent physical contact and lots of affection are very effective tools. Not everyone agrees, but some experts think that television watching can inhibit a child’s ability to learn to pay attention. Regardless of whether or not TV causes attention deficiencies, the American Academy of Pediatrics says children younger than 2 should have limited exposure to television. The Academy also says that after they turn 2 they should only watch about one to two hours a day. Some research shows that teaching attention skills to children with ADHD can help improve their ability to maintain attention. In one study, children with ADHD and without ADHD were given both visual and auditory attention tasks. The tasks were relatively
