5 hacks to help your child improve their concentration

Asked by Anonymous on our Parent Webinar series.

Given the theme of concentration this month, we’ve gone through the questions that have been emailed to us by hundreds of parents just like you to find the 5 most common concentration related questions. The questions were:

1. When is the best time to study? 

2. How long should students study for? 

3. My child finds it hard to focus for the first 1-5 minutes – how can I help them? 

4. Does music help or hinder concentration? 

5. How long and often should my child take breaks for? 

1. When is the best time to study? 

We tend to find that every student has what we call a Zone of Effectiveness, that is a time of day when they work best. For some students that’s first thing when they get home from school of in the afternoon, so that they can then laze around, guilt free in the evening. For other students it’s after they have had a chance to get home, have something to eat, decompress a bit and then switch on after dinner. Most students tend to intuitively know when they work best and as such, some of their behaviour will be driven by a natural gravitation to this time. 

However, there are a few practical hacks that students can use to make sure that they aren’t simply leaving the work to the last minute when their concentration spans might be starting to slip: 

• Melatonin typically starts to increase after 9:30pm for teenagers, slightly delayed relative to adults and pre-teens, which can leave them feeling fresh later in the evening than the rest of the household. At this point, cognitive processing drops quickly, so working past 9.30pm, will lead to low levels of concentration, making study increasingly pointless.

  
  

• Impact of blue light exposure: If your child works on a laptop or device then they will be subject to the blue light emitted from this screen. Studies have found that this blue light suppresses sleep and ideally someone should have 90-minutes free from exposure to properly reset their melatonin levels so that they sleep. Further, cognitive processing working under blue light tends to be lower, whilst lack of sleep will impact concentration the next day as well. This would mean ideally, students should be looking to start wrapping up their study around between 8:30pm and 9:00pm.

  
  

• Err on getting the work done first: We tend to procrastinate most on tasks that we don’t want to do, which means they get left for last thing in the evening, when concentration levels will be declining. As such, we would always err on students building the habit of getting the work done as the very first thing in the afternoon so that they can relax into the evening. 

2. How long should my child study for? 

A general rule of thumb is that a student’s attention span is roughly 2-3 times their age, meaning that a 15 year old’s attention span will tend to be from 30-45 minutes, depending on how interesting a task is. Research also shows that after 20-30 minutes of work a student’s attention tends to decrease by 15-30%.  

This is one of the reasons that the Pomodoro technique is one of the most widely used time management strategies. The Pomodoro technique suggests that people have the highest levels of attention when working in 25-minute chunks. Developed by Francesco Cirillo, the technique was named after the small tomato (pomodoro in Italian) kitchen timers that sits in many Italian kitchens, and which Cirillo used to time tasks. The system is widely used as the short-time span makes the idea of working less intimidating or overwhelming, decreasing the tendency to procrastinate and making it easier to get started. The shorter study periods ensure that the attention levels are higher and less likely to succumb to distraction. Cirillo suggested that people work in 25-minute segments separated by a quick 5-minute break to re-charge. 

Younger or more distractable students are advised to start by using the shorter 25-minutes blocks to study, whereas older students or students with longer attention spans might be able to study for up to 45-minute blocks with a break in between. Importantly, this system provides a good way for students to build up their attention muscle. 

3. My child finds it hard to focus for the first 1-5 minutes – how can I help them?

   
   

For most students, the first 1-5 minutes of study is the hardest. Most students spend 30-minutes procrastinating, delaying study then finally drag themselves to their desk, the kitchen table or wherever they study, slumping into their chair, telling themselves how bored they are. This isn’t a particularly motivated physiology or psychology, so it isn’t particularly surprising that students then struggle to concentrate. 

Instead, before sitting down to study, we suggest that students get pumped up.  

What we mean by this is for students to perform some brisk movement for 60 seconds to get the blood flowing. They could put on some music and dance around like crazy. Do sit-ups or push-ups. Shadow box. Just do something that gets them moving.  

The reason for this is that when students move, they begin to activate the pre-frontal cortex - which is like pressing the on button for concentration and focus. The movement also triggers the release of dopamine and norepinephrine, which are the two hormones/neurotransmitters that ADHD medication work on to increase focus. A short burst of movement triggers both. As we know, dopamine activates the body’s reward system, driving action in anticipation of a reward, whilst norepinephrine helps increase focus. In other words, the movement will put your child’s body in a much more switched-on state than starting in sloth mode. 

Then, once your child is at their desk, they shouldn’t spend time thinking about how boring the study or homework is going to be. Instead, they should start working immediately. If they are making notes, they should start typing or writing. If they are memorising their notes, they should pick them up and start reading. Once they’ve started, they’ll tend to find that it isn’t as bad as they thought it would be. By removing the negative self-talk, your child will get themselves in the zone as fast as possible. 

4. Does music help or hinder concentration? 

This is one of the most asked questions in study skills, and the research gives a nuanced but practical answer: it depends entirely on the type of work that a student is doing, and the type of music. 

If your child is studying for an exam, they will be doing deep cognitive work: memorising notes or writing practice exams and any distraction risks impacting outcomes. In these moments silence is always the suggested solution. 

However, if a student is doing less cognitive, repetitive or less interesting work, then background music may be helpful, but the question then becomes, which type of background music. An experiment with 133 participants found that music with higher intensity is more distracting and has a greater effect on task performance and concentration. The result helped formulate the Attention Drainage Effect theory which posits that a distraction causes attention capacity to be unconsciously reduced or “drained” while performing a cognitive task. Because hip hop has stronger sounds and faster tempos, it has a more pronounced negative effect than lighter music.  

By contrast, background music significantly enhances cognitive performance and emotional wellbeing in students who prefer background music, demonstrating improved concentration and reduced anxiety during tasks. The genre that consistently emerges as best suited to studying is lo-fi or instrumental music — low tempo, no lyrics, minimal variation. It provides enough ambient sound to mask distracting background noise without competing for the brain's language-processing resources. 

As such, the rule is: 

• High cognitive processing: no music 

• Lower cognitive processing, repetitive, less interesting work: instrumental music 

5. How long and often should my child take breaks for?

    

Students should think about taking 2 types of breaks between study blocks:

• Short breaks for short-study blocks: When students are using short-study blocks like recommended in the Pomodoro Method, students should take a break of 5-10 minutes. These breaks should be positioned not as a reward for studying, but rather as a biological refresher. Short breaks allow the brain to reset and maintain optimal cognitive function throughout the study period. Neuroimaging studies show increased brain activity in regions associated with memory and learning after short breaks.

  
  

• Longer breaks after 2-3 consecutive short-study breaks: Students should take a longer break of 15-20 minutes. Critically, what your child does in the break matters as much as taking one. Scrolling through social media or checking emails doesn't recharge the brain — it depletes it further. Effective break activities should allow genuine mental rest. Active recovery involving gentle physical movement increases blood flow to the brain and tends to be more restorative for sustained study sessions.