Attention spans were longer.

I've been wondering about this lately. As a kid, I spent hour upon hour learning about computing: typing in Basic code from a magazine into a Commodore 64, playing with music on an Atari STe, learning my way around a DOS command line, dabbling with 3D modelling... just so much stuff that my own kids would never have the patience for.

I wonder if it's just that kids today (gods that makes me sound old!) are constantly surrounded by entertaining things to do - gaming, TV/films, music, social media.

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hnthrowaway0315 an hour ago | parent | next [-]

I have been shielding my 6 years old son from electronics, except 40 minutes of TV twice a week. I have no idea how to grow his patience and perseverance, though. He is like me, who doesn't have a lot of patience to begin with, so I can't really guide him through some of the situations. We have been taking him to some activities as well as reading to him but nothing really sticks.

I just hope eventually he loves reading and learns in a more traditional way instead of from laptops and pads.

	▲	GordonS an hour ago \| parent [-]
		We struggled to get our son into reading too, but he took straight away to comics, and from there he had a long stint with graphic novels (e.g. Percy Jackson, Artemis Fowl). You can get more mature graphic novels as they mature and progress, e.g. City of Dragons. And eventually he picked up an Alex Rider book, and hasn't stopped since. He's now how I remember myself as a kid - nose stuck in a book, completely engrossed!

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jdw64 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I think that's actually a pretty accurate observation. I'm not a cognitive science expert, so I don't know the details, but there have been articles about 'popcorn brain' due to sustained attention issues, right? Personally, I use LLMs for coding quite often (in my environment, I'm often forced to use them). Compared to the past, when I use an LLM, the answers come immediately, so it seems harder to focus deeply than before. The generation younger than me, which is more focused on Shorts, probably has it even worse

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trumpdong 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I think it's an adaptation. Instead of living in a world with limited valuable information we're now living at the end of a firehose of never-ending near-useless information which has to be filtered at high speed.

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Braini 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Thats correct - and I notice that on myself. There are just much more things reachable at any point in time compared to our youth it takes real effort to focus.

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hnthrowaway0315 an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

I have been wondering how to train my 6-year old son and myself to increase my attention span.

Some rules are obvious -- cutoff mobiles and pads completely (he doesn't have access to them so it's for me), sit in the library and study from books (I believe this is even possible for programming topics as I can write on paper). Basically, cutting off everything electronics definitely helps -- even putting my phone in the bag improves productivity significantly.

But the problem is, my son is unruly. If I put him in the library, most likely he runs around and messes things up, which ends up we leave early without doing anything.