How long is a child's attention span at each age?
Attention span isn't one number — it varies with the task and with interest. As a rough guide, the time a child can focus on something they didn't choose is around two to three minutes per year of age: 8-12 minutes at four, 16-24 minutes at eight. The same child can stay far longer with a game they love, and that isn't a contradiction: it's what interest-driven attention looks like. To speak of an attention problem, the difficulty has to show up in more than one setting and persist over time.
Read the articleAges 7 to 12: what changes in a school-age child?
Between seven and twelve a child stops seeing the world through the family's eyes and starts applying their own measures. Concrete logic settles in, and rules, fairness and comparison come to the front. Friendships become a domain independent of the family, and self-evaluation feeds from it. Emotionally there's a shift too — your child stops telling you everything, because they've noticed they have an inner world. That quietness is usually not distance; it's the development itself.
Read the articleDevelopmental milestones from 3 to 6: what to expect when
Between three and six a child builds their body, their language and their social world at the same time. Roughly: at three, sentences reach three or four words and play shifts from side-by-side to together; at four, storytelling and 'why' questions take over; at five, rule-based play, turn-taking and letter and number awareness arrive; at six, the foundations of reading and writing settle along with real friendship preferences. Milestones describe order, not a timetable — what matters is not the age itself but whether progress is continuing.
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Development by age
Every age has its own work — what to expect, and when to ask someone.