The Transition Card

 
In my previous post about transitions, I introduced Max, who found it difficult to let go of one activity and take up another.  It didn’t matter if the next one was something he liked doing.  He just couldn’t break away.
Transitions can be difficult for everybody, but a behavioral problem resulting from this difficulty is developmentally most likely in preschoolers.  We tend to think of young children as having very short attention spans.  This is true for the activities we impose on them, such as sitting quietly at the dinner table while adults talk about stuff that doesn’t interest them and serve them food that interests them even less. 

The playground is a fluid environment, where the games played by children of this age morph seamlessly as we watch with rules that change moment by moment.  So in a sense, that can be taken as evidence of short attention span.  A more empathic interpretation suggests intense concentration and focused attention, unwavering over the duration of the play period. 
The International Correspondence Chess Federation was founded in 1951 for people serious about playing  chess, one move at a time, by mail, courier, or homing pigeon.  The picture above is an official postcard, a relatively recent innovation.  Chess is famous for requiring intense focus and concentration.  Does it require more focus than that preschool playground game of tag/rugby/steeplechase, with rules different at the end than at the beginning?  The preschool game could never be played by postcard.

I think preschoolers look at the world as an unknown territory, ripe for exploration and new discovery.  Their time in the sandbox, time with blocks is often overtly experimental.  Watch them carefully and patiently and you’ll see it too.  Maybe they want to figure out how to get a roof on the structure they made with blocks.  They try one shape of block, but that doesn’t work, then another.  Eventually they see that they have to change the support structure.  The first time a child is able to build a little tunnel or arch in sand is a triumph of inventive engineering over the inflexible physics of gravity.  This is not evidence of a short attention span.
So it’s no surprise that it can be tough to pull somebody away from an intense experiment which they feel is right on the brink of a marvelous discovery.

I suggested to Max’s mother that she give him plenty of warning.  The first, without a time frame, just to give him a head’s up that something’s coming.  Then a physical reminder such as a tap on the shoulder, at 20 minutes, 10 minutes, and 4 or 5 minutes.  Keep these reminders consistently timed, so that he eventually will get a visceral feel for how much longer he’s got. 

She loved this plan, and promised to try it right away. 

It didn’t work.  When I saw them a couple of weeks later, she told me that it did seem to help a little, because he seemed less surprised when she turned off the game/TV/light or demanded that he move to the next thing.  But he still didn’t really start to make the transition on his own, which I had honestly hoped he would do.
When children respond to this method of transition warnings, they typically complain at the first warning, try to negotiate at the 20-minute notice, but at 5 minutes they start putting away the toys that they have been playing with.  That didn’t happen with Max.

This hyperfocused state that preschoolers can be in, I suspect, is related to their concrete thinking.  Since they can’t picture themselves doing something else in the future, a future activity can’t be made more attractive to them than what they’re doing right now.  I tried to come up with a more concrete transition system for Max, that was less abstract than being told something would occur 20 minutes in the future.  From his perspective, that’s as good as never.

I took my idea from soccer.  It’s not that soccer players have a problem with concrete thinking (although it’s possible they do).  But soccer is so heavily international that there is no universal language with which officials can communicate with players.  They use cards.

I suggested that she work with him on making his own cards.  It’s OK that the time-warning system didn’t work.  At least he now knows that such a system exists and that it’s something you want him to do.  So explain this to him when he’s not deep into an activity, and make some cards out of cardboard.  Let him decorate or design them.  Ask him which of the cards he would like to mean 20 minutes, or 10, 5, or 2.  He can make these for you as a present that you’ll really be grateful for.  Instead of a verbal reminder, you actually hand him the appropriate card which warns of an upcoming activity change.  He may not want it, but it’s completely concrete.  Remember that part of my invention is doing it together.  When you sit together to make these cards, you should make a card for him.  It’s a 5-minute extra card, which works like the snooze button on your alarm clock.   When he gives it to you, he gets another 5 minutes.  You have to honor this!  Here’s a subtle point in my invention:  he gives you the 5-minute extra card.  That means he doesn’t get another and another and another.  It becomes way more difficult to whine and negotiate when you have given away all the currency of time which these cards represent.   You can show some concrete thinking, too.

Transition Issues -- A Definition

Pretty much every week, I’m in an airplane.  At this point, I have flown so often that nearly everything is routine about it.  Those of us who board earlier in the process are already sitting as the rest of the passengers walk on.  Nearly everybody is using this time to talk on their cellphone, text messages, or do something technological until the plane takes off, when all electronics must be shut off.  So it was not unusual that the guy across the aisle from me was chatting breezily on his blackberry phone in a foreign language as the plane filled up.  I heard the big door shut and sealed by the flight attendant, who announced that all electronics must be turned off.  They walked up and down the aisle.  Politely, they reminded a few of the passengers that they had to finish using their laptops or phones.  The big jet was being backed out of the gate.  One of them tapped him on the shoulder and gestured, with a smile, to his phone.  He nodded his head in cooperation as he continued to talk on the phone.  The plane started to taxi to the runway.  Both flight attendants approached the man and told him verbally that he must shut off the phone.  He kept talking but nodded his understanding.  They walked away, as the plane got closer to the end of the runway.  The plane stopped.  Both pilot and co-pilot, in uniform, emerged from the cockpit and came to the man.  He saw them, smiled and held up his index finger, as if to say ‘I’ll be with you in  a minute.’  One of the officers said, “In 15 seconds we will have you removed from this aircraft by Federal marshalls.  You will be taken to Federal detention.  You are committing a crime and will have a criminal record.”  The man, showing an unexpected facility with languages, seemed suddenly to understand English.  He abruptly said into the phone, “I gotta go,” and turned off the device.

Ask any parent about getting their child to turn off the video mid-story and wash their hands for dinner.  Sometimes they wish they had a couple of Federal marshalls to call.

This is the first essay of several on transition issues, techniques, and objects.  I hope some readers find these ideas helpful.

Transitions are the times of overlap between what we are doing and what we are doing next. 

This is my own definition, so it doesn’t appear just this way in parenting books.  But I think it applies throughout our lives.  In babies, it could be transition between being awake and being asleep, or maybe between being held and being put down into the crib.  For preschoolers, it might be the transition between one activity and another, say coloring vs. playing with blocks.  In school, there are transitions between classroom work and lunch, lunch and active play, then back to class.  By high school, it may be all about just getting off the phone.

Being able to navigate successful transitions is a life skill.  Our frequent flyer, for example, nearly spent a night in jail.  There’s an important balance to be struck between being bad at this and being too good at it.

Many children are brought to me for evaluation of what is thought to be an attention problem.  (Because I do this very carefully, I often find other issues. )  Other children are brought in for behavioral advice because every transition results in a tantrum.

Being able to pay attention is also a key life skill.  It enables us to listen to a story, to follow crucial directions, and to fall in love.  Even if it didn’t help us get through school, it would be important in establishing human relationships and stalking prey on the savannah.

But it’s also important, and little studied I think, to be able to break off our attention when appropriate.  Otherwise, we might end up on the No-Fly List.

There’s something about certain activities, I believe, that interferes with the normal balance of transition controls in the brain for certain children.  For some, video games tap into something very primal.  There aren’t many activities that a child can do for so many hours that they ignore bodily functions.  There’s a clue about autistic spectrum disorders here, by the way.  Some children with ASDs will continue to do a repetitive activity until they fall asleep exhausted, or are distracted or stopped by somebody.  Maybe it’s making a sound, maybe it’s not so benign.  Decades ago, some of these were assigned the unfortunate categorization of self-stimulatory behaviors. 

Max was brought to me because his mother didn’t know what to do.  In kindergarten, he did fine with the class activities and didn’t get in trouble.  In school, he could transition between circle games and coloring and learning to write his name just as well as everybody else in the class.  He was not a behavior problem.  At home, however, it was a different story.  No matter what he was doing--playing with blocks, playing with his robot people, or looking through picture books of trucks--his mother couldn’t pull him away.  She’d plead with him to come to dinner, bargain with him to get into the bath, but he always said words that were the equivalent of holding up an index finger as if to say, ‘I’ll be with you in a minute.’  When she was more assertive, a long and unpleasant tantrum exploded.

Max was not, in my professional opinion, developmentally abnormal, attention-challenged, or emotionally unstable.

It was hard for him to give up a fun activity.  Because of his normal developmental stage, it was almost impossible for him to envision himself in a future situation, even if that future was only 15 or 30 minutes away.  So even when his next activity would be even more fun, he could never appreciate it.  So there was never an incentive to stop what he was doing and move on.

For the record, he was brought to me with his mother complaining that he was constipated.  It was only after I asked lots of questions that the whole story emerged.  He focused so intensely on whatever he was doing that he never wanted to stop, even for brief bathroom breaks.  After a while of ignoring the feeling that he had to go, he no longer felt that he had to go.  This led to a spiral of holding it in until it turned to concrete.

The first step would be helping him get to a less intensely-focused state, in which he'd be less and less invested in his current activity and more ready for the next.  I suggested a gentle reminder at 20-minutes.  Mom could tap him on the shoulder and let him know that a change was coming.  As expected, he would nod his head or indicate he understood but otherwise show no indication that he would comply.  Then again at 10-minutes, but this time with a little more discussion.  At 4 or 5 minutes, he should be told to shut off the video.  He won't, but he also won't be surprised when it happens.  Maybe he won't like the transition, but at least he'll be prepared for it.