Distraction is a Curious Thing
Did you realize that there is more than one type of distraction?
That’s good to know because you can't address a problem that you can not identify and describe accurately.
When you are trying to help someone else, identifying where exactly the problem is can be really, really hard. This is especially true when you are trying to help people who are not yet used to observing themselves in detail.
Today, I figured out that my son Sean's version of distraction is fundamentally different from mine.
When I am distracted, I am interrupted or I am circling around the thing I want to focus on. While this happens, I still have the thing I want to do somewhere in the back of my mind. If you asked me mid-distraction "what did you mean to do" I would be able to tell you "I was going to do the laundry but then I got distracted by the book on the nightstand and ended up reading for a bit".
On the surface, what happens to Sean looks similar. He goes off to his room to tidy something up or complete an errand and when I come by half an hour later, he is listening to music, reading, or playing a video game.
The result is the same as it is for me. The thing we meant to do did not (yet) get done.
However, when I ask Sean "What did you mean to do" he often can't answer. For him, a distraction is not a temporary shift in priorities as it is for me. It is not a veering off the path but still knowing where the path is.
The moment Sean gets distracted, he completely forgets what he was meant to do. It's not just sitting there at the back of his mind until he returns to it. It's completely gone. Often, even when I ask him, he can't tell me what he was on the way to doing. Unless he can refer back to a list or I tell him, he is often left guessing what he meant to do.
This is a completely different situation than my distraction. I only need help "unglueing" myself from whatever distracted me. Sean needs help remembering what he wanted to do in the first place.
Practically, this means that we have to work out systems that he can use to jog his memory. I hung a dry-erase board on his door to see if writing things down on it helps him. Of course, he also needs to practice not getting distracted in the first place. But that's a whole separate skill.
