In this episode of Early Childhood Chapters, host Emily Garman sits down with Dr. Julie Tourigny, pediatric occupational therapist and author of Calm and in Control, Organized and Engaged, and her upcoming release, Alert and Attentive. Together, they explore why attention is not a fixed trait but a skill that can be taught and strengthened in early childhood. Dr. Tourigny shares practical strategies educators and caregivers can use to help children regulate emotions, sustain focus, and thrive in both learning and play.
Emily Garman: Welcome to Early Childhood Chapters, the podcast from Gryphon House Books. Today we're joined by Dr. Julie Tourigny, pediatric occupational therapist, educator, and author of three powerful books for early childhood professionals, Calm and in Control, Organized and Engaged, and her newest release, Alert and Attentive. With more than 25 years of experience supporting young children's development, Julie has helped countless educators and families strengthen the essential skills of self-regulation, executive function, and attention in children. In this episode, we'll dive into the strategies from her new book, Alert and Attentive, exploring how teachers and caregivers can help children build focus, sustain attention, and engage meaningfully in learning and play. Welcome to the podcast, Julie. Well, tell me, how does it feel to have finished your three-book series?
This is really a major accomplishment and a contribution to the field. When you started writing your first book with Gryphon House, did you envision that this would be a three-book series, or were you thinking of just one book at that time? What made you realize there was more to be shared?
Julie Tourigny, OTD, MS, OTR/L: Yeah, thank you. I am really proud that this thought that I had a few years ago now, maybe about five years ago, has kind of grown into three complete books in a full series. I had no idea that that's what was gonna happen. I was really interested at the start of my career, which began in 1998, as you said, as a pediatric occupational therapist, I was really interested in handwriting and this other small niche of the children that I worked with called sensory integration or sensory integration disabilities.
As time has gone on in my field and in my work, more and more students, children were coming to our clinic or we were pushing into their school environments or daycares without the tools to keep themselves regulated, which is why I really kind of dove deep on my own to better my ability as a therapist to understand better what is emotional regulation or self-regulation. And because I did all that work, because we wanted to be good practitioners in our clinic space, it kind of evolved into this idea for a book. And I pitched it to Gryphon House, and you said yes. And as I was writing that first book, which is about self-regulation, I realized, gosh, there's a whole missing link to this, which is that executive function piece, similar and completely related, but not all about and only about self-regulation. So I started kind of jotting down notes as I was writing that first book, like, gosh, there's a whole other thing here on working memory. There's a whole bit here on flexible thinking. And that's what really evolved into a pitch for the second book. And again, Gryphon House said yes to that one. And similar. As I'm writing the executive function book, Organized and Engaged, I'm realizing that there is one final part to the series, and this is when I realized maybe it should become a series, the attention, focus, and concentration piece. So that's how they all came to be.
Emily Garman: What is it about the work that you do with children? And you can talk a little bit about that, but what made you realize that that this was really needed in the field?
Julie Tourigny, OTD, MS, OTR/L: So again, back in the late 90s when I began practicing, I was in Massachusetts. I was with Mass General Hospital and Spalding Rehab. And I did some work in their outpatient clinics. We also had an outreach program where we had contracts to go into the Winthrop Public School District. We went into a residential and day programming center for children who'd sustained some type of head injury. And a couple of other kinds of outreach opportunities.
And again, by and large, many of those children that I worked with had motor disabilities. They had motor difficulties. And as we progressed from the late 90s up through the early to mid 2000s, more and more children were coming to receive occupational therapy services with an inability to regulate their emotions well, with an inability to manage those big feelings that you get when you're three, four, five years old, with an inability to start a task, whether it's a play activity or an organized sport or a class activity, and finish it to the best of their ability. So I think it was just that shift in my practice over time to seeing that this was a real change and need.
Emily Garman: Who is the audience for these books?
Julie Tourigny, OTD, MS, OTR/L: Well, that's a great question. I would say the audience is anyone working in early childhood. So that could be a parent, it could be an in-home daycare provider, it could be somebody working in Montessori or a traditional program, all the way up through kindergarten and for sure the beginning of the year first grade. So kind of, I would say, months is the very beginning of when these skills are something we can start nurturing and developing through the middle or end of first grade.
Emily Garman: That's such a critical window of time for all kinds of development. So that really makes sense. Early in the book, Alert and Attentive, you describe attention as the ability to focus on something specific while ignoring non-important sights and sounds. Something I struggle with at times. Why is attention such an important skill for young children in every aspect of their life, whether they're in school, daycare, and just day-to-day living?
Julie Tourigny, OTD, MS, OTR/L: I like that question. So I think it could be known that we all recognize attention and focus, the ability to concentrate on what you should and block out that non-important information happening all the time all around us is incredibly important. What's the shift in thinking that I really tried to put forth in the book was that this is a skill. It's not a fixed trait. It's not something that we can command in our three-year-olds, our two-year-olds, our four-year-olds, even maybe sometimes our middle-of-the-year kindergartners that we can just kind of command and then, they have it. It's not something that we want to think means a person is just able to be quiet and sit still.
Right? It's a meaningful connection with the content, whether that's play, learning, socializing, eating, driving a car, for us adults. It's that meaningful connection with the content and finding relevance and gleaning something from it, whether it be a social interaction, a play experience, or some type of age-appropriate learning.
Emily Garman: And by calling it a skill, that implies to me that you can work on it, you can improve it. It isn't just, well, you're good at that or you're not. You can build it.
Julie Tourigny, OTD, MS, OTR/L: That's right, Emily. So you just said, and I bet we'll dive deeper into the parts to the whole of how do we teach it. But like you said, to something or filtering out those distractions or something that can be hard for you. Well, then we recognize that. And one of the big things is the recognition of, oh, this is a skill. I can throw. ideas and strategies added to make me better in these areas, whether that's a modification to your environment or child's environment, a change in our social culture of the classroom or the work environment, where we're moving from one style to maybe a more neutral or positive based style.
We're looking at the cultural nuances of our environments and we're leaning on those to glean relevance and meaningfulness so that we're recognizing that it is a skill that we the adults in the room or for our own self can be nurturing and improving upon but we can also be modifying our media environment to support that as well.
Emily Garman: In the book, you also talk about how attention, what we've just been talking about, and that self-regulation are really closely linked. can you share an example of how helping a child become self-regulated, regulating their emotions, can directly impact their ability to focus?
Julie Tourigny, OTD, MS, OTR/L: Yes, so self-regulation is the ability to remain calm and in control of your reactions to something that's given you a big feeling. it's the range of emotions. It could be I'm very mad and I don't know how to manage that feeling. It could be I'm really excited. It could be that I'm sad and lonely because I've left my home environment and I'm not feeling good about that transition. When a person isn't able to remain calm and in control of those feelings, then they're gonna be focusing that mental energy on that feeling, right? If you've ever like think about if you as an adult have been really anxious or really excited about an important email coming through.
A part of your brain is focusing your mental energy, waiting for that to come through. You are naturally distracted by that emotional push that into a two, three, four, five year old who's struggling with those big feelings they get from someone taking their toy, from them raising their hands and not being called on, from them tripping and falling on the playground in front of their peers and feeling very embarrassed over it. If they struggle to react, if they struggle to stay in control of their emotion, that reaction and that feeling, if it stays with them, is going to distract them from being able to focus on what they otherwise could and should be.
So yes, it's incredibly important to have well-regulated students or children in our environments before we start nurturing and teaching the attention and focus piece.
Emily Garman: I think that's really interesting that you talk about it in adults and in children. It looks different. And maybe we, I can imagine that sometimes teachers and adults who work with kids might get frustrated because children are not able to focus and be attentive in the way that most adults can. And obviously it's a challenge to keep preschoolers focused during circle time or transitions in classrooms. But what are some...maybe misunderstandings that lay people may have, people who don't have your expertise in the way attention looks different in young children versus older children or adults.
Julie Tourigny, OTD, MS, OTR/L: Yeah, so think about a time that you're driving somewhere new in the car and you have a passenger in the car maybe, you have your music on, and you all of a sudden are like, my gosh, I think I'm lost, or wait, these instructions aren't making sense to me. You immediately are saying to the person in the car, you gotta stop talking. You turn down the volume on the radio or you turn it off completely because you need to be locked in, because you've never driven here before and you don't want to be lost. You don't like that feeling.
We forget, I don't have any memory of being a two year old, we forget that at one point everything was important to us, right? We had no idea how to filter the non-relevant from the relevant, it all was a stimulus. It was time, again, in these early, early learning phases of our development between birth and two years of age, that we're starting to recognize familiar people, familiar sights and sounds, important reactions to when I cry, I get picked up, or I get my bottle, or I have my diaper changed. Those are the things that begin to shape people into recognizing important, relevant stimuli from the extraneous. Then you push a child into a brand new environment that is filled with toys and sounds and new smells and new peers. And they're like, my gosh, everything's amazing. Everything's important or the opposite. Everything feels overwhelming and scary to me. And it's all important. So I think the big thing, if you're new to the field of early childhood is to really think about that.
Julie Tourigny, OTD, MS, OTR/L: It's our opportunity to develop, again, attention as a skill, not for a child to just sit and stay and be quiet, or be passive, but to recognize in a meaningful way the importance of attending to something they find relevant and to learn and grow from those opportunities. Rather than just assuming, they know not to look at that. They know not to listen to the garbage truck coming every Friday, not to be bothered by the happenings in the hallway. That's not a possibility for most of our early learners.
Emily Garman: Yeah, why would it be that they have to learn the skill? Your book, the new book, includes a lot of strategies for helping educators to reduce distractions and to design environments that support attention. So can you share with us here what are just a couple of changes, simple things that educators can do today to make their classrooms more focus-friendly for those young kids?
Julie Tourigny, OTD, MS, OTR/L: So if you want to think about your environment, any environment, no matter what environment you're in, Montessori, in-home daycare, giant public school, private school that's play-based only.
You can consider your immediate environment as kind of a silent teaching partner. It's kind of your assistant. And you, the educator, have control over that. You can create, I like to, we call it the just right environment. You can equate that thinking to almost like the book Goldilocks, where we don't want the temperature too hot or too cold. We don't want the room to be sterile and white with nothing in it, but we also don't want it to be too overly cluttered with so many toys and so many art projects and that's going to be different. It's going to differ in my experience year to year, given the makeup of the students coming to the classroom. It's going to differ as you as the educator evolve and grow and move from maybe a two-year-old room to a kindergarten classroom. Again, private to public, in-home to Montessori, but you can be thinking about that environment as a just right opportunity to create the optimal kind of temperature.
Even some people like to take advantage of smells, that there is no smell at all or there's a gentle lavender smell at nap time or an invigorating kind of orange peel or lemon smell in the morning when the kids enter the room. I would really think in a low to no cost way, know, not to be buying a bunch of materials, that the environment can be your personal assistant because you do have a lot of control over making it just right.
Emily Garman: And that carries into thinking about the activities that you do in an early childhood classroom all day long. And one of those things is playing games. it games with, with two children together, games with the whole group. And you have a lot of those in the book. You talk about games like I spy and bingo or spot the difference. So how can teachers use games, not just as a fun thing to do, but as intentional tools to teach focus to children?
Julie Tourigny, OTD, MS, OTR/L: That's a great question. So I think we as early childhood practitioners understand the important and incredible power of play and open-ended play. So open-ended play is the child succeeding by just engaging in the activity, that there's no right or wrong way to engage, that it's based on the child's imagination. Again, like you just described, and that are present throughout the entire book is a close-ended activity, right? So it has rules to it. It has a right and wrong way to follow those rules. So it's the opposite of those incredibly authentic open-ended experiences. The value of that is that it teaches, it's a motivating activity for the child, if it can be done within the parameters of the child's age and their developmental interest and ability, it is a wonderful way to be meaningful and teach attention and focus with rules that exist. There's a right and a wrong. There's a wait for my partner to have his or her turn and then it's my turn. Without trying to, we're teaching sustained attention. We're teaching I've got to wait and be patient for my partner to finish their turn. I have to think about potentially, depending on the game, what their answer was or where they are now on the board, so that then I can be thinking about what my action or reaction is gonna be. So it's a real multifaceted activity that speaks to all the different components that make up focus, attention, and concentration.
Emily Garman: So do you think that to get the most out of your books, should they be read chronologically that the first one you published, one, two, and three? Or if educators or caregivers are having issues with a specific problem with the child, maybe having to do with attention and focus, could they start with book three? Or is it really important to go in order?
Julie Tourigny, OTD, MS, OTR/L: It is not important at all. It is not chronological. They are standalone. They could be read just as they are. They could be read in succession, although I don't know that there's a value or a detriment to the order in which they're read.
I love my Alert and Attentive, the one that's about to come out, because it really speaks to the crux of some of the main and primary difficulties early childhood educators have. How do I get my one or my 15 or my 20 little children to sit and focus and attend in a meaningful way to all the activities that are happening throughout the day? so I feel like that one's a great kind of starting point.
And then the next two really dive much deeper and more specifically into the how's and why's of becoming successful in completing tasks and problem solving, which would be that Organized and Engaged, the executive function piece. And then Calm and In Control really is speaking to how do I help my students or my children remain calm and in control of their emotions. So the order doesn't matter.
Emily Garman: So if you're an educator or you're a parent and you've got a child who has been described as easily distracted, unable to focus, particularly as a parent who's saying, my child's teacher is saying this about my child and I don't know what to do. What are some things that you would want them to understand about the development of attention? Like we've discussed, it isn't just something that some children are good at and others aren't. It's a skill that can be built. What is good for parents in particular, I think, to understand about the development of that attention?
Julie Tourigny, OTD, MS, OTR/L: So I think number one, understanding attention span.
So attention span means how long is it appropriate to expect a child or an adult to be focusing on one activity in one sitting. So that's going to change remarkably. And I wrote it down so I didn't get it wrong. Hold on, let me find it. So for example, our two-year-olds, we should expect that their attention span is between four and six minutes at most. It could certainly be less than that.
If the activity isn't motivating to them, if it's boring to them, if they don't feel well, if they're tired. But the span for the extent a two-year-old can pay attention is four to six minutes.
Versus our five to six-year-olds, so that's our kindergartners, we can expect them to be sitting and staying and maintaining their focus to one activity for up to 18 minutes. So between the age of two and six years, zero months, a child's attention span has grown threefold.
When we've got these multi-age classrooms especially, or when moms have children who are two, four, and six years old, what a six-year-old's capable of and what that two-year-old is capable of is far shorter, or far longer, if we're thinking about it from the perspective of the six-year-old. That would be the first thing I think about.
The second thing I think about is, your educator. If they've been teaching for a while and they're coming to you and saying, this is more than what I see, with the other children in the classroom, either this year or historically, I might be looking to find some extra support.
And that's not what this book is about. This book is about nurturing and teaching attention as a skill, which is also a lovely tool for someone who might need more intervention or might need more support. If a mom was worried and a professional or a person in her life had said this might be bigger than just rambunctiousness, I would be looking to the pediatrician or the special ed team at that school if there is one for some additional advice.
Emily Garman: I've got another question and I know we didn't talk about this one beforehand, so if you have to pivot a little bit, that's okay. But I feel like one of the things that I didn't think about when I was preparing for this interview, that now has come to me as something that's very obvious, that we can't have a conversation in 2025 about attention and focus without talking about screens, even when we're talking about toddlers and very young children.
Have you seen changes in the children you've worked with over the last 15, 20 years in regards to screens and how do you feel like children's ability to self-regulate and focus has changed because of screens?
Julie Tourigny, OTD, MS, OTR/L: I have thought about this question, I've been asked this question, I've written about this question, and I feel like as screens have become more and more embedded in everything that we do, I mean even now I get a digital receipt when I check out at places, I feel like my answer to that has evolved. So absolutely screens diminish a child's need to have unstructured time. And by that, I mean in those moments where a child could have nothing at all to do, they could instead engage in something even really meaningful on their little tablet or on the television. I mean, cars have tablets now put in the back seats!
So one big thing that's, in my opinion, that screens have done is diminish the opportunity for children to feel bored and have to figure out what do I do with my unstructured time? And in those moments, for me because I'm old, I was born in 1976, so in 1978 or 80 when I was two to four years old and bored, I used that unstructured time in a far different way than maybe children are doing today, because they’re never feeling truly bored as young people.
Now that doesn't mean the people who are about to listen to this aren't going to say, not my kid, they've got lots of times for boredom. And that's where the brain really grows and evolves and starts to learn about what am I interested in? What do I like? Do I like outdoor play? Do I like big movement play?
Am I more of a building and construction, constructing person? Am I a coloring person? When we give kids many moments of boredom, it's when I think their brains are able to start shaping and forming the true person that they'd like to become. Of course, we recognize that screens are highly motivating. So when we move from something and they're passive, right, we're not doing anything, we're just receiving it, whether we're two or we're 49, we're just receiving that input. When we stop that and move to something low to no tech like coloring or learning how to draw or learning, using loose parts in nature, there's a frustration tolerance that's required for those things because now we're needing to actively do in order to feel rewarded or successful. And that requires patience, attention, and it requires grit. When you're just passively involved in watching something on a screen, you don't need frustration, tolerance, resilience, or grit, right? When you start engaging as a two, three, four, five year old in these active activities, you need those things and it can feel really hard for kids. It can feel new and strange. Some kids don't mind it, but there's a big handful who are like, ooh, this doesn't feel good. I'm not gonna do it.
Of course there’s a lot of positive about screens, we could talk for the next hour about the positive impact of screens, but those would be the two big detriments that I see is that we've taken away boredom, and the development of really thinking about what do I like, what are my interests? And then also, when we move from a screen to having to actively engage as a young person, that resilience and grit can feel really big and difficult.
Emily Garman: Thanks for taking that question on the fly there. It seems like when people with expertise like yourself are talking about screens, you really feel the need to qualify it. You've even said that, “this is my opinion,” but there's research. I mean, there's a lot of research around this now. The youngest children, the children who were given screens at a very young age are now in their early 20s. So we've got a body of data on this. That is pretty alarming, honestly. I say that as a parent. It really makes you think and compare the way that our children are growing up with these screens versus the way you and I did. It's really interesting.
Julie Tourigny, OTD, MS, OTR/L: Absolutely. And here's the thing, I'm not a researcher to be kind of in the weeds of the data and the conclusive evidence today about it, but screens aren't going away. So, we can't say I want it back to how it was in 1982 because we're not going in that direction. I think it's important to really think about those big pieces. Let your kids be bored. Let them feel, my gosh, there's nothing here for me. So that they can actually start thinking.
I'd like it to be art. I'd like it to be music. I'd like it to be building and constructing. Give them, give them that gift. And then, give them either open-ended or closed-ended, right? Really imagine new play-based experiences or really closed-based. Let's play games. Let's do a puzzle. a puzzle's incredibly closed-ended so that they can start to feel what it takes to have resilience and grit because when we move, this is a fact, when we move out of early learning, which is naturally play-based and game-focused, into older elementary school where kids are learning to spell and to read. If that's their first opportunity to feel frustration and the grit it takes to learn something completely new, it's gonna be hard. It's gonna be real hard.
Emily Garman: well thank you so much for joining us on Early Childhood Chapters and a big thank you to Dr. Julie Touringny for sharing her wisdom on helping children develop the focus and attention they need to thrive. Her new book, Alert and Attentive: Effective Strategies to Support Focus and Concentration is available October 1st from Gryphon House.
You can find all the links to the book and to the webinar as well as Julie's website and social media in our show notes. As always, thank you for listening and for the incredible work you do every day to support young children and their families. Dr. Julie Tourigny, thank you so much for joining us today on Early Childhood Chapters.
Julie Tourigny, OTD, MS, OTR/L: Thank you for having me. It was a pleasure.