Why You Should Encourage Your Student to Daydream

Children have an innate propensity to daydream. Wandering minds can drive some parents absolutely crazy, especially if they want their student to focus on a task for a period of time. With younger children, attention spans can be very short and limited in scope. Although some suffer permanently from attention deficit disorder, many children start growing attention spans as they age in maturity and mental capacity.

However, both parents and teachers tell students "to pay attention", "focus", and "keep their eyes on the task". Effectively, education practices, parents, and even employers teach people's minds to wander less and focus more because that supposedly gets more done. This mindset kills the child-like quality of daydreaming and that might not be a good thing.



While daydreaming, many things can be occurring. Lack of focus or laziness can be a factor, but there are many other mental processes going on like the following:

- imagining new ideas
- processing information
- solving problems
- considering alternatives
- clearing mental overload

All of these mental practices are good for all of us to do. (Read The Virtues of Day Dreaming by The New Yorker, The Importance of Mind-Wandering by Wired.com, or Imagine: How Creativity Works by Jonah Lehrer.)

The quantity of daydreaming is another matter. If daydreaming too often people are labeled space cadets; if they daydream too little, they are accused of not thinking outside the box. We can't have it both ways. We either build the box or break it down. Encouraging daydreaming in reasonable amounts may actually help your student focus more, imagine and be creative (key aspects to successful careers), and have a more relaxed attitude.

Next time you want to tell your student to snap out of it, think twice. Is he really being lazy and zoning out or is he cooking up the next big idea? Encourage your student to let his mind wander, at least for awhile.