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Key points
- The term "attention-seeking" is often used to describe children's negative behaviors, but it isn't helpful.
- All children need and want positive attention—but some children struggle to ask for it effectively.
- Sometimes, symptoms of conditions such as ADHD get described as attention-seeking, which isn't accurate.
- Avoiding the term "attention-seeking" drives a search for specific problems and solutions.
Marina, a six-year-old girl, interrupts her mother repeatedly during our session, trying to get Mom to look at the family portrait she has drawn on the whiteboard. Her mother tells Marina to wait a few moments so she can finish what she's saying, but instead, Marina grabs Mom’s cell phone and begins to dance around the room with it.
An escalating back and forth ensues, with her Mom demanding that Marina return the phone and Marina's mood changing from silly to angry. Marina shouts, cries, and finally, tells her mother, "You're the worst mom ever!" With that, Mom, understandably frustrated, threatens to take away the new Lego set that Marina got for her birthday last week and Marina collapses onto the floor, still holding the phone, but loosely enough for her mother to take it from her.
Is this attention-seeking?
When she is at school, Marina often calls out in class, repeatedly gets up to sharpen a pencil, or crumples paper loudly, and then gets up to throw it away. Despite her teacher’s well-established classroom rules and repeated prompts to stop doing those things, Marina continues to do so. Marina is often fussy and short-fused when presented with tasks, requiring numerous interactions with the adults in the room.
Are these behaviors attention-seeking?
“Attention seeking” is a catch-all phrase that we use habitually in children's mental health and in educational settings to explain children's negative behavior, but it misses the mark. Children want and need adults’ attention to survive; they are developmentally wired to make adults notice them. Babies cry when they need something from an adult, creating a noisy, non-specific call for adult attention, and parents spend a long time figuring out what needs a baby is communicating.
As children get older, they gradually develop more effective skills to get adult attention. Language and impulse control top the list of skills needed for this task. Language allows children to seek adult attention more efficiently—stating their needs rather than the adult having to guess at them. Impulse control helps a child inhibit the urge to scream and stomp when the adult’s attention isn’t available immediately, which allows for more emotionally regulated and adaptive outcomes—partly because the adult will not become angry and frustrated with them.
All children seek adult attention, but we don’t notice it as much when they develop age-appropriate skills for doing so. It’s less obvious.
When a child’s language and/or impulse control skills are not typical for their age, it stands out to us. It looks like they are seeking more attention, when in fact, they are seeking the same amount of attention as any other child, but their skills for doing so look different and may be less effective—meaning they make more attempts to get that attention.
Children struggle to develop age-typical attention-seeking skills for many reasons—including neurodevelopmental disorders such as speech and language problems, autism spectrum disorder, ADHD, and/or psychiatric conditions such as anxiety, OCD, depression, or mood regulation disorders.
In Marina’s case, she’s diagnosed with ADHD. She has a harder time than other six-year-olds with expressing her needs in words, waiting her turn, and tolerating frustration. She was trying to get her mother’s attention but struggled to do it in a way that didn’t escalate emotions all around.
Coming up with solutions in this situation isn’t about reducing Marina’s need for attention, but about identifying the skills she struggles with and modifying our approach to her. For example, Marina might need shorter wait times for parental attention until she is better able to communicate her needs and better able to regulate her emotional and behavioral responses.
In the second example—of Marina’s behaviors at school—we see another way that the term “attention-seeking” may be misused. Marina’s challenges with meeting classroom expectations are symptoms of ADHD. Her trouble keeping her body still and her difficulties tolerating frustration occur because her regulatory circuits are developing differently than her peers.
If we define the problem as attention-seeking, then we will solve the wrong problem. Identifying the problem as ADHD symptoms helps adjust expectations about what Marina can and can’t consistently do and helps develop accommodations and supports that bring Marina positive adult attention rather than negative.
All children want positive attention from adults—standard parenting and behavior plans are based on this concept. We give positive attention when children behave appropriately and negative attention when they behave inappropriately. We presume that a child can change their behavior in response to these different types of attention.
When a child with neurodevelopmental and/or mental health challenges can’t change their behavior to receive positive attention, they get a firehose of negative attention, which increases their risks of developing poor self-esteem and disrupts their sense of competence and safety. To avoid that pattern, we need to work on ways to help children achieve positive adult attention, rather than trying to figure out how to get them to want less attention—because that’s not the problem.
Ahh, you might say, aren’t some children so “attention-seeking” that they don’t care if it’s positive or negative—that they need so much attention that they cause problems on purpose to get negative attention? This is an example of a myth about children that has been said so often that we presume it to be true. We don’t even question it but there is nothing that we know about child development to support this concept.
Children get negative attention when their attempts to get positive attention don’t work. They aren’t seeking the negative—they are having a hard time doing what they need to get the positive adult attention.
Labeling a child’s behavior challenges as "attention-seeking" distracts us from solving the actual problems. Successfully addressing the underlying challenges means adults must shift expectations and responses, moving away from managing how much attention to give and moving toward meeting the child's needs. This new understanding also drives us to work on building children's skills rather than withdrawing attention from a child who actually needs more, not less.
Facebook/LinkedIn image: DimaBerlin/Shutterstock
