Why "Hyperactive" Kids Can Focus for an Hour in Theater Class

You have probably been told the numbers. Adults can concentrate for forty-five minutes, maybe an hour. Children need the object of their attention changed every few minutes or the information simply stops going in.

Test that against your own life for a moment. Nearly everyone has had one teacher — at school, at university — who started speaking and the room went quiet for reasons nobody enforced. Hours passed and felt like five minutes. Nearly everyone has also sat through the opposite: five minutes of something dull, disconnected, impossible to plug into emotionally, and it stretched out like three hours.

Same brain. Same attention span. Completely different results. Time in a child's head runs on engagement, not on a stopwatch — which means a child who "can't concentrate" is usually telling you something about the material, not about themselves.

"Just tell the child to do something useful and wait for them to put the phone down and pick up the good book instead," says Anoushka Nesterova, one of our founders and teaching artists. "It doesn't work. Our psyche always takes the road toward the greater pleasure, and it will always find a way to get there."

If a task is boring, or unclear, or the child doesn't know how to begin, their mind will invent a million reasons not to do it and go find the thing that pays out quickly instead. That is not a character flaw and it isn't unique to children — adults do exactly the same thing, with better excuses.

So we don't start with instructions. We start with engagement, and we build it deliberately: our teachers do the exercises alongside the children, read the scene with them, play the game with them. Nobody stands at the front of the room issuing tasks. The teacher is in it, which is the fastest way to make a child want to be in it too.

Finding that engagement is individual work, because children arrive wired differently.

Some have a huge emotional amplitude — they feel enormously and react instantly. In a classroom that reads as too much. In a theater studio it is exactly the raw material an artist works with, and our job is to help the child aim it somewhere.

Others watch from the side and look withdrawn. They need to think things through before they do them, and they need a completely different approach — above all, they need not to be pushed into displaying qualities that simply aren't theirs. Some children want to talk, invent, describe, and their imagination does the work. Others find it far easier to express themselves through gesture and movement than through words.

Theater can hold all of these at once, which is the real reason it works for children who don't fit one mould. There are no right answers here and no ready-made formulas — a fact our teachers treat as the point, not a problem.

The working method is the same one actors are trained in. You take the individuality in front of you and you don't try to change it, correct it, or measure it against anyone else. Then you build circumstances around it — a situation, a character, a task that this particular child finds genuinely interesting, and in which their own nature can operate the way it naturally wants to.

From there, the child steps into the work because it is theirs, not because they were told to. Later comes the next step, the one about shaping a character and imagined circumstances more consciously. But each child arrives at that on their own clock, and the thing that ruins it fastest is rushing. Some of this simply has to ripen.

What we are doing, in plain terms, is helping a child develop in the direction their own nature is already trying to grow. In a theater studio that is interesting to watch and worth researching, whichever direction it turns out to be.

Very often, hyperactive and hyper-emotional children want the same thing: attention.

A classroom can usually only answer that demand by suppressing it. Theater can answer it a different way. Instead of feeding the hysterical version — look at me, everything for me — we give the child somewhere constructive to put it: caring about the character they play, about the partner they play opposite, feeling their way into an image, a role, a situation. Even for a small child this doesn't have to be anything enormous.

That single redirection — from demanding attention to giving it — does something visible. It relieves the pressure behind a very high emotional amplitude and starts bringing it toward balance, without anyone being told to calm down.

And for the children whose "hyper" is purely physical — the ones who have to be running, moving, drumming a rhythm on something, who genuinely cannot hold still — the answer is well-taught movement. Real work in dance and plastique feeds that quality and takes the excess off it. The child unloads. And very often it turns out their talent was hiding in exactly that place, and they go further in those disciplines than children who don't have the "hyper" at all.

This is the part we care about most, so we'll put it plainly: hyperactivity, hyper-mobility, hyper-sensitivity, hyper-emotionality — we don't treat any of these as an illness or a verdict. We treat them as a superpower, and as the place where this particular child might grow up to be extraordinary.

There is a reason for that beyond optimism. Every genuinely talented artist we have worked with has something in them that is overdeveloped. You do not become an interesting performer by being evenly moderate at everything. The quality that makes a child difficult to seat at a desk is frequently the same quality that makes them magnetic on a stage — so what we teach is not how to switch it off, but how to run it.

That skill pays out in the studio first and then everywhere else. Energy is a good thing to have; plenty of adults spend years trying to get some back. What matters is that it isn't frittered away in a thousand tiny restless movements but goes into the harmonious development of a body — and that big emotion goes into beauty and into giving something to other people, instead of into tantrums and rows with everyone nearby. The aim is a person other people leave feeling inspired.

It starts very small. Small exercises, small classes, small moments of a child being genuinely, emotionally switched on. The big things come after.