It is bad when the child is distracted from classes. On the other hand, he is more easily distracted from the situation of punishment …
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If a child does not know how or does not want to focus on what is needed in the learning process, this creates difficulties for both him and the teacher. At the same time, adults often overestimate the severity of the child’s experiences: often, instead of a real experience, the child only demonstrates it, and, on the other hand, children, as a rule, easily switch to new events. You punished the child, left him in the corner — in a minute the child finds a new entertainment for himself … Easy switching of attention helps the child bear the severity of the punishment: the child can quickly switch to new moments of the environment, forgetting about the troubles that were just there.
Distraction in psychological practice
Distraction (En.: Distraction) is a typical technique used at various points in psychological practice.
On the one hand, the hypnotic state consists in abstraction from a certain part of reality, and therefore it should be regarded as the development of the phenomenon of distraction. Simple absent-mindedness, if it is directed by the operator, may contribute to the emergence of new psychophysiological possibilities, but the question arises whether it is legitimate to use the term «hypnosis» in this case. Something similar happened to little Robert; in this example, Erickson accompanied his three-year-old son on distracting psychological work, allowing him to forget the pain (Haley, 1973/1984).
On the other hand, if the patient is unexpectedly distracted by something, then with skillful use this circumstance can contribute to hypnotic induction, since it fixes attention and depotentiates consciousness. This is a good moment for the unconscious to listen to what the patient refuses to hear. In order to dispose of the distraction, it is enough to simply tell the patient: “Only the work of your unconscious matters now…” (Erickson & coll., 1976).
At the moment of reorientation, distraction is also used so that the patient can clearly distinguish between trance and the state of wakefulness (Erickson & coll., 1976). With the help of distraction, the patient, as it were, loses the thread of memories of what happened in a trance.