Why taking breaks can actually help your child learn

Most parents will recognise the pattern. Your child sits down to study with good intentions, but after a while their focus starts to fade. They get up for a drink, check their phone, stare out of the window or suddenly decide that now is the perfect time to visit the toilet. What was supposed to be a productive study session becomes stop-start and frustrating.

One of the reasons this happens is that concentrating for a long period of time is hard. We sometimes expect children to sit at a desk for an hour or two and maintain the same level of focus throughout, but our attention doesn't really work like that. There will be times when your child can concentrate brilliantly and times when they are simply running out of steam.

This is where the Pomodoro Technique can be useful. It is a simple way of breaking study into manageable periods of focused work followed by short breaks. The traditional approach uses 25 minutes of focused work followed by a five-minute break, before starting another session. The idea isn't to turn your child into a revision machine. It is to make focused study feel a little more manageable.

Why 25 minutes?

Twenty-five minutes can sound surprisingly short when you're thinking about exam revision. Surely a child needs to study for longer than that? Of course they do. The point isn't that 25 minutes is the maximum amount of time a child should ever study. It is simply a manageable block of time in which to focus on one thing. Instead of looking at a two-hour revision session and thinking, "I've got to do this for two hours," your child can think, "For the next 25 minutes, I'm going to concentrate on this one task." That can make a big difference, particularly for a child who finds it difficult to get started. Twenty-five minutes of focused work can feel much less daunting than an evening of revision. The technique also creates a natural stopping point. After 25 minutes, your child gets up, takes a short break and then decides whether they are ready for another focused session.

The timer isn't the important bit

There is something important to understand about Pomodoro, though. The timer itself doesn't make learning happen. If your child spends 25 minutes reading the same page of notes over and over again, the fact that they used a timer doesn't suddenly make that an effective learning strategy. The 25 minutes simply provides a structure for the time. What your child does during that time matters much more.

They might spend 25 minutes answering practice questions, retrieving information from memory, working through some maths problems, explaining a difficult concept in their own words or testing themselves with flashcards. Those are activities that require the brain to do something with the information. The timer simply helps create a period in which they can concentrate on doing it.

It can make getting started easier

One of the biggest benefits of the Pomodoro approach may actually happen before the learning begins. Starting a large piece of revision can feel overwhelming. "I need to revise biology" is a pretty vague and intimidating task. "For the next 25 minutes I'm going to answer questions about cell biology" is much more manageable. This can be particularly useful for children who procrastinate because the task feels too big. They don't have to commit to hours of studying. They simply have to get started.

And once they've completed one 25-minute session, they have a choice. They can take their five-minute break and then do another one. Four sessions would give them 100 minutes of focused study, but they don't have to think about all of that at the beginning. Sometimes making the first step smaller is enough to get things moving.

What should happen during the five-minute break?

The break matters too. The idea is to step away from the work, move around, get a drink, have a chat or simply give your brain a chance to switch attention for a few minutes. It doesn't need to become another opportunity to consume more information. But I'd be slightly wary of replacing a revision break with five minutes of scrolling through TikTok or Instagram. Your child has technically stopped studying, but they may not have given their attention much of a rest. A short walk around the house, making a drink or getting some fresh air can be a better way to create a genuine change of activity.

And if your child is working well after 25 minutes, there is no need to panic when the timer goes off. Twenty-five minutes isn't a magic number that means the brain suddenly stops learning. Recent research into Pomodoro-style breaks suggests that structured breaks can be useful, but it also suggests that there isn't one perfect break schedule that works for everybody. In some circumstances, allowing learners to regulate their own breaks can work just as well.

So treat 25 minutes as a useful starting point, not a scientific law.

Try it with your child

If your child struggles to maintain concentration, why not try a simple experiment? Choose one manageable task and set a timer for 25 minutes. During that time, the aim is to focus entirely on that task, with their phone somewhere out of reach and other distractions removed. When the timer finishes, take a five-minute break and then decide whether to repeat the process.

You could even try it yourself. Sit down with your child and work on something of your own for 25 minutes before taking the same break. It can make the whole thing feel less like another rule you've imposed on them and more like a study routine you're trying together. The important thing is not how many Pomodoro’s your child completes. It's what happens inside them.

Twenty-five minutes of focused, active learning is far more valuable than 25 minutes of simply sitting at a desk.

And that's really the point of the technique. Pomodoro isn't about squeezing more and more study time out of your child. It's about helping them make the time they do spend studying more focused, manageable and sustainable. Sometimes the hardest part of studying is simply getting started. A timer, a manageable goal and a short break might be enough to make that first step feel a little easier.