Flex - Setting Focus On A List ItemRenderer With TextArea Inside?

I've wrote a custom itemrenderer for a List component (Flex 3.5) which is a VBox with a Label and a TextArea wrapped inside. All works fine so far but I want the TextArea in the first itemrenderer to receive focus so that it instantly becomes editable when tabbing onto the List. Is that possible and if how would I achieve this?

I've already added an event listener that selects the item at index 0 but the textArea in it should also be focussed at that moment _list.addEventListener(FocusEvent.FOCUS_IN, onListFocusIn);

private function onListFocusIn(e:FocusEvent):void
{
_list.selectedIndex = 0;
}