WARNING: This post contains 2,935 words and even includes a lengthy quotation.  It is considered too long and difficult for the modern reader to finish.

Recently I came across a frightening statistic: Apparently, the attention span of a human being today is approximately 8 seconds.  Do you know what else has the attention span of 8 seconds?  A goldfish.

If this does not terrify us, I don’t know what will. The ability to pay attention is deeply dyed into what makes us human.  It’s also, according to someone like Simone Weil, what connects us to the sacred. But sadly, any veteran teacher will tell you the attention span of children has dropped significantly over the last decade. 

What is the cause of this loss of attention?  Some of the factors appear to be obvious: there has been a deep and unanticipated cost in the wake of the dominance of the brave new digital reality.  Social media has altered conversation, relationships, and the way we attend to one another.  Smart phones, tablets, smart watches, and the death scrolling habit all conspire to narrow our attention.  The intersection of social media and smartphones together appear to form the perfect booby trap for endlessly capturing our attentiveness.

Some of this is neurological and some psychological.  The rapid progression from text, to video, to clip, to video meme moves closer and closer to a sort of flashing light hypnosis that places our brains in a passive state.  Furthermore, this constant dopamine reward cycle is proven to be addictive.  There is a reason that before anyone else was on the alert, Steve Jobs did not let his kids use an iPad.

Eventually, what makes the technology in our pockets particularly toxic is its true purpose: consumerism.  Facebook, Instagram, X, Youtube, Google – all are built on the architecture and logic of marketing. They are marketing systems that follow the same logic as Amazon. 

So much of our lives and the lives of our children are framed by this consumer logic.  Our attention has been treated like a commodity and is being actively harvested.  This is troubling for many evident reasons.  Perhaps one of the more significant issues that is not frequently mentioned is that it causes depression and unhappiness.  Marketing always funnels our attention back to ourselves so that we are in a perpetual narcissistic state, caught in a sort of digital looking glass. 

Want to be beautiful?  Buy this shampoo or makeup.  Want to be powerful and magnetic?  Buy this cologne.  Want to be up to date and live a relevant life that will capitalize on the impending wealth transition?  Buy this AI course.  Be strong, admirable, and connected.  “You do you!”

Did you know your brain makes no distinction between negative thoughts and self-rumination? Positive thinking is always looking outward. The digital algorithms, on the other hand, wind us tighter and tighter into more condensed silos of our own self logic. The collateral to this self-obsessive bombardment is our happiness. 

We were made for more than ourselves. We were made to pay attention, to be present and engaged, to work on problems, to create things, to meditate, to pray.  How can we free ourselves and our children up to be happy and actively engaged with the world?

Two pieces of great news:

1. Attention can be re-trained.  

One of the most inspiring realizations of my career is how deeply we have underestimated children.  Ordinary children, English language learners, kids with special needs, homeless children, rich kids, children from the suburbs – all have been vastly underestimated by our society.

I’ve been privileged to see the incredible growth that is possible when a child is both loved and challenged appropriately.  We generally focus on metrics, grades, testing, but the rubber hits the road when it comes to attention.  

Our success or failure in educating a child comes down to the extent to which we can provoke their active attention.

For several years I taught art history to 14-year-olds.  As part of the class, we regularly conducted art studies in which we would sit and silently observe a piece of art for an extended period of time before discussing it.  At the beginning of the school year, students could hardly sustain a couple minutes of observation and only ten or so minutes of discussion.  By the winter months, they could sit and actively consider a painting for as long as twenty minutes, with a lengthy conversation afterward. By the end of the year, if time allowed, they would have been able to observe a work of art for thirty minutes or more.

Of course, this did not happen by itself.  They had to be coached, given attention cues and other tools to create the appropriate architecture for their active attention.  This sort of discipline takes time but almost always works because as children learn to actively look at something, whether in a science lab, an art class, or in mathematics, they become increasingly invested and interested.

2. Reality is infinitely interesting

There’s a beautiful story of how the scientist Nathaniel Shaler began his apprenticeship with the great Swiss naturalist Louis Agassiz.  According to Shaler, the first day he visited Agassiz’s laboratory his first task was to study a small dead fish in a rusty pan.

After about an hour, Shaler was done with the fish: weary of its alcohol smell, and satisfied that he had learned what there was to learn about it. But Agassiz, though he was never far off, said nothing at the end of that hour, and indeed nothing, aside from a daily “good morning!” until Shaler had been at the fish for seven long days. Shaler, in the course of those days, astonished himself with what he saw and learned: “a hundred times as much as seemed possible at the start,” he says, detail after detail about scales, teeth, order, structure. Finally, on the seventh day, Agassiz spoke—“well?”—and for an hour Shaler disgorged his findings as Agassiz sat on the edge of the table and puffed his cigar. At the end of the hour, Agassiz replied, “that’s not right” and swooped away, and Shaler understood that his teacher was testing him. He spent another full week at the fish and astonished himself again with the results. This time Agassiz approved, and he expressed his approval by presenting Shaler with a new task, a pile of fish bones and an enigmatic “see what you can make of them.” Shaler set out—again with no help from Agassiz but the occasional “that’s not right”—to reconstruct the bones into the different skeletons from which they had come. The task took two months of determined labor.  It is no surprise that Nathaniel Shaler dates his life as a scientist from these first encounters with the man who went on to become his close friend and mentor.

The world around us, even the most humble of things, is all inherently interesting. We are surrounded by a quiet but important language of meaning that calls our name and asks to be heard.  This problem is that our attention has been damaged and brutally calloused.

Schools, of all places, should be havens for attention.  Unfortunately this is frequently not the case. There is a veritable crusade to stuff as many screens into the contemporary classroom as possible. 

Technology aside, today there seems to be an incredible amount of downtime at schools. This sort of environment is about as conducive for deep attention as the DMV. Can you imagine sitting at the DMV all day with deep, focused attention, never zoning out?

But the change can’t just happen at school. Ultimately it falls to parents to help children become more present and connected.

Here are some strategies to help reclaim your child’s (and our own) attentiveness and presence:

1. We need to form our children to have an appropriate attitude towards technology.  This means tech-minimalism. The question of when our kids should start getting smartphones is hotly debated (our 16-year-old doesn’t have one yet).  That question is for another post, but the argument usually centers around kids’ ability to stay connected with their friends. This is a fair concern, but it quickly takes on the form of arguing for a necessary evil.

We rarely step back and ask the more fundamental question: Are smartphones and social media healthy for young people?  We already have answers. The science is in, the verdict has been given: social media and smartphones are tremendously unhealthy for young people, especially girls.  

For more information on this issue, we suggest The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness or, a bit older but still relevant, Glow Kids: How Screen Addiction is Hijacking our Kids – and How to Break the Trance.

Personally, I think it’s useful to engage in open conversations with our kids about these issues, rather than simply avoiding them. We try to be mindful of the risks of extremes, and we do have a screen presence in our house. Stay tuned for a post on how we try to find balance in this area.

2. There is value in boredom, space, silence, and stillness. We often have a tendency to immediately rush in when our kids become listless or bored. But what if boredom is a necessary stage on the path to paying attention to things that are quieter and more substantial than whatever is playing on the iPad? Often the things that are deeper and more worthy of our focus do not immediately stimulate or entertain us.  They require us to think about them. 

I remember hearing about a study from years ago. The researchers took a group of children around lunch time and put them in a room that had a large array of healthy whole foods laid out.  Interestingly, the children filled their plates with nearly perfect portions and ratios of macronutrients, suggesting they intuited what their bodies needed. 

On another day, the same children were brought into the same room at the same time of day with the same table of food laid out. This time, however, there was a second table. On this table was a smorgasbord of fast food, candy, and other unhealthy options. We all know what happened next. 

If kids are asked to choose between a great film like The Black Stallion and Bluey, they’re never going to make the right choice. We need to create a context in which our children are able to choose from a multitude of good things and not confuse matters by introducing attention temptations that can’t be resisted.

Children need to be given beautiful and interesting things to pay attention to. This means good books, good films, and lots of time outdoors. 

3. Children – and especially teens – long for meaningful conversations. It’s important that parents model a depth of inquiry and sense of wonder for their children. This means actively pondering with our children. It’s far better for children to see us mull over something than to be given an easy sound-byte level answer. Asking our kids what they think about something, and then asking them why (i.e., asking them to ground their interpretation in evidence) on a regular basis is a powerful way to help them be attentive and thoughtful. 

In an important sense, what we ask our children is just as important as what we tell them. As a Socratic teacher and school leader, I have trained many teachers in what I refer to as Q&A narrative Socratic questioning. This means asking children questions of different level (factual, interpretive, philosophical) that guide them to explore a theme, idea, or text. Stay tuned for a post on how to implement this sort of teaching in your homeschooling.

4. Meditation practice is a great way to teach and practice quiet focus. Most of our minds are constantly stuck in a sort of middle gear. They’re neither quiet enough when they should be at rest, nor decisive enough when we need to be concentrating. It’s as if we are constantly pressing on both the gas and the brakes at the same time. 

I have personally found a daily meditation practice to be life-changing because it has allowed my mind to reach a place of rest. This ability to quiet my mind also allows me to focus when I need to exert mental energy.

5. Breathing is a path to physical stillness and focus. Our ability to focus is influenced by how calm and present we are. For example, breathing through your mouth signals panic and stress.  Along with a daily meditation practice, I recommend coaching children to breathe more effectively. This means helping them to practice nasal breathing and also incorporating breathing practices such as  5 minutes of box breathing each morning. Teaching kids to incorporate the physiological sigh when feeling stressed or needing to energize themselves can also help them be more present and attentive.

6. We need to teach kids to be active readers. I have worked with thousands of kids and read what are considered to be some of the most elevated books and primary sources with them. From Aristotle to Churchill, Dante to Martin Luther King, Jr., Dostoevsky to Tolstoy.  Like many teachers, my experience is that kids’ reading ability has plummeted over the last decade.  The issue, I believe, is that students try to read books from the same state of mind that they watch a show or a YouTube video.  They think if their eyes are on the page of text, the information will simply enter them. 

For a difficult text, this simply does not work. Think about watching your favorite show.  How active is your mind?  Not very.  In fact, your mind is in a perfectly passive state.  (Anecdotally, I have a Garmin watch that tracks my stress and energy levels. When I watch a show, it shows extremely high levels of passivity.) This sort of cognitive posture might work for reading a comic book or light fiction, but not difficult texts.  The words will simply dance in front of your eyes without making an impact.

What can we do?  The answer is to teach kids the habit of active reading. One powerful way to do this is through annotation practice.  Annotation forces the mind to read with an active cognitive posture.  When you annotate, you are interpreting what is notable on the page.  You are asking questions and tracking characters, themes, and ideas.  Annotation is like a mapping exercise in which the reader tracks the meaning across the page. 

Let us know in the comments if you would like posts dedicated to teaching your kids to annotate.

7. Experience is a training ground for paying attention.  Helping kids touch, taste, smell, listen, and enjoy the whole library of sensory wonders out there can help them transition from living in a world they take for granted to a world of hidden treasures around every corner.

We’ve seen this firsthand with cooking. Our kids love to cook and are pretty capable in the kitchen. One reason for this may be that we incorporated our children into our own culinary adventures early on.  This began when they were newborns.  I would often hold them while cooking and have them smell every ingredient.  Visitors would laugh as our little ones would strain to get a whiff of whatever we might be cooking. 

This love for cooking has continued into childhood. For example, last month our boys made a smoked fish dip from some ladyfish they caught in the Gulf of Mexico. From catching the fish, to cleaning and brining it, to making the dip, it was a lengthy process that required focus and patience. They didn’t even notice how much work went into it, though, because they were enjoying the experience.

8. Engaging in activities that involve working with a medium teaches focus. The best sorts of activities for focused attention are those that have a balance of accessibility and challenge.  If an activity is too challenging, the child will feel overwhelmed and become despondent.  If the activity is too easy, the child will lose interest. 

Other than games, one great approach to provoke this sort of focused activity is to have your child work with a medium such as wood carving, pottery, photography, or fiber arts. The reason this can be so powerful is that when you work with a medium you are forced to enter into a conversation with a reality outside of yourself.  A wonderful book on this is Shop Class for Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work. 

For a time, my father and I shared a hobby of carving wooden spoons in a tradition known as Slojd (here is the original Slojd handbook, open source).  Slojd was a practice developed in Sweden that was meant to help school children learn how to work with a medium. The point was not to develop them into artisans but to help them become well-rounded, more focused people.  Today, many adherents of Charlotte Mason methods utilize paper slojd as well as slojd in wood.

In Conclusion

There’s no magic bullet, snake oil, or convenient solution to this problem. Ultimately, being good stewards to a child’s attention requires something more from us. 

At the end of the day, we are the first and living lessons to our children. This means that if we want attentive children, we too must be attentive, engaged, and alive.  Parenting, for this reason, is always a personal call to become the best version of ourselves.

With special thanks to our 13-year-old, who provided the photos for this post.