Attention is the Key to Wonder
Parenting in the Smartphone Era
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A few weeks ago, we hung a birdfeeder outside our kitchen window. We’ve since become obsessed with birdwatching while we eat our meals, the birds enjoying their meals on the other side of the glass. I taped a bird guide on the wall and we’re slowly learning to identify the differences between a white-breasted nuthatch and a Carolina chickadee, a male house finch and a female house finch — and how to name all these birds in Spanish, of course. It has been a delightful exploration for the whole family. I keep on exclaiming to anyone who will listen: “It’s better than television!”
My children (ages 4 and 2) are innately attuned to delight, as all children are. When we’re walking around the neighborhood, the refuse to be hurried as they stop to bend down and explore a centipede making its way across the road, or to listen to a sound in the distance that they haven’t heard before. They are filled with curiosity and wonder as they soak in the world around them with all of their senses.
As an adult who has been socialized in a capitalist productivity-obsessed country, it can be difficult to accept children’s slow way of being in the world, the way they have no sense of destination — only of a strange and wondrous journey. I am beginning to lean into the idea that we are all on this journey together. I don’t want to hurry my children’s curiosity away simply for the sake of my own ingrained predisposition towards “productivity” — and I don’t have to.
I think a lot about how I want to cultivate that sense of curiosity and wonder in my children as they grow older, and I can’t help but feel a growing sense of despair as I think about the myriad ways that devices and the internet will begin to encroach on their lives — and their sense of wonder. Even if I don’t give them a device, they will have access to them in schools or with friends.
Right now, my children’s heightened attention on the world around them is a beautiful thing to behold. Attention is the gateway to wonder. To think that their attention might soon be held hostage by a handheld device is, to be quite honest, devastating.
A lot of parents feel as though they have no choice when it comes to giving devices to their children. It is as though devices are a fact of life and we must accept their intrusion into our lives, our homes, our brains, our souls.
But that’s a fallacy. The truth is, we do have a choice.
I have been heartened to learn about parents all over the world who are taking matters into their own hands, like this mother in Spain who started a WhatsApp group for parents who want to delay giving smartphones to their teens, and the initiative exploded. It has now spread to the UK, where 75,000 parents have made a pact to give their kids a smartphone-free childhood.
A mother in the UK, Clare Fernyhough, is quoted in The Guardian:
“We thought we had an extreme view and that’s why we wanted to have solidarity with each other, but what we’ve realised is that, actually, it’s like we’ve lifted the lid on something here by mistake and people really need to talk about this and a lot of people have been feeling like us but not feeling they could talk about it.”
This week on the Scroll Sanity podcast, Nic and I talk with an American mother of two daughters, ages 10 and 13, who has decided to do what she can to delay allowing smartphones into her daughters’ hands — although many of her fellow parents disagree with her decision (as well as her daughters, of course).
iParenting with Emily Brogan: Raising Kids in the Digital Age
On this episode of the Scroll Sanity Podcast, Nic and Carmella kick things off with their "Flows and Frictions" segment, discussing their experiences with minimalist smartphones and the ongoing challenges of balancing functionality and distraction.
If you’re a parent, how are you making decisions around technology with your kids?
I continue to follow closely everything that
writes (on his Substack) or says in the media. As a parent but also as a citizen of the world, I completely agree with him about the urgency of this problem. We need all hands on deck!Watch this video where
lays out his four norms for breaking this collective action trap:
No smartphone before high school
No social media until 16
Phone-free schools (phones don’t just make them anxious and lonely; they make them less intelligent)
More independence, free play and responsibility in the real world
Check out his full interview on The Daily Show here.
Carmella that was an excellent article. I watched theprogram which interviewed mr haidt and it was excellent. It is scary the damage we are doing to our children