“Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity” – Simone Weil
Our capacity for attention evolves as we grow from baby, to young child, to teen, to adult, to elder. It is one of the unique gifts of being human – our flexibility in how we can attend to the world around us, ourselves and also unseen worlds.
In the youngest years children have a capacity for a lantern-like attention. Their attention is drawn by their environment – they hear their father’s car on the driveway, they see the tiniest bit of fluff on the carpet. It is almost as if they have no filters – they are acutely tuned in to what’s around them. Owen Barfield describes this as “participatory consciousness” – and suggests that this is the kind of consciousness that fosters creativity and flexibility of mind.
As we grow into life, we also develop the ability to hone our attention and focus. This allows us to choose to direct our attention on a task and in effect block out the rest of the world. When we learn something new this is a vital part of the learning process. Choosing to direct our attention takes practice. We have to rein ourselves in, take ourselves in hand and use our will forces to “stay on task”. This inner capacity we often call concentration. It is an ability that we have to practice over and over again.
In the earliest years we see the infant learning to focus through independent play and through relational interactions. It is helpful if we don’t interrupt this budding capacity by scooping them up to change a diaper or to go on an errand. Instead, we can observe the child and wait for a natural break in their concentration and use that moment to introduce some new activity.
As the baby grows into kindergarten age, we begin to ask more of them. Through imitation, repetition, imagination and rhythm we invite them into building habits of attention. For example, the early childhood teacher will gently focus the child’s attention to keeping the room orderly – shoes together, coats hung up, toys in the basket. In these years we want children to have both the capacity for “participatory consciousness”, especially to be able to be immersed in the natural world and a growing ability to focus their attention.
As the child moves through the grades, year by year their capacity to concentrate and to focus their attention is developed. In high school we see this blossom – they are challenged to study long and complex texts by authors such as Victor Hugo, Dostoevsky, Ralph Waldo Emerson.
What are the challenges and enemies of this development? As parents we all know how easy it is to disrupt a good habit, and how much effort it takes to reinstate it! You come home late and allow the children to go to bed without doing the dishes – and for the next few days it takes a lot of work on your part to reinstate the habit. The habits of attention and focus are broken when a child is given access to a screen.
Screens spoil our capacity for attention. They are disrupters to this delicate human capacity that needs practice and reinforcement. There has been much written about this tragic fact. (Nicolas Carr “The Shallows”. Casey Schwartz “Attention, a love story”, Jaron Lanier “You are not a Gadget” amongst others). Companies and marketing specialists know how to destroy our good intentions and entice us to spend our precious time and attention on what they offer us. A recent book by Gaia Bernstein (“Unwired”) focuses on “the manipulative design of technologies and the need to work together to hold the tech industry accountable”. She outlines how it is no longer only a question of how we, as individuals, work with our own screen habits. The tech industry is explicitly designed to disrupt our ability to direct our own attention. A very sobering situation, I believe.
As parents we strive to help our children grow into empathetic, moral human beings. If “attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity” then what are we doing when we allow our children access to screens?