The paradox of contemporary parenting:
We're placing more stock in parenting than any society in human history, while simultaneously leaving parents more isolated than ever before.
→ Parents absorb the shockwaves of systemic failure
→ When institutions can't solve problems, they become "parenting issues"
→ This isn't a flaw in the system—it's how the system maintains itself
Where have you been feeling this paradox of parenting in your own life? What parenting challenge have you been treating as a personal challenge that might actually be a systemic issue?
How might it change if we tackled it together?
This means …
→ Tech companies aren't trying to help you parent—they're trying to replace you
→ Your child's attention is being monetized through "47 different jobs"
Tech companies aren't trying to help you parent - they're trying to replace you Your child's attention is being monetized through "47 different jobs" Companies deliberately create parent-child distance to maximize engagement They fear organized parents more than regulators
→ Companies deliberately create parent-child distance to maximize engagement
→ They fear organized parents more than regulators
How has technology relieved some of the burden of parenting responsibility? Isolation? Burn-out?
What are some of the drawbacks you experienced?
If you could change one thing about your family’s relationship to technology, what would it be?
Attention is your medium, not your currency
This means … Attention isn't something we spend or lose - it's something we shape
Your child is learning attention patterns from somewhereeither you or their devices
We can actively create new forms of attention
What we attend to shapes what we become
Attention is your medium, not your currency
>>IT IS AN ENTIRE TOOLKIT
>>IT IS A MEDIUM OF EXPRESSION AND EXPERIENCE
>>IT IS FREEDOM OF MIND
>>IT CAN BE LEARNED—AND THEN LEARNED AGAIN DIFFERENTLY.
Attention is like an eye that transforms into whatever it looks at most.
→ Technology has overtaken parents and educators in shaping children's attention
→ Systems designed for commercial gain now architect children's cognitive capacities
→ Digital interfaces act as 'hidden tutors' of cognitive habits, shaping user attention.
→ Manipulative design techniques, endemic across digital interfaces, train users to develop a contrived attentional style, inducing prolonged absorption.
In gambling literature, this attentional style is known as "dark flow.”
→ A dissociative state where users are trapped in low-agency experiences designed to maximize screen time.
→ Characteristics of dark flow:
● Time loss
● Diminished self-awareness
● Automatic behavior
→ Contrasts with positive flow states from engaging, challenging tasks
→ Developers train users into dark-flow attention through specific design principles, originating in efforts to maximize user "time on device" in order to grow revenue.
2. Variable Reward Schedules
Effect: Sets the user's mind on autopilot, encouraging a trance-like state
Examples:
Any features that remove natural stopping points or the need for user actions/decisions:
● Autoplay
● Endless scroll
Leads to passive, uninterrupted use
Slot-machine-like distribution of rewards at random intervals
Effect: Leads to a steady increase in the rewarded behavior.
Examples:
Any feature resembling a game of chance:
● Loot boxes
● Pull-to-refresh
● Potential cascade of "likes" on a post
Leads to compulsive, steady engagement
When you’re in the “machine zone, “everything else falls away [...] A sense of monetary value, time, space, even a sense of self is annihilated in the extreme form of this zone that you enter." + A gambler named Lola tells Schüll: "I'm almost hypnotized into being that machine. It's like playing against yourself: You are the machine; the machine is you."
Where do you see the 'slot machine’-like features in the apps and devices you use daily? In the apps your kids use?
Ads disguised as genuine posts or recommendations in social media feeds.
Recapture Notifications
Notifications designed to pull users back into apps, often with trivial updates.
Users must return at specific times to avoid penalties (e.g., Snapchat streaks).
Forcing repetitive tasks to unlock progress or achievements.
→ Attentional Roach Motel: Easy to enter, but hard to exit (logging out, deleting accounts).
→ Time Fogging: Services hide time markers (e.g., Netflix not showing elapsed time) to prolong engagement.
→ The phone-absorbed parent becomes a "still face" to the child
→ Children can't learn from what they can't see
→ Every digital task becomes invisible choreography
→ We must make our work visible again
"Recently, researchers have adapted this procedure by introducing parent phone use as the still face phase, and during this phone use infants display increased negative affect, decreased positive affect, and increased bids for the parent's attention" (Myruski et al., 2018)
● Parallels between parental phone use and intentional withdrawal of attention
● Potential implications for attachment and emotional development
“BystanderIgnorance”
●
- Narrate your phone use ("I'm sending an email to...")
● - Create "demonstration times" for digital tasks
● - Where possible, move key activities back to physical space
● - Share your screen for complex digital tasks
→ Children carry trauma from their digital experiences
→ Creating space to process these experiences is crucial
→ Naming gives us power over what we're seeing
→ Community support makes healing possible
→ According to recent data, teens are spending “an equivalent of a 40-hour-work week” on their devices.
→ This time cannot be black-holed and written off: it is a whole lifetime.
→ Find ways to bring it out into social reality without getting lost in it yourself. (Remember Meta’s strategy!)
→ Universal student experience
→Appears in regular feeds
→No warning or context
→No natural processing
→ Lives as unresolved trauma
Whydoesthishappen?
→ Malicious users uploading harmful content
→ Platform A/B testing (automated!)
→ Platforms constantly experiment with content
→ Violence/shock often drives engagement
→ Your data helps optimize these tests
→ Users become unwitting test subjects
→ Create spaces to experiment and nurture different forms of attention
→ Use protocols to structure shared attention experiences
→ Make these sanctuaries regular and reliable
→ Connect with other families doing the same
“An Attention Practice is a lot like a poem. Think of it as a "poem of experience." Like a poem, it has some degree of constraint (almost all poems consist of words that exist in the dictionary, and some are even constrained by the structures of line and meter) and some degree of freedom. Finding the right balance between constraint and freedom is the task before you.”
—Peter Schmidt
adapted from “Writing an Attention Practice”
The act of attention should be durational, as in, lasting over time.
The protocol should give people something to do with their attention—either a way to attend (dispersed), a sensory mode (visual), or a creative action (“destroy the object in your mind—imagine its complete undoing”). ❖
It usually works best if there are a few different constraints sequenced in an interesting way.
What could an attention sanctuary—or an attention protocol—look like in your home? (Maybe you already have one…)
1. The paradox is the point
2. Tech is your direct competitor
3. Attention is your medium, not your currency 4. Protect the gaze
5. Name the unspoken 6. Build attention sanctuaries
1. What's one thing you learned tonight that changes how you think about your own relationship with technology?
2. What's one concrete change you could make this week to create more space for human attention in your home?
3. What would be possible if parents in this room started working together to create attention sanctuaries for our children? What could we build?