Attention, Ms. Thain

Allow me speak to a parent’s intuitive wisdom, in an attempt to give voice to what they see but may struggle to articulate.

When our children sit at the dinner table, phones face-down but minds still captured by their digital afterglow, we witness something more profound than distraction. Marion Thain’s recent Guardian article “Are young people’s attention spans really shrinking? It’s more complex than you might think” attempts to soothe our concerns about young people’s diminishing attention spans by suggesting that distraction is nothing new — that the Victorian gentleman juggling twelve daily mail deliveries faced similar challenges to our Twitter-scrolling teens.

Yet every parent recognizes the false equivalence. A letter, even hastily written, requires the writer to gather thoughts into coherent form. The ink-stained paper bears witness to a unified act of consciousness. Our children’s relationship with screens manifests something altogether different — a perpetual state of partial presence, where attention dissolves into an endless stream of algorithmic suggestions.

Ms. Thain, directing King’s College’s Digital Futures Institute, presents herself as a voice of measured reason against generational panic. But her argument reveals the very technocratic mindset that parents instinctively resist. When she compares reading novels to listening to vinyl records — mere consumer preferences that shift with time — she misses what every mother knows: that the capacity for sustained attention shapes not just what our children know, but who they become.

In a middle-school English classroom, we conducted an experiment, if you’d like, that stands in contrast to Ms. Thain’s technological determinism. Rather than accepting the false choice between forcing students through Victorian novels and surrendering to digital fragmentation, we created a clearing, a space for genuine encounter with literature. The classroom transformed into a sanctuary of attention — couches, pillows, and beanbags replaced rigid desks. Students chose from hundreds of books across genres, freed from the perceived tyranny of prescribed texts yet supported by an environment designed for deep engagement. The essence of this clearing lay not in the freedom of choice but in the recognition that attention requires embodied space — physical and psychological room for consciousness to settle into sustained encounter with meaning

The issue transcends reading habits or test scores. When we see our children struggle to sit through family dinner without checking notifications, we glimpse a deeper transformation of human consciousness. The technologies commanding their attention aren’t neutral tools but architectures of desire, deliberately engineered to fragment focus into monetizable moments. Each notification operates like a slot machine’s lever, training young minds to crave the next dopamine hit.

What Ms. Thain dismisses as shifting priorities, parents recognize as spiritual formation. The constant digital engagement reshapes not just attention spans but the very capacity for depth — in relationships, in thought, in prayer. When she equates Victorian letter-writing with social media scrolling, she reveals a blindness to the qualitative difference between communication that demands internal coherence and platforms designed to dissolve that coherence into profitable distraction.

Our parental instinct that something essential is being lost finds validation in the growing body of research on digital technology’s impact on developing brains. But more fundamental than any neuroscience is our lived experience of watching children struggle to develop the sustained attention that meaningful relationships and deep learning require.

The path forward requires neither wholesale rejection of technology nor resigned acceptance of cognitive decline. It begins with honoring the wisdom that makes us uneasy when our children can’t look up from their phones long enough to complete a thought. This unease points toward a truth that Ms. Thain’s analysis misses entirely: that attention is not merely a cognitive resource to be managed but a fundamental capacity for presence — to each other, to ideas, to reality itself.

In defending this capacity, we defend not just our children’s ability to read long books but their very ability to be fully present to the world. This is why we persist in creating spaces of quiet, in maintaining family dinners, in reading together despite resistance. We recognize, even if we struggle to articulate it, that the formation of attention is inseparable from the formation of the soul.