I recently tried turning off most of the notifications on my phone. I expected it to be easy, since almost nothing that comes through is urgent. It was harder than I expected. I kept feeling I might be missing something, even though I couldn’t tell you what. That small experiment got me thinking about managing attention for parents, starting with my own.
One day, my daughter sat next to me at the kitchen table, wanting to show me a picture she had drawn at school. As she started explaining, my phone buzzed. I glanced down, read the pop-up, and told myself I would answer later, but for a moment I was gone from the room. When I looked back up, she had finished her story in a single sentence and slid the drawing across the table. I realized later that the interruption had changed something in that moment, even though neither of us said anything about it.
Managing attention for parents turns out to be less about limiting screens and more about understanding what attention actually is. Think of attention like a checking account: there is a balance, you can direct it deliberately, and every withdrawal reduces what’s available for the next thing. When I glanced at that pop-up, I didn’t split my attention evenly between my daughter and my phone. I spent most of it on the phone. And she noticed where it went.
What Attention Actually Is
Attention is the active direction of cognitive and emotional resources toward something. There is no unlimited supply, and depth of attention toward one thing means reduced depth toward everything else happening at the same moment. That’s simply how attention works.
Jonathan Haidt’s work on childhood and smartphone culture has focused primarily on how devices affect children’s development. But the adult side of that conversation matters at least as much, because children learn what attention is by watching how the adults around them allocate it. So the question is also what we model in how we manage this resource.
The frame here is not guilt. Parents are living inside the same attention economy that is pulling at their children. Every notification is a small variable reward, the same pattern that makes a slot machine hard to walk away from. It’s why social media feels compulsive and why a buzzing phone is so hard to ignore. Managing attention for parents means seeing that pattern clearly enough to make deliberate choices about it, rather than simply reacting to every prompt. I still slip back into old habits. What counts is noticing the moment and choosing again.
What Children Are Actually Observing
Children do not primarily learn from what parents say. They learn from what parents do, and more specifically, from what parents consistently attend to. When a parent puts the phone down to make eye contact, the child observes a choice about where attention goes. When a parent checks the phone mid-conversation, the child observes a different choice. Neither lesson is stated out loud. Both are learned over years of watching.
What children are really learning is allocation. What is this person treating as worth their attention, and for how long, and under what conditions? Children build a working model of how adults manage attention by watching the people around them. That model travels with them into adolescence, into friendships, into their own eventual relationship with a device.
Children learn what to attend to by watching what adults attend to. The screen is not the lesson. The allocation is.
Kavvanah: Directed Attention as a Practice
Jewish tradition has a word for the intentional direction of attention: kavvanah. It shows up most often in prayer. What makes a prayer meaningful is not just the words, but where the person saying them has actually directed their attention. You can recite the same words with kavvanah or without it. The words are identical. What differs is whether the speaker is actually present to what they are doing, or whether the body is going through the motions while the mind is elsewhere. Kavvanah is the practice of deliberately directing attention, rather than simply showing up.
It’s a useful word for parents, too. The goal is directed presence: attention pointed somewhere on purpose. A parent who sits down with a child and consciously puts the phone in another room is practicing something like kavvanah. It’s a visible commitment to this conversation, this child, this moment, as the thing that gets the resource right now. Children notice not because they know the word, but because they can feel the difference between a parent who is attending to them and one who is nearby.
Managing Attention for Parents at Home
Rules about phones at dinner are useful, but they address the instrument rather than the practice. The more durable shift is to treat attention as a household resource that is allocated deliberately rather than consumed by default. It also goes better when every adult in the house is in on it. Talk with your partner or co-parent, pick one small change you can both see, and back each other up when it slips. A useful rule of thumb: if the phone is within arm’s reach, it is in the conversation. Put it in a different room. And let your kids see you do it.
In practice, managing attention for parents comes down to small moments when attention is pointed somewhere on purpose. Maybe a meal where the phone is not just silenced but placed elsewhere. Or a car ride spent talking instead of listening to podcasts. A twenty-minute window after school where a child has a parent’s actual attention, not proximity. These small choices add up. A child who grows up this way learns something specific about what it means to be present with another person.
Parents who want to understand the broader pattern of overfunctioning and what gets carried versus transferred can find that explored in When Parents Carry Too Much. Attention is a different kind of carrying. Managing attention for parents means deciding where to point it, and when, and why, rather than letting every notification make that decision by default.
My notifications experiment is still a work in progress. Some days the phone still wins. But I’ve started to notice the moment I reach for it, and that moment is where the choice is.
