Too Much, Too Soon
When Attentional Literacy Should Arrive
This is the second piece in a six-part series on attention as curriculum. Part 1, “Attention Is Not Free,” introduced Attentional Literacy and its three components; this piece asks when a child is developmentally ready for each one. For the full shape of the series, start here: “Attention, Unfinished.”
Max turned ten recently. It was a big milestone for him. His parents worried about his safety, as all parents do, but they also understood the importance of building his confidence and independence. A couple of years ago, they started asking him to fetch specific items at the grocery store. Last year, they encouraged him to interact with the cashier as they checked out:
“Hello! What’s your name?”
“Hi! I’m Max.”
“How old are you, Max?”
“Nine.”
Turning from Max to his Dad, “How would you like to pay today?”
“Show her the card, Max.”
“Ok, swipe it there. Would you like your receipt?”
Max looked up at his Dad, who nodded back at him. He turned back to the cashier, “Yes please.”
“It was nice to meet you, Max.”
“Thanks! Nice to meet you too.”
He was timid at first, but he got the hang of it by the end of the year.
Now, Max’s parents thought it was time for a little more freedom, and a lot more responsibility. He was given permission to go to the corner store in their neighbourhood alone. It was two blocks away. For years, he’d known to look both ways before crossing the street. He’d learned how to locate items at the store. He felt comfortable talking to cashiers, and over the past few weeks, he practised counting change at home with his Mom.
At ten, it was time he did it all on his own. So, after a small pep talk that included permission to buy some of his favourite candy — an enticing prospect — Max embarked on this new adventure.
He’d been to that corner store before, but going alone filled him with an indescribable mixture of excitement, fear, delight, and trepidation. The allure of his favourite candy was all but forgotten in the face of this feeling, this self-expansion.
Nobody called it that at the time. Nobody told Max that fetching items off a list was training his sustained attention; he had to hold several things in mind while walking down an aisle, checking them off the list in his head without forgetting what came next. Nobody told him that answering the cashier — carefully listening to her questions, waiting his turn, and calibrating his replies to an adult he’d never met — was a rehearsal of the kind of social attention that celebrates the dignity of a stranger. Counting change with his Mom at the kitchen table exercised his working memory. And the walk itself, across two blocks with no one beside him, required him to take on some adult responsibility — to look both ways because he’d decided to, not because someone was watching to see if he would. That’s what executive function is: self-direction without a backstop.
None of this was designed with Max’s attention in mind. It was just childhood. But here’s the secret about Max’s story: he turned ten in 2006.
Then there’s Oliver. He turned ten in 2026. His experience of this important milestone is radically different from Max’s. He hasn’t been to a grocery store in more than four years; since the Covid pandemic, his parents order their groceries online. He’s never counted change with his Mom because she doesn’t carry cash with her. When they go to the corner store in their neighbourhood, the cashier barely acknowledges them because their presence is an interruption: he’s busy scrolling.
Max was rewarded with more independence on his tenth birthday. Oliver was given his first iPhone.
“Now that he’s older, he’s probably going to explore more of the neighbourhood,” his parents ventured. “With the phone, at least we can track him so we know he’s safe.“
When Oliver gets restless waiting beside his Mom at the corner store — the same kind of store Max once walked to on his own — nobody gives him a job to do. His Mom hands him a phone, and the restlessness disappears.
Across those twenty years, the same pattern emerged in schools. In 2006, when a quiz was handed back to Max, it was his responsibility to tell his parents at the dinner table that he’d gotten a ‘C’. Today, Oliver might get the same mark, but his father knows before he does because the app notifies his parents the moment the teacher enters the grade.
Oliver has lost the opportunity for disclosure. Even though Max knew his parents might be upset, he had the responsibility to inform them, which was a developmental event — he grew more mature by doing so.
None of it — not the corner store, nor the grade his father saw before he did — is really about growing up faster or slower. It’s about attentional development. Max built it two blocks and one quiz at a time. Oliver still hasn’t had those chances. He isn’t failing to develop it by accident. The phone in his pocket was given to him to assuage his parents’ fear, but their fear is the perfect cover for a pernicious business model. A much larger machine is competing for exactly the attention Oliver hasn’t finished developing yet.
His world has grown strangely as a result. Max’s world got bigger by exact, deliberate increments: an aisle, two blocks, never more than he could handle at once. Each freedom was afforded to him when he was ready for it, not just because he’d rehearsed enough, but because he’d grown enough. Oliver’s world has barely grown at all in the real world — he’s supervised, watched, accounted for, and safer in the physical world than Max ever was. But in his pocket, a small screen opens on to a world with no bounds: a feed without an end, strangers by the billion, all of which arrived the day he got a phone, not when he was genuinely ready for it. That’s too much, too soon — not enough freedom in the real world, and far too much for a ten-year-old in a universe of digital proportions.
Why Timing Isn’t Incidental
Attention isn’t a single faculty that switches on when we ask it to. It’s a set of layered systems that mature on different timelines. The voluntary, top-down layer — the one that allows an adult to peel himself away from the television to write an essay about attention itself, as I’m doing now — is the one that develops last. That’s why ten-year-olds like Oliver aren’t ready for the barrage of stimuli a smartphone puts in front of them: the very system we use to moderate that encounter is still under construction.
Psychologists Mary Rothbart and Michael Posner offer a three-network model of attention. The first is the alerting network, which maintains “a state of high sensitivity to incoming stimuli.” The second is the orienting layer, which helps us select and prioritize certain pieces of information from that sensory input. The final network is our executive attention, the most sophisticated of the three; it “involves mechanisms for monitoring and resolving conflict among thoughts, feelings and behavior.”
The developmental window that sharpens our executive attention is widest in early childhood, but it continues to improve through adolescence. Executive attention needs less stimulation to develop well, not more. That’s why most public health guidelines recommend no screen time under age two, and less than an hour a day between two and five. Yet, we’re giving iPads to kindergartners.
If schools are to aid in their students’ attentional development, they need to respond in developmentally appropriate terms:
Conditions, Not Content: Early Childhood (Ages 0-7)
In Part 1 of this series, I identified three components of Attentional Literacy. None of them should be taught at this stage. It’s simply too soon.
In early childhood, saying “not yet” is the correct educational choice; it isn’t a failure to educate. What this age group needs is unstructured play, sustained joint attention with a caregiver, and minimal screens. That means children should have access to manipulatives for interactive and creative learning. We should prioritize teacher-student ratios. And in place of screens, students need interpersonal socialization.
In other words, they need developmentally appropriate conditions. Twenty years ago, that’s exactly what Max had.
For a sizable portion of early childhood, kids are nowhere near a classroom, so the work of protecting these conditions begins at home. When they do arrive at school — from pre-K on — the standard doesn’t change. In fact, it should be elevated.
Max’s story is proof by omission: conditions got him this far. What comes next needs more than conditions.
The Vocabulary, Before the Mechanism: Middle Childhood (Ages 7-11)
By around eight years of age, kids can reliably judge, after they’ve acted, whether they’ve got something right. In psychology, this is called “retrospective monitoring”. Its counterpart, “prospective monitoring” — predicting in advance — still lags behind at this age. But retrospective monitoring is all-important; it’s the skill that allows children to notice that their attention drifted, which is precisely what enables us to begin explicit instruction about attention.
Once a child can accurately judge, after the fact, that their attention drifted, two things become possible:
They can be told what attention is and recognize it in themselves, and
They can notice when it drifts, and choose, deliberately, to return.
In other words, this is the stage at which instruction on Components 1 and 2 of Attentional Literacy can begin: to know what attention is and to know that it can be shaped, wittingly. For a third grade teacher, saying, “Katie, you were somewhere else just now; come back to us,” begins to bear real fruit. It helps the student identify their own attention and encourages them to direct it on purpose.
In middle childhood, students also have the capacity to understand attention as a subject of inquiry. In Part 1, I described attention as the filter between sensation and perception. That’s a bit much for an eight-year-old. But here’s what would work: picture a pitch black classroom. The door is closed, the curtains are drawn, and the students help their teacher close every gap where light might spill in. The teacher turns on a flashlight and shines it at one of the students’ feet. Guess where all of the students have directed their attention?
A flashlight only lights up one thing at a time — you choose where to point it. Attention, when we learn how to use it, can work the same way. The flashlight is a metaphor the teacher can return to throughout the year to build upon the students’ conceptual understanding of attention.
What kids can’t do at this stage is hold an entire system in mind. The economy, incentives behind products, and behavioural design are all beyond the grasp of children who have just begun to notice attention in themselves. The third and final component of Attentional Literacy comes later.
Naming the Mechanism: Adolescence (12+)
In adolescence, changes in cognition make remarkable things possible in the classroom. Kids go from inductive reasoning to abstract, systemic, and hypothetical reasoning. They can hold multiple invisible variables in mind at once rather than only what’s concretely present. These capacities emerge unevenly across individuals, but they grow gradually in early-to-mid adolescence for most.
This is the stage at which our students can begin to understand that the notification on their phone is another hand on their flashlight, pushing it in a direction they didn’t intend to illuminate. That’s the third component of Attentional Literacy: knowing how attention can be shaped, unwittingly, and by whom.
Adolescents can begin to understand things like revenue and the incentives that spur design decisions. With scaffolded guidance, they can untangle the connection between the “like button” and Instagram’s bottom line.
But most remarkably, teenagers can recognize that rules and systems are made by people, not given by nature. That recognition may be part of why they reliably push boundaries at this age. They’re starting to understand where those confines come from. In order to comprehend who profits from the capture of their attention, they need to ask who built those systems and what they stand to gain from them.
Adolescence is when the brain’s reward circuitry becomes especially responsive to the kind of feedback digital systems are built to deliver — likes, notifications, streaks. The same part of the brain that lights up for food or money activates when teens are shown Instagram photos with many likes. A recent study showed that adolescents have a measurably higher learning rate from social media feedback than adults.
Understanding the science doesn’t diminish the strength of the lure — recognizing a system doesn’t make a student immune to it. We still need to improve the developmental environment we provide our youth, including teens. But recognition is where resistance starts, and that’s our advantage as educators: we can help students channel their healthy impulse to rebel against deadlines and classroom norms into skepticism for the systems built to commandeer their agency.
It’s On Us
Let’s return to Max and Oliver for a moment. Max is thirty now; whatever his childhood was like, it’s long gone. Oliver, however, is still a kid. He turned ten this year. Did he have the conditions he needed in his early childhood? Was he handed an iPad in kindergarten? Has he been afforded the space and time to dream up imaginative games with his peers? Were those peers available to socialize with him, or were they consumed by the engrossing silos behind their own screens?
One thing we know for certain is that Oliver was just given a smartphone of his own, before he had the cognitive ability to understand how it would act on him. I wouldn’t give a ten-year-old the keys to my car, but then again, my car doesn’t tell me what to think, and when. That’s too much, too soon.
The thing is, Oliver’s just a stand-in for an entire generation. He, and they, haven’t been provided the basic conditions they need to grow well, to understand the way their minds work, or to comprehend the world they’re coming of age in.
That’s on us. Let’s try changing it.
If this piece resonated, share it with the educators, administrators, and parents in your network. These conversations grow stronger with more voices, and The Walled Garden grows through exactly this kind of conversation.
Part 3, “Pay Attention, Be Astonished,” turns from when to teach attention toward what it feels like to actually practise it — meditation, contemplation, and boredom, embraced rather than escaped. For the full shape of this series, “Attention, Unfinished” lays out all six parts.
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I am an elementary art teacher. Last year we focused on handwork and the practice of attention. I am in the process of planning out our upcoming school year art show theme and I am thinking of using what im learning from this. Our art show is huge and heavily involved with community, families, and administrators. I look forward to the next readings! Thank you for using your words to teach the importance of attention.
Andrew, again you help to engage the thinking that we need to reflect on as we look to establish a better relationship with our tech.
Recently we visited my wife’s family. Our nieces are have been shepherding their children through the challenges of modern life. They grew up much like Max - perhaps with even more autonomy and imagination as the iPhone didn’t enter their world until they were out of school and in university. But, it’s their children that give me the big hope. The oldest will be going into grade 7 and has just received his ‘phone’ … I know his parents have some angst about this for sure. However, he and his sibling and cousins took great pride in showing us all the movie they made (and the sequel too). They created the script on paper, they rehearsed and then filmed it on the iPhone. He used IMovie for some simple editing and titling. They screened the movie for all adults and took great pains to elaborate things we watched and how they would change things or perhaps what the next installment would have.
They were playing and the digital tool was just a way for us to watch. They still go downstairs and get into all sorts of shenanigans - it can get loud and there are arguments, but they sort it out.
They have a solid foundation of imagination. They are good readers and love books and stories. They are solid students. None of this is by accident - their parents, rooted in their childhood of imagination and play simply built the environment that it can occur in. They know that the phone and the Chromebook in their lives needs to be managed and watched and talked about carefully.
It can still be done. It must be done for our future to be able to think creatively and independently- we have some big problems that they will need to wrestle with. They will need sustained attention to do it.