Fancy Farms

About a year ago I had some free time between meetings and decided to find somewhere to have lunch. As I walked along an unfamiliar street, I noticed a boutique supermarket up ahead and decided to have a look. A few minutes later, sandwich in hand, I headed to a counter with stools facing out the front window. After I sat down, I noticed, just outside the store, tables and chairs that looked much more comfortable. As I was gathering up my things to relocate, I noticed something that made me slowly sink back onto my stool. Sitting at an outside table, directly across from me, was a mother sitting across from her one-year-old in a stroller. What stopped me was the look on the child’s face as her mother picked up her phone. 

I flashed to memories of the films I had seen of infant’s reactions to their expressionless mothers’ (still face) and I was curious to see how this child would react to having her mother’s face replaced with the back of a phone. The heavily tinted glass that separated us guaranteed I could observe them without being detected. The mother played her role perfectly, holding up the phone in front of her at an angle that, for her child, replaced her face with the back surface of her smartphone. At first, the baby looked interested in the phone and watchfully tracked her mother’s hand movements as she swiped left and right, up and down. I set the stopwatch on my phone and set it in front of me so I could make notes about the timing of their interactions. At fifteen seconds, the baby began to protest, rhythmically kicking her feet and letting out an occasion yell. It seemed clear that she did not like being replaced and tried to capture her mother’s attention. The mother played her role perfectly, proceeded to swipe, take a few selfies, add captions, and post them to social media. 

This continued until the fifty second mark, when the little one seemed to deflate. She suddenly became lethargic, looked about, and then hung her head limply down and to the left. After a while, she began to look up and around again: At 74 seconds, she seemed to notice a bird hopping by, people passing, and the wind moving colorful umbrellas overhead. One after another, they captured and then lost her attention. Her face became strained, as if she was angry or had a stomach ache, began to shake her legs, let out an occasional yell, and looked up from time-to-time to see the back of the phone. At 103 seconds, she became less active and again looked deflated. At this point I became aware of how deflated I began to feel watching her face. I also felt the urge to reach out and pick her up. My mind flashed to wondering how many times I might have done this to my own son. 

At 157 seconds, mother put down her phone and took a sip of her coffee. When she looked down at her baby, I could feel the relief in my own body, and the thought, “Thank God,” went through my mind. If this were my research project, I may have called it off. Now, at 176 seconds, mother was trying to get the little one’s attention, but her little one no longer seemed interested. There were no visible responses to her words or gestures, just her limp head hanging to the left and her blank stare. Was this intentional avoidance, a state of hopelessness, or emotional exhaustion? Her mother seemed to shrug it off and stopped trying to get her child’s attention. She took another sip of her coffee and returned to her phone, her child now seemingly indifferent to her actions. A few seconds later the mother stood up and pushed the stroller away while looking at her phone. 

As I finished my sandwich and headed off to my next meeting, my little observational study rolled around in my mind. I recalled that the early observational attachment research noted that parents who were dismissive or intermittently available, tended to have children who developed insecure patterns of attachment. It was those mothers who were good at being available and responsive to their children’s requests for engagement that had children who were secure in their attachments, developed adaptive affect regulation, and good attentional abilities. For the first time, I began to wonder if the constant availability of devices and their addictive nature will prove to have a deleterious impact on the attachment security of this generation. The social synapse now has a new and ever-present distraction that sacrifices those we are with for people and things at a distance. I can’t help but wonder how devices will impact the development of our children’s sense attachment security in the coming years. 

Based on all that we presently know about child development, the addictive quality of the internet is doubtlessly impacting the nature of parenting, the security of attachment, and the ability of our children to regulate their emotional lives. A central mechanism of the development of security is the consistent availability of attentive and attuned caretakers. This available attention, not just to react to, but also to anticipate a child’s needs is especially important early in a child’s life when they lack any ability to self-regulate. There are all sorts of things occurring in the environment competing with a parent’s attention and, of course, they are not always attending to their children. But for the first time in history, a parent’s environment includes ubiquitous screens that have not only been designed to capture and hold their attention, but now serve as a portal to their job, their entertainment, and their day-to-day functioning. 

Early in life, a child learns whether their needs will be addressed by available parents; if the parent arrives, and if the parent’s arrival actually results in reregulation or more dysregulation. The infant may not have conscious thoughts about this process, but these experiences will be translated into the biochemistry and neuroanatomy of their brains. Over the last century of research, we have learned how important our attention is to a child. This attention is now being competed for by the internet. The reason why the combined wealth of Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Bill Gates is (as of this writing) 189 billion dollars, is because the algorithms they have constructed to attract and hold our attention are working, perhaps all too well.

It is vital for optimal early development that a child feels seen, felt, heard, and understood. Thus, it is important for a parent to have a higher level of executive functioning that allows them to flexibly turn their attention to the child, attune, figure out what is needed, and help them re-regulate. For a young child, connection is life and disconnection is death. The body and the primitive brain know this at its core from the first moments of life. Once a child is regulated, it seems important that they are allowed to return to exploration and play unhindered by the demands of the parent.  The early attachment research shows us (and the current epigenetic research supports) that the availability of eye contact, shared gaze, reciprocal play, and the hundred other ways in which children interact with those around them stimulates their metabolism, brain growth, and learning.  My best guess is that we will see an increase in depression, anxiety, and hopelessness in children when situations conspire to divert parents’ attention away from their children. This is the aftermath of war, famine, epidemics and perhaps, the rise of the internet. 

This is an expert from Dr. Cozolino’s book The Development of a Therapist.