American kids’ ability to focus is under a full-frontal assault, and it should be taken seriously as a national threat.
Attacks come from all sides: dopamine triggers and flashy apps, streaming services and immersive games, TikTok reels and endless doomscrolling.
Everybody’s talking about falling test scores and America’s ability to keep up with the rest of the world (especially the East) in its academic performance. But no amount of reform is worth a lick if kids can’t focus long enough to read a book.
To do anything of lasting value in life, one needs to be able to focus on their work. To understand anything complex, one needs to be able to focus on a train of logic. To think deeply and agentically about the course of one’s life … you get the idea.
To build a great country, you need a population that at a minimum can focus on something longer than a commercial.
Our civic system depends on it — our children-turned-adults will need to think in order to be informed stewards of a nation. And our changing economy demands it: in a world where mediocre work will increasingly be encroached on by AI, deeply focused work will likely be the thing that keeps people employed.
So: focus is important. But what do we do?
At first glance, this problem is neatly bundled under the broader debate about kids and screens. Pro-screen parents (and pundits) argue that kids need access to screens to keep up with the rest of the world; that they’ll be behind if they’re not digital natives, and that their friends have screens, so denying them access would equate to the destruction of their social lives.
Anti-screen parents (and pundits) clap back that kids having access to screens is bad for their mental health; that kids can be exposed to all sorts of inappropriate and dangerous things via screens (adult content, exploitation, and grooming, with a whole alphabet of inappropriate hedonisms in between); and that kids deserve to have a childhood, unplugged as nature intended.
These are all good and valid points, and are all compelling reasons why parents should think twice about screen access. But on the issue of focus, it isn’t just screens, and it isn’t all forms of screens.
Screens indeed appear to be taking a (sizeable) toll: studies show that higher screen exposure at 18 months can predict a toddler’s worse ability to focus at 22 months, and that kids ages 6-10 with over two hours of screen time a day have more attention deficits. Increased screen time (especially that with fast-paced content, like flashy games and social media reels) is associated with an inability to sustain concentration and hyperactivity symptoms.
None of this is exactly a surprise. It’s intuitive that spending all day on screens reduces our ability to focus. Most of us have experienced it ourselves — the simultaneously pleasant and ominous feeling of the doomscroll slowly eroding away our brain cells, carrying them off into the algorithmic river, like rain stealing midwestern soil into the Big Muddy.
But nothing in kids’ lives builds the muscle of focus, either, as an antidote against the erosion caused by fast-cut content. Even classrooms with their 45-minute periods and interrupting bells are at odds with true focus: 45 minutes is only enough time for shallow, cursory productivity. It gives the illusion of being productive, but it’s not true focus. It’s not enough space to build the deep work muscle Cal Newport made famous in his requiem on focus and productivity.
Those 45-minute classes are the “deeply focused” pinnacle of a kid’s day. They’re good training for a lifetime spent in busywork — the middle-manager’s day of infinite meetings and a hydra of Slack messages. But they’re not very good training for the focus muscle.
To be able to focus, kids need to spend time simultaneously building their muscle for focus and avoiding things that atrophy it again — like getting fit by working out and avoiding empty calories. It’s a double-edged sword.
The enemy here, as you may begin to see, is less in the medium (classrooms? screens?), and more in the span (30-second videos? 45-minute periods?). The screens are less the devil himself, more his preferred medium of access.
Saying “screen time is destroying kids’ ability to focus” is like saying “grocery stores are making people fat.” Some of the things sold in grocery stores can make people fat (most things in the middle aisles are bad for one’s waistline if not consumed moderately). But if you shop around the edges, you can spend your whole life eating from the grocery store and be healthy and lean.
In the same way, a lot of the cheap, empty-calorie content in the middle aisles of the internet will destroy kids’ (and adults’) ability to focus. It’s bad for you. But the stuff around the edges is actually nutrient-dense and muscle-building. You can use it (and should use it) and still have a healthy and vital focus muscle.
Not all screen time is created equal. FaceTiming Grandma, who lives two states away, is a fantastic use of screen time. Watching YouTube shorts is not. A four-year-old learning to write by using an iPad to text her friend is a virtuous use of screen time. Cocomelon is… probably not.
The nuance that gets lost in the anti-screens argument is that screens can be immensely good for kids. Screens are the access portal for extremely valuable things. For example, the AI platform developed by Alpha School, TimeBack, lets kids move through their Common Core materials at their own pace — which results in them often moving two or three (or more) times faster than public school kids.
The entire platform is screen-based, and it’s hard to argue with its utility and virtue.
The problem isn’t even platform-specific. Khan Academy was originally hosted on YouTube; thousands upon thousands of academic lectures and interviews still are. But YouTube also hosts chintzy, flashy, thirty-second shorts that can suck the unsuspecting into a spiral of intravenous dopamine shots and psychological despair.
It’s funny how human nature is omnipersistent, how in Homer’s allegory of the sirens luring sailors into the smothering depths he could have been describing our relationship with our screens, just 2500 years too early. The ocean was not bad; the sirens were. So too are the platforms and the demons who live within them.
Ray Girn (career Montessorian and serial school founder) has repeatedly said that he’d rather have his children watch a ninety-minute Disney movie than spend ninety minutes on social media. The latter gives them quick, unrelated dopamine hits; the former is a ninety-minute exercise in focus. Movies have long character arcs and plot twists to keep track of. They’re still entertainment, but they engage a valuable part of the brain.
By this standard, a ninety-minute movie is also measurably better than ninety minutes spent watching fifteen-minute episodes of a kids’ show — because it demands a longer window of focus. It builds the muscle.
Kids need to know how to focus, because they’ll rely on that skill for the rest of their lives. The modern world, more than ever, requires a strong muscle: everything is fighting to grab hold of your attention, while the persistent truth — that the types of effort that lead to an abundant life require focus — remains unbroken.
Even being a social media content creator requires focus (the number one thing kids now say they want to be when they grow up, replacing “astronaut” as the twenty-first century pinnacle of childhood dreaming). Making videos that go viral requires a lot more attention than just watching them. You have to ideate, film (often complicated sequences), edit, and refine.
Focus is a muscle. Cheap calories atrophy it, deliberate exercise strengthens it, and our kids need to build it. In the same way we encourage sports and PE to tone the body, so too do we need to encourage long blocks of focus to tone the mind. Kids need to read books, spend hours in free play, listen to long lectures. They need to replace the metaphorical pop song with the metaphorical symphony. They need long blocks of time, not constant interruptions.
We can reform the education system all we want, but it will only be worth something if kids’ minds are strong enough to take advantage of it.