TEACHING CHILDREN TO PAY ATTENTION 

What do adults fail to learn as they teach children to pay attention?

[Spring 2008]

ETHOS

Too much theory, and even lahdedah conversation, is like writing cheques for a fantasy bank-account. Another approach to high-talk is to ask - What do these new arguments & conclusions enable me to teach my children so that may live more honourable & happier lives? 

When desperate politicians feel a moral panic will help their ambitions, they often talk of a lack of manners in children & how this can & must be corrected. They easily forget that the House of Commons only ever manages the charade of common civility, and not true minimal civility.

I haven’t got children: but as Juliet Mitchell says of only-children - that of course they have a sense of siblinghood - I too do & must keep parenthood in mind. What would I tell my child or youth?

“I will always give you sufficient attention. Your task in life is to find at least two other human beings – a partner and a friend – who also give you this.  If you do, you will be on a different planet from most of humankind and you will be able to use new telecoms with less desperation!”

I hope the discussion will keep this in mind.

VARIETIES OF ATTENTION

It is a truth universally proven by divorce lawyers the world over that the three principal reasons for the unsewable rend in the once-eternal love  are, in order, money, sex and musical differences - that Dolly Parton is justified whereas Mick Jagger is merely ancient. The fourth apocalyptic horseman of the over-mortgaged, carrying the lovers to Mumu Nisi Land is Inattention, with whom, riding pillion, are its equally illegitimate siblings Reflex and Careless

This essay initiates a discussion to flog that unkillable fourth horse: focussing on how modern telecoms allow one to absent even when in present company, and the puzzle this creates for parents giving their children the things of the world.

It starts from the absolute anguish in the humiliating cry carried by six small words. “Why don’t you listen to me?”.

(The other form of this cry is: “Why don’t you pay attention to me!” )

Such rhetorical pleas come after countless occasions when one feels one’s lover (or friend or child or parent) has shown, even proved, insufficient attention. It is annoying when the other person has not taken in a word of what you’ve said. It is far more maddening when they repeat back exactly what you’ve said but with no respect for the tone in which you spoke. Related to the latter is a far more corrosive belief: that one has limitless attention, or more accurately,  limitless due/good attention. Let us first consider due/good attention in ordinary life. Then I will speak of attention to Art.

ORDINARY LIFE

“Now pay attention!”  is a command we have all heard in childhood. A dozen or so years later, some people hear themselves saying it to their own children. What are they trying to get across of what they learned as kids?

Let us stay with the metaphor a moment. ‘Pay’ attention gets us thinking of attention as a coinage and of accounts: and whether one can be flush or overdrawn or try to peddle fake coins.

I will return to children through two common adult failures of attention. Is this a controversial statement :

“To pay due attention to those in ordinary sickness & danger, is not an intrinsic virtue: it is merely the absence of inhumanity, like not-kicking babies or puppies?

In the First World, for most people, for most of the time, life is not a relentless state of danger or sickness. It is the cunning ploy of authorities – religious & secular - and of advertisers, to emergencify ordinary life: in order to sell things and to create anxieties to enforce submission. It is the task of parents to help children to lower their anxiety threshold. One of the first strategies parents should introduce their children to is to keep in mind the fundamental questions:

What are other people for?

How could & should we pay attention to each other in ordinary life?

All religions use counsels of perfection as a controlling strategy.  It is more humane to use the contrary of the line of absolute viciousness.
We all know what it is to say in a tone of stunned exasperation:

“What a complete bastard/bitch/shithead: s/he always does X or fails to do Y”

The two most frequent complaints, the world over, between peers and across the generations, are:

1) He never asks me what I want to do, what I’d prefer to do.
    Or, if he does, he doesn’t listen to my reply.

2) She never asks if I enjoyed doing something, or did something well.
    Or, if she does, she doesn’t listen to my reply.

Listening to such replies, whether or not one also asked the originating question, is the highest/golden currency of human attention that can be paid.
Remembering the story told, and honouring the preference, are two further mighty kindnesses.

Imagine parents and teachers, secular & spiritual, saying to 7 year-olds, 14 year-olds, 21 year-olds, 35 year-olds:

“Pay golden attention to others sometimes – please / for goodness sake / for fuck’s sake! Isn’t that the least you’d expect?!”

Children who have been (mis)diagnosed with so-called Attention Deficit Disorder have not received sufficiently believable & predictable attention from their carers: there is not enough good attention in their emotional memory banks for them not to feel abandoned and to start fragmenting. Their attention-seeking noisiness is a manic defence against this feeling. 

I would like to add a brief note about “the preference question” - “What do you prefer?”. It is always better to ask this than the “plain desire question” -  “What do you want?”.

This is because it acknowledges the ordinariness of human complexity, greed and uncertainty – a person always has several desires : some of which may only come to mind if the inviting question feels genuinely kind.

Related to this is the mighty lesson, gettable in childhood but which even some old people fail to get: Choice always includes loss but rarely means loss.
In ordinarily life, the thing not-preferred today may be had tomorrow or soon. It is very rare, as rare as a true emergency, for today’s choice to mean unbearable loss.
Of course we all want everything now, but we try to grow up.

LEADEN / DIVIDED  ATTENTION

Now imagine parents & teachers giving children the other necessary lesson:
An honest & mature person has a limited amount of (golden) attention per day. 

The counter-intuitive fact is that extended inattention (half-attention) is more emotionally (and physically) exhausting than focussed (due) attention. Four hours of inconsequential or even reluctant chat over an evening or in bits over a working day is far more tiring than forty minutes of good conversation. The latter can make you feel satisfied all day, or send you to sleep content: whereas the former leaves you feeling stuffed & empty at the same time, and slightly vexed all day. In fact submitting to that much chat usually means you do not have enough good attention left for a proper conversation. (By ‘proper’ I don’t mean lahdedah subjects – but the intention to bring honesty, playful intelligence & spontaneity.)  There is a zero-sum: after you have given your day’s quantum of golden or even good attention, you will for the rest of the day be able to give only poor, divided, leaden attention. Of course you can pretend, show the outward signs of undivided attention: psychopaths are the best imitators.

It is possible and often necessary to attend simultaneously to more than one task – domestic, professional, civic, religious or recreational. This might be for a personal or a shared good. One learns how to do this. One gets the knack, the trick of it at work – writing a note, checking one’s emails, speaking/texting on the phone, and being part of a real-group conversation – all at the same time. Sometimes it feels great to be at home, with the telly and the stereo on, a butty in one hand, a cup of tea in another and a comic or the paper in one’s lap. Sometimes it’s good to be among family or friends, with the papers and the telly/stereo, knowing anyone can speak but no one has to listen if they don’t want to.

The harder lesson of shared life is to learn when to not multi-task: in the realm of human emotional exchange this means :
Don’t treat conversation as a task. Pay attention to the person talking to you right now: and don’t attempt anything else – however doable.

Humans talk to each other in a variety of tones with a variety of purposes.
Here is a plausible range.

TIMEOFDAY – CHAT – GOSSIP – CONVERSATION – DISCUSSION- HEARTTOHEART – CONFIDENTIAL DISCLOSURE - CONFESSIONAL 

The main reason why many people get this wrong too often is a simple category mistake: an inability to keep in mind the distinctions between minimal civility, common civility, and cordiality: and that there is a significant gap between the first two and the third. To state the obvious, minimal civility isn’t mock-civility or snide-sniping. It is offering the rudimentary emotional investment in greetings, requests, thanks and apologies to every human you meet in the day. Common civility is offering slightly more chat with a little more emotion, but indicating this is limited. Cordiality is offering open-ended talk and emotion. Minimal civility is plain, easy and not exhausting: one does it, one does not linger or reflect on it. Common civility has the most shades.

A clichéd scene from yoof comedy or drama is of a group of young people with dropped heads (as in morning assembly) furiously texting or talking on the phone to absent ‘friends’, all the while trying intermittently to keep alive the craic with each other. Is this any way to live?  Does not such half-attention or inattention corrode the soul? Won’t one pay for the inattention eventually?

PROOFS

Invoking the axiom “Absence of proof is not proof of absence” is a witty move in debate. When two people are talking in an empty, windowless room and neither has hidden telecoms, the eternal problem of other minds means that one will still never have perfect proof of attention: your interlocutor may look attentive, but may actually be daydreaming. For millennia, humans have adjusted to this. What the presence of telecoms in the conversational space does is give perfect proof of probable or actual absence. People rarely switch them off and they become adept at hidden use of vibrating pagers, and mobile texting. There is always a third ‘speaker’ or rather interrupter in the room.

ART

One of the finest expressions of the moral dilemma created by the delusion of limitless good attention was given by the master aesthetician Edgar Wind. Writing in 1960 he observed that :

“If a man has the time and the means, he can see a comprehensive Picasso show in London one day, and the next a comprehensive Poussin exhibition in Paris, and – what is the most amazing thing of all – find himself exhilarated by both. When such large displays of incompatible artists are received with equal interest and appreciation, it is clear that those who visit these exhibitions have acquired a strong immunity to them.” 

Firstly, reading this remark, decades later, I smiled – as I guess Reader you did too – at his ‘ancient’ wonder: knowing that now one could go to an exhibition in London, Paris and New York on the same day! Wind’s point was that it was not aesthetically possible, and not morally advisable, to attend two exhibitions in a week. He acknowledged that a person could get there, whatever country, could see the exhibits, could have thoughts and feelings about them, and could even write 1-25 thousand lucid and witty words about them. His unfashionable point was that if one gave due/good attention to the first exhibition then one could not give it to the second until there had been a significant temporal and emotional break, for it was not a good way to live.

This argument had & continues to have a profound affect on me. 

Here’s a question. How should this truth be incorporated into the school or university curriculum or even the rest of one’s cultural life after 16 or 21?

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ANOTHER PROMPT

Since 2002 I have written a couple of times & published once on the effect of telecoms on the way people attend to each other. I re-think about it as telecoms become yet more sophisticated and intrusive. In October 2007 I read a fine and witty article Telecom Rehab by Andrew O’Hagan in the London Review of Books. Two lines struck me powerfully:

Before I became the Elizabeth Taylor of the telecommunications universe, I had loved being out of contact.
I was considering telecom rehab after a holiday in Cornwall during which my family threatened to throw my Crackberry into the sea.

I remembered a newspaper article from a few years back:

An immigrant from a dirt-poor village, thousands of miles away, comes to a dirty English town. He works like a dog and becomes rich. His kids will not want as he did. If the boy wants a Porsche, his dad will buy him one. But the lad can no more control 700 horsepower than he could a donkey: crashing the hot metal into a poor pedestrian. Now he walks the prison yard.

How old must your kid be so that a Blackberry, or the next thing, is not a crash-waiting?