Attention spans: it's not just the children

You pick up your phone to check one thing. The weather, maybe, or whether the school trip needs a packed lunch. Twenty minutes later you look up and could not say where the time went. There was a message, then a headline, then a video someone sent, then a feed that never quite reaches the bottom.

Most of what gets written about screens is about children, and we have written some of it ourselves. But attention is not only a children’s problem, and it is hard to help a child with something we are wrestling with too. So this one is for the grown-ups.

The interrupted day

Start at work. When Microsoft looked at data from people using its work software, it found that the busiest fifth were interrupted by a meeting, an email or a chat every two minutes of the working day: 275 interruptions, counted across the whole day (Microsoft Work Trend Index, 2025). That is a heavy-user figure, not an average. Plenty of parents will still recognise the rhythm.

The way we hold our attention has shifted along with it. Gloria Mark at the University of California, Irvine, has spent years measuring how long people stay on one screen before switching to another. In 2004 her team found it was about two and a half minutes. In recent years it has been 47 seconds (UC Irvine).

Mostly, we reach

It is tempting to blame the notification. The research is less comfortable than that. In a study at the London School of Economics, Maxi Heitmayer and Saadi Lahlou asked 37 people to wear small cameras that filmed their days from their own point of view, then went through more than 1,100 moments when they reached for their phones. 89% of those interactions were started by the person, not by a notification (Heitmayer and Lahlou, 2021).

Nine times in ten, nothing called us. We simply reached. The authors conclude that the disruption lives in learned habits rather than in the device itself.

That is no reason for guilt. A habit is only a groove worn by repetition: a small itch of boredom, a reach, a little reward. And that is the hopeful part, because a groove can be worn a different way.

What the children see

Children mostly learn what to do with a phone by watching what we do with ours. Their own phones are busy, too. When Common Sense Media tracked the Android phones of 203 American 11 to 17-year-olds for a week, half of them received 237 or more notifications a day, and about a quarter of all the notifications arrived during school hours (Common Sense Media, 2023).

Picture two kitchens. In one, every buzz is answered at once, mid-sentence, mid-meal. In the other, a grown-up turns the phone face down and says “hang on, I’m reading”. A child growing up in the first learns that the buzz comes first. A child in the second learns something else. Neither lesson is taught on purpose. Both are caught.

Three signs of change

It would be easy to stop there, and it would be wrong, because things are moving.

The first is in the Netherlands, where phones have been kept out of secondary school classrooms since January 2024 under a national agreement rather than a law. When researchers evaluated it for the Dutch education ministry, 75% of secondary schools reported a positive effect on pupils’ concentration (Kohnstamm Institute for the Dutch government, 2025). That is what the schools report, not a measurement of each child’s attention, but it is a striking number.

The second is closer to home. In the UK, children’s enjoyment of reading has risen for the first time since 2021. In the National Literacy Trust’s 2026 survey, 36.1% of 8 to 18-year-olds said they enjoy reading in their free time, up from 32.7% in 2025, which was the lowest in twenty years (National Literacy Trust, 2026). Still low, still fragile, but up.

The third sign is the one you can make yourself.

What helps, for grown-ups

None of these needs a rule chart. Choose one and try it for a week.

Give the phone a home. A shelf in the hall, a drawer in the kitchen. If it lives somewhere other than your pocket, every reach turns into a short walk, and most reaches do not survive the walk.

Switch off everything that is not a person. Keep calls and messages from the people you love. The rest can wait until you go looking for it, which, as the cameras showed, you will.

Say it out loud. “I’m putting my phone away for tea.” “I’m just finishing this chapter.” Children learn more from a habit they hear narrated than from a rule they are handed.

Leave a little boredom in the day. The itch that sends a hand to the phone is often plain boredom. Sitting with it for a minute is where a lot of thinking, and a lot of children’s play, begins.

Let them see you read. A book, a newspaper, a letter. Something that stays the same while you are looking at it.

Something that waits

That last one is why we chose paper. A Journee letter does not buzz, autoplay or refresh. It arrives with a child’s name on the envelope and waits on the doormat until somebody is ready for it, and then it asks for nothing but a little time and a choice at the end. If you would like more on keeping some of childhood off the screen, our page on screen-free stories is a good place to start.

None of this is about getting it perfect. It is about noticing the reach, and taking a little of your attention back, one evening at a time.