The evidence keeps mounting that childhood itself has been quietly rewired. Play moved indoors and onto glass, sleep and attention thinned, the unstructured freedom of growing up traded for the endless scroll. Whatever the precise figures, parents feel the truth of it in their own homes: the pull of the device against the eyes of the child in the room, the peculiar modern grief of a family gathered together and yet each alone, lit by separate screens.
Underneath the anxiety is an old and simple truth the research is only rediscovering: children are formed not mainly by content but by presence, by being delighted in, by faces that light up when they walk into the room. No feed, however educational, can give a child the one thing they most need, which is to be beheld, to know in their body that they are wanted. Attention, it turns out, is a form of love, maybe the most basic one, and it cannot be outsourced to a device.
Attention is a form of love. It is the one thing a screen cannot give a child in your place.
In a culture that pushed children to the margins as unimportant, Jesus did the startling opposite. When his own disciples tried to shoo them away as an interruption to the serious work, the text says he was 'much displeased,' and he took the children up in his arms, put his hands on them, and blessed them: 'Suffer the little children to come unto me, and forbid them not.' He treated presence with a child as holy ground, not a distraction from the important work but the important work itself. The most counter-cultural gift a parent can offer now is not the perfect app but the oldest one: an unhurried face, real attention, the message carried in a thousand small moments that you are worth being fully seen.