Most discussions of the phones problem focus on the child’s screen. Kathryn Jezer-Morton opens her Brooding column from the other side of the exchange: the pressure it puts on parents to manufacture a constant supply of alternatives, which is one reason organized sports are so popular — solving the daily problem of what are we doing today? is not the same project as wanting your kid to be challenged.
Then she moves to the part that is not about anyone’s device at all. Parents are on their phones too, out of work or idle habit, and the effect is atmospheric before it is behavioral. It creates what she calls “the negative space where talking could be, but where silence is excused because people are doing stuff on their phones.” In the soundscape of a household that negative space is loud. It teaches children that saying nothing is fine, and it teaches them on the strength of what they watch adults do rather than what adults tell them.
Conversation as private culture
Jezer-Morton, who teaches at a college, treats the family’s relationship to talk as the most fundamental component of its private culture, alongside food and forms of affection. Children raised with the expectation that they are part of the conversation — that their perspective is not a welcome addition but a required contribution — are, she suspects, better equipped socially. She is honest that she knows of no studies proving this.
What she does report is a pattern her colleagues keep noticing: young people increasingly struggle to express what they think and feel. The thoughts are not absent. The habit of putting them into words is. She is willing to guess that the blockage shows up as anxiety only some of the time and is more often plain inexperience, because building the link between your inner and outer worlds takes practice. And a skill that was never practiced is the easiest thing in the world to hand off to a chatbot — the column notes that in the absence of the skill, it becomes tempting, or even necessary, to let AI do the work.
What the children actually asked for
The empirical section is a small, informal survey of children in the author’s orbit, and the answers are the piece’s pleasure. The loudest theme was that children can tell whether you really mean it, and that if you seem not to care they will say less. One 16-year-old suggested being asked, “What kinds of questions are interesting to you?” Her own younger son asked for specificity — not how was school, but are there any teachers you really like or really don’t like? His friend Stella argued that negative material is more fun: ask who the worst teacher is, or whether there’s a nemesis in the class. A 12-year-old proposed asking children their opinions on things adults assume they don’t care about, politics included, partly to demonstrate that the opinion would be valued; the worst outcome is a shrug. Two more children volunteered that they liked being asked to remember things, and to hear what their parents’ own childhoods were like.
The answers share a structure: none of them are requests to be entertained. They are requests to be taken seriously enough that the adult’s curiosity is not a performance.
The craft of it
Jezer-Morton is a good guide to the difficulty, because she does not pretend the conversation is always worth full attention. With younger children, especially, it can be conducted while making dinner or sorting recycling — the caveat being that it cannot be conducted from behind a phone. The adult’s job is to steer: a disquisition on Minecraft can be nudged toward what it is like to play with an older versus a younger friend, or what the personalities are like mid-game. That steering is not a betrayal of the child’s interest. It is how a child learns that some conversational threads catch and others fall away, which is a lesson they can only get by watching someone do it.
The image she closes on is a paper boat steered down a stream with a stick — nudged to find the current, kept off the rocks. Conversation is a pleasure, she writes, but not one anybody is born knowing how to perform. At any age, the most encouraging thing available is the sense that someone is genuinely interested in what you have to say. What the children told her suggests they can distinguish that from its simulation at a very early age, and that they adjust accordingly.
Read the full story at The Cut.