You Are Overstimulated Too

We spend a lot of time thinking about what screens do to our kids. Less time thinking about what they've already done to us.

Your attention has changed

Researcher Gloria Mark at UC Irvine has been studying attention for two decades. In 2004, the average time someone spent on a single screen task before switching was about two and a half minutes. By the 2020s, it was down to 47 seconds (Mark, 2023).

That's a structural shift. Most apps are designed to recapture attention as quickly as possible. Over time, the brain tends to adapt to an environment that fragments focus. The change is environmental, and it's happened to most of us.

Now add a toddler

Parenting a small child is already one of the most cognitively demanding things a person can do. You're tracking safety, food, sleep, emotions, language development, and social situations simultaneously. All day. With very little recovery time.

On top of that, you're carrying what researcher Allison Daminger calls the "cognitive dimension of household labour": the invisible work of anticipating, planning, monitoring, and deciding that sits mostly in one parent's head (Daminger, 2019). The doing, and the remembering that the tasks exist in the first place.

By 6pm, your cognitive resources are often running low. The phone tends to appear because your capacity for decisions has narrowed. That's a depleted brain doing what it can. We wrote more about this pattern in the mental load and the 6pm handover.

Rest is doing something

There's a part of your brain called the default mode network. It activates when you step away from focused tasks: daydreaming, staring out a window, sitting quietly. Research shows this is when your brain processes emotions, consolidates memories, and builds your sense of self (Immordino-Yang, 2012).

Both you and your toddler need this. Low-stimulation time is part of how brains recover.

So when you put something calm on for your kid and sit in silence for ten minutes, there's something useful happening for both of you. Even if it doesn't feel like it.