"Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity." -Simone Weil

You watch your kid play and start thinking about everything working against them… the culture, the apps, A.I… you wonder if you'll be able to maintain your influence through all of it. If they'll still come to you when it actually counts.

Then your pocket buzzes, and your eyes drop back to the feed. And across the yard a kid who asked you to watch goes back to playing alone, the way they have a hundred afternoons before this one.

That’s how it happens. No blowups or fallouts. Just a thousand small moments where they reached for you and found the top of your head, bent over a screen, uninterested.

A kid won't tell you they noticed. They just reach for you a little less the next time, and less after that. By the time you go looking for the closeness, they've already trained themselves to stop expecting it from you.

That closeness was never going to be built on annual trips or Christmas gifts. It gets built every day.

So worry less about the culture and the apps and the machines coming for your kid. The thing most likely to pull them away from you is already in your hand.