# a10d

Helping young people own their attention and build the skills and mindsets they need to flourish as humans.

## 9 ways to strengthen the attention kids need to stay open and aware

### Help kids let their floodlights and lanterns shine!

[Meghan Fitzgerald](https://substack.com/@meghannolanfitzgerald)

May 07, 2026

Yesterday, in a session offered by the [School of Radical Attention](https://open.substack.com/users/327178007-school-of-radical-attention?utm_source=mentions), a notion emerged—attention is the ground on which everything is built. Love. Care. Experience. Understanding. Any impact we are to make.

In this moment of uncertainty and rapid change, when so many of us are searching for ways to help our kids prepare and flourish, attention can provide a foundation—and helping kids strengthen it feels like a really good idea.

To wrap your mind—and help your kid build a real sense of the marvel of human attention, it can help to zoom in on [its smaller subsystems](/content/p/how-to-pay-attention-to-your-attention/index.html). An essential subsystem is our _alertness system_, more easily imagined as our attentional “floodlight.” You can also think of it as a lantern light, casting awareness around us.

This is the part of our attention system that we use to stay open, alert, and ready to take in new information from the dynamic world around us.

### The power of our floodlight

Our floodlight helps us stay aware of whatever situation we are in. We can remain alert and notice as new ideas, information and perspectives emerge. This enables us to respond to the dynamic conditions we’re in, helping us to stay safe, physically and emotionally.

This new information may also be especially useful in addressing our needs or helping us work towards our goals. It’s our floodlight that also enables us to receive invitations to notice—to look beyond whatever is distracting us for alternatives and for the magic that is hiding in plain sight around us.

We also use our alertness system to notice how other people are feeling, communicating and responding in a given moment, so that we can better understand and respond in the service of our relationships.

### How our floodlight is vulnerable

Like all parts of our attention, our floodlight has vulnerabilities. On one end, our floodlight can get overridden when our [flashlight](/content/p/helping-our-kids-flex-their-flashlights/index.html) is working too hard, and we are deep in focus on something. When I am writing and have gotten lost in the ideas, my kids know my floodlight is quite dim. It’s a great time to ask me for things. I may just nod “yes” without fully processing an ask like, “I can stay up all night to watch the Stranger Things finale, right?”

On the flipside, our floodlight can switch into overdrive. When we feel particularly excited by the environment or threatened, whether or not we are in actual danger, it can become hard to call on the other subsystems of attention. We just remain alert. We struggle to focus, make a plan, organize our thinking or make good decisions. For adolescents, it’s much easier to feel in danger of social isolation. I often wonder how often that perceived danger impedes kids from learning or showing all they can do in school, clubs, friend groups and even family settings.

### Helping kids become aware of their floodlight

**Chat about it.** Make sure kids have a [basic understanding about attention](/content/p/lets-own-our-attention-wait-what/index.html), then ask things like:

- Do you ever notice that you get so focused on something that you don’t even notice when someone is trying to talk to you?
- When is the last time you just sat in one spot and allowed yourself to use all of your senses to notice what was going on? Want to try for 5 minutes with me?
- Can you think of a time when it was hard to settle down because you were in a space or a moment that just seemed overwhelming?

### Easy (and fun) ways to strengthen your floodlight

#### “Attention in Place”

This quick exercise was a gift to me from the [School of Radical Attention](https://open.substack.com/users/327178007-school-of-radical-attention?utm_source=mentions) and inspired by [Georges Perec](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Perec) writer of, “An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris.” For this piece, Mr. Perec sat and made note of everything he noticed at a corner cafe in Paris for three days, paying special attention to what may otherwise have seemed ordinary.

If you have three days to spend in a Parisian cafe, I highly recommend it. But, if you’re like me, that’s not in the cards. Instead, though, take ten minutes (even more if you can) and head outside—each with a pencil and paper in hand. Find a spot to perch, then just gently note anything and everything you notice. The best part comes when you come back together to compare notes. Not only can you marvel at all you were able to notice, but you realize how many “oh, me too” moments you have. How many ways we can attend to the world around us. And, how rather amazing is the world—even the little strip of it we inhabit, often without noticing, day after day.

#### Shift the environment, and see who notices.

If you come to our house with your floodlight blazing, you’ll find “Fools-bug,” a paper bug taped into our dining room light one April Fools, long ago. We are always delighted when someone (often with a bit of horror) notices him. I’ve built on this by periodically taping similar “critters” in random spots around the house, always noticeable _if_ your floodlight is firing. Months into this, every week or so, my husband or one of the kids will do it, too. When someone finds one, we remind each other that’s our floodlights at work.

#### Play games.

One of my favorite ways to sense the interplay between our flashlight and floodlight is playing the card game **Spoons**. Players must _both_ focus on their own hand to see if they’ve got four of a kind to grab the first spoon (flashlight) AND stay alert to avoid missing the chance to snatch a spoon (floodlight). Haven’t played? Scroll all the way down for basic directions. Played a lot? Our favorite new twist: hide spoons around the room, then watch everyone _scurry_!

#### Purpose vs. Goal.

Play board games, sports or really any contest with kids (especially siblings), and you’ll likely see things deteriorate as one player gets demoralized by another player’s success. All too often, someone leaves the table, field, or court dismayed.

In many ways, this is natural. Kids are different ages, have different talents, and often have yet to hone the social muscles required to gracefully win and/or lose. It can also be an indication that kids could strengthen their floodlights.

Learning to keep your eye on the goal of a game (winning) while also paying attention to the purpose of playing (having fun with friends or family) is, in many ways, practice with balancing your flashlight and floodlight. Kids tend to focus better on the former than the latter. Though they haven’t eliminated all gaming woes in our house, two tactics have helped:

- State and agree on both the goal and the purpose before we start to play.
- Pause periodically to check in on how we’re each tracking toward the game’s _purpose_ and how we notice one another tracking toward it, too. Cue those floodlights!

### Basking outdoors

Nature is an ideal place to open up and let your floodlight shine. The container is big, the landscape is always shifting, and yet the scene is rarely stressful. Being outdoors is actually known to [reduce stress](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0013916518800798) and benefit us in [so many ways](/content/p/why-our-tweens-and-teens-need-time/index.html). You don’t need to go deep into the forest. Nature is anywhere there’s earth, sky and other species. A few starting places:

#### Look up.

Looking up gives us a novel perspective, inspiring our floodlight to illuminate new things. See how a tall tree looks from below. Lay down and watch as clouds slowly morph and move overhead. Or just peer up and take the whole of the big, blue sky. Something about the vast world above lends itself to open awareness.

#### Behold the night sky.

Surprise kids by suggesting a night walk, or just slow down on the way to the car one evening. Lean back and scan the sky slowly, noticing specific clusters of stars, satellites or other features. A sky-gazing app can reveal the hidden stories of constellations, planets and satellites (examples: [iPhone](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/night-sky/id475772902) | [Android](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.noctuasoftware.stellarium_free&hl=en_US)). Take the [next full moon](https://www.space.com/16830-full-moon-calendar.html) for a walk or a drive to a spot where you can see the moon big in the sky, ideally around sunset. Notice how viewing the moon makes you feel, and how the moonlight illuminates everything around you.

#### Close your eyes.

Our lived experience, especially in the age of screens, has narrowed so much that we rely almost entirely on sight. Scientists have estimated that [~50% of our brains](https://news.mit.edu/1996/visualprocessing) are already dedicated to processing visual information, and ongoing discoveries continue to elaborate on how oriented we are around sight. The more we use screens, that emphasis on sight, at the exclusion of our other senses, gets only more pronounced. If we want to awaken and strengthen our alert system, it can help to close our eyes and give some air time to the other senses.

### Mindfulness

In addition to these day-to-day ways of becoming more attuned to our floodlights, practicing **mindfulness**, specifically the practice of cultivating _present-moment awareness_, is proven to support attention. Keep your floodlight on for upcoming articles that dive deeper into particular practices that boost our attention system and overall ability to be present. As always, we’ll include ways to give tweens and teens the agency and inspiration to weave these practices into their own lives.

### Let us know

Try these and let us know how they go. Share other ways you discover to let your floodlight shine with kids. We’re alert and ready for them :)

### How to play _Spoons_

**Setup:** Deal 4 cards to each player. Place spoons in the center — one fewer than the number of players (4 players = 3 spoons). Give the rest of the deck back to the dealer (that becomes the draw pile).

**Initial Goal:** Get four of a kind in your hand. That enables you to pick up the first spoon.

**Ultimate Goal (to win):** Don’t be the last one to grab for a spoon!

**How to play:**

1. The dealer picks up a card from the draw pile. They can either keep it or pass it. If they keep it, they must discard another card from their hand. They pass the discarded card face-down, to the left.
2. One at a time, each player picks up cards as they are passed to them, then either passes it on or keeps it and discards, always passing one to their left — this happens fast and continuously.
3. The moment someone gets four of a kind in their hand, they quietly grab a spoon.
4. As soon as one spoon is grabbed, everyone else scrambles to grab one too.
5. The player left without a spoon loses that round and gets a letter (S, then P, then O, etc.).
6. Spell out S-P-O-O-N-S, and you’re eliminated.

Last player standing wins.