The Devolution of Presence in a Culture of Distraction
Much appreciation for Mary Felice and Suzanne Dion for inspiring this post
For hundreds of thousands of years, the human infant knew one thing above all else: the presence of the mother: her scent, her skin, her sounds. Evolution shaped us around this bond. A child’s nervous system co-regulates in the warmth of the mother’s body—her breath, her gaze, her rhythms. Mothering wasn’t a task. It was the ground of being.
Then something changed.
Not all at once, not with a crash, but slowly. Subtly. The industrial era pried the mother from the hearth, handing her new roles and endless responsibilities. Factories first, then offices. With it came a culture of separation—children placed in the care of others, and soon after, absorbed into educational systems that prized participation in production over relationship. Then came the media machines: radio, television, and finally, the omnipresent screen. These didn’t just distract children. They distracted mothers.
We no longer measure mothering by presence but by productivity. How many things can be juggled while parenting? How many apps can optimize the day? How quickly can a child be soothed, silenced, or sidelined so that something else can take center stage?
This isn’t about judgment. It’s about consequence.
The capacity for patience—for stillness, for attunement—is not just an admirable trait. It is an evolutionary necessity. A newborn does not develop in isolation. They develop through relationship. The mother’s gaze is not sentimental—it is a neurobiological scaffolding. It is memory being written into the body.
What happens when that gaze is absent? When the mother’s attention is fragmented, hurried, and stressed? When her phone vibrates just as the child reaches for her eyes? We don’t fully know. But the early signs are sobering: skyrocketing anxiety in children, shortened attention spans, difficulty with self-regulation, and attachment disturbances.
We are not only witnessing the erosion of mothering—we are also seeing the outsourcing of it.
And yet, the culture calls this progress. Empowerment. Liberation. And in some ways, it is. Mothers should not be chained to past roles. But there is a cost to mistaking separation for freedom, distraction for independence. Motherhood is not a hindrance to modern life—it is what makes life human.
Headlines or revolutions may not mark the slow death of mothering, but it is etched into the nervous systems of a generation. And evolution is patient. It waits. If the child becomes motherless—not just physically but emotionally, energetically, attentively—what becomes of humanity?
We are too early in this experiment to know.
But every child, deep in their bones, remembers something older than culture: the nearness of the mother. And every mother, no matter how overwhelmed, still carries the ancient knowing of how to hold, to soothe, to be.
The question is—will we remember before it’s too late?
The Screen Between Us
It happens every day. A mother, exhausted and overstimulated, nurses her newborn in the soft light of early morning. Her body is warm; her arms cradle the child. But her eyes? Her eyes are somewhere else. They are on a screen—liking, replying, scrolling, consuming. To the adult mind, this is multitasking. Necessary, perhaps even sanity-saving. However, to the child’s nervous system, it is something entirely different.
The infant does not yet know about phones, feeds, or messages. What the infant knows is the field. Attunement. The presence of the mother’s eyes and the coherence of her attention. That ancient evolutionary agreement: I am here, and you are safe. The mother’s face is the first mirror, the first world, the first orientation point for the developing psyche. And when that face is intermittently available—present but not present—the infant adapts, not by understanding, but by reorganizing around disturbance and absence.
We underestimate what this costs.
When a screen comes between mother and child, it does not just interrupt attention. It fractures the evolutionary container in which presence has always been primary. The infant, whose biology expects continuous holding, attunement, and feedback from the mother’s gaze and tone, begins to experience a field of fragmentation rather than wholeness. The flow of subtle emotional regulation—the dance of eye contact, expression, coo, and stillness—is disrupted. And over time, the child learns: connection is arbitrary, unpredictable, and distracted.
This is not about blaming mothers. It is about seeing clearly. Technology has moved faster than our biology. Faster than our capacity to integrate its impact. And many mothers—isolated, under-supported, flooded with contradictory messages—reach for the screen because it offers a brief reprieve. But let us not mistake that reprieve for presence. Let us not confuse distraction with adaptation.
To hold a child is to hold a universe becoming aware of itself. It is a sacred task, not in the sentimental sense, but in the evolutionary one. It is about the transmission of safety, coherence, and unconditional beingness. And a fractured gaze, repeated thousands of times in the first months of life, carries effects we are only beginning to understand.
The screen between us is not just glass. It is a veil between generations. A filter over the mother’s presence. A modern myth that we can be two places at once—here and there, nursing and texting, holding and scrolling. But a child does not bond with a mother’s hands. A child bonds with her presence.
And presence does not multitask.
Framing the Child
In today’s world, a baby’s first weeks are often accompanied by hundreds—sometimes thousands—of photos. Every yawn, every smile, every new outfit is captured, filtered, and uploaded. On the surface, it seems harmless. Even sweet. A digital scrapbook of devotion. But there’s something deeper going on—something we rarely question.
The act of photographing, especially when frequent and reflexive, subtly objectifies the subject. The child becomes an object of attention to capture, rather than a presence to be met. And over time, this repetition—click, smile, upload—reinforces a shift in the parent’s mind. From this mystery is my child, to this image is my child.
Even if unconscious, this matters.
Every time the parent reaches for the phone instead of the child’s eyes, something is registered in the relational field. Presence is broken. The child, whose entire being is wired for attunement, is briefly reduced to appearance. And if this happens repeatedly—daily, hourly, endlessly—it conditions both the child and the parent into a relational style that is subtly performative, curated, and surveilled.
It’s not that photography is evil. It’s that it interrupts. It frames. It flattens. Especially in infancy, when the child’s self-sense is still forming through the mother’s gaze, that interruption is not trivial. And when paired with the ever-present phone and its endless feed of distractions, the child begins to occupy not just the parent’s arms, but their mental image gallery—a precious object, but an object nonetheless.
The child doesn’t want to be remembered later. The child wants to be seen now.
From Sci-Fi to Cribside
We’ve long entertained ourselves with dystopian fantasies: rows of infants in sterile labs, artificial wombs, synthetic caregivers, consciousness uploaded to machines. Brave New World. The Matrix. Gattaca. These images seem absurdly far-fetched—grotesque distortions of what it means to be human. But here’s the uncomfortable truth: we are already living a quieter version of these futures.
Not in the form of tubes and steel, but in living rooms and nurseries.
Blinking devices, artificial light, intermittent attention, and digital surrogates increasingly surround the modern infant. The mother is often present in body, but not in presence—distracted, overwhelmed, pulled in every direction by a culture that does not honor stillness or attunement. There is no malicious intent here—only momentum. We are boiling the frog, one notification at a time.
And while we search for genetic markers or environmental toxins to explain the rising rates of autism, ADHD, OCD, and other neurodevelopmental conditions, we rarely look at what the infant experiences as a field of sensitivity. We forget that the organism was designed by evolution to expect something very specific: the continuous, coherent presence of the mother. Not just her milk, but her gaze. Not just her hands, but her attunement. Not just her proximity, but her attention.
What happens when that expectation is consistently unmet?
We don’t yet fully know. But we do know that early development is radically sensitive to the environment. The architecture of the brain is formed through presence, pattern, and relational resonance. And when that resonance is fractured—when the child is fed but not felt, held but not met—it alters the very pathways of becoming.
This is not science fiction. This is science ignored.
We are raising children in increasingly artificial environments while pretending this is normal. We hand them screens before they can crawl. We teach them to self-soothe before they can speak. We replace the face with the feed. And still, we act surprised when they struggle to focus, to connect, to feel safe in the world.
Maybe the dystopia is already here, it just came with streaming lullabies and Wi-Fi.
The Rise of the Robotic Caregiver
It’s easy to imagine the future: robots with soft voices and blinking lights, marketed as high-tech nannies and babysitters. However, the truth is that the robotic caregiver is already here, not in humanoid form, but in habit. In the slowly shifting way a mother’s attention is pulled, again and again, into her screen. What we are witnessing is not just the introduction of new tools, but the automation of presence.
Mothering, once defined by attunement, nuance, and intimate responsiveness, is becoming increasingly functional. Feed the baby. Change the diaper. Check the app. Scroll. Respond. Repeat. The body remains, but the depth of the undivided attention, the organic rhythm, and the face-to-face aliveness are interrupted. Not violently, but persistently. Subtly. Mechanically.
We often think of robots as being made of metal and wires. But robotization begins in the psyche. It starts when presence is fragmented, when attention is divided, when responsiveness is reduced to a checklist. And the infant, wired to expect the full living presence of the mother, begins to adapt to something colder, flatter, less human.
This isn’t just about technology. It’s about what kind of contact we are normalizing.
When a mother responds to her child with half an eye and half a mind, while scrolling, texting, and listening to notifications, the infant doesn’t just lose attention; it also loses trust. The infant loses orientation. What replaces presence is a kind of ghosting: a mother-shaped outline without the soul behind it. And over time, the child learns that THIS is connection—fleeting, partial, conditional.
We are not waiting for the rise of robotic caregivers. We are becoming them.
Unless we remember what it means to truly be with a child, not just physically, but with the whole field of attention, emotion, and presence, we will keep outsourcing the essence of mothering until there is nothing left to outsource. And the cost will not be measured in missed moments, but in the fundamental rewiring of what it means to feel safe in the world.
Reclaiming the Gaze
Wake up! It’s happening right before our eyes—and behind them, too. The slow death of mothering isn’t a future crisis. It’s a current reality. And it’s subtle enough to go unnoticed. That’s what makes it so dangerous. There’s no announcement, no collapse—just a gentle drift away from the sacred act of being with.
But there’s still time to turn toward what we’re losing.
Because the antidote to this death is not a program, or a policy, or a parenting hack, it is a return. A remembering. A radical revaluation of the mother’s gaze—not as optional, not as sentimental, but as essential. As evolutionary. As holy.
To reclaim the gaze is to reclaim mothering as an act of presence, not performance.
It is to place the phone down, not out of guilt, but out of reverence, for what happens when two living beings meet in undivided attention. It is to recognize that the infant’s first experience of the universe is not abstract. It is the mother’s eyes. The mother’s tone. The mother’s holding. The field of safety that tells the child: you are known, you are wanted, you are real.
No robot can give that. No screen can simulate it. No culture of optimization can replace it.
The question is not whether technology is evil. The question is whether we are awake enough to notice what it’s stealing from us, one glance at a time.
The world doesn’t need more efficient mothers. It needs more present ones. Mothers who remember that what they offer—before education, before discipline, before even language—is their gaze. Their breath. Their being.
That is the beginning of everything,
and mother is the everything in the beginning.
John Harper is a Diamond Approach® teacher, Enneagram guide, and student of human development whose work bridges psychology, spirituality, and deep experiential inquiry. He is the author of The Enneagram World of the Child: Nurturing Resilience and Self-Compassion in Early Life and Good Vibrations: Primordial Sounds of Existence, available on Amazon.