Balancing a Culture of Distraction with Guided Attention for Gifted Exploration and Reflection

Abstract

As I was looking for relevant material for the Adolescent Psychology course I teach, my attention was drawn to a book by Thomas Cottle, Mind Fields: Adolescent Consciousness in a Culture of Distraction (2001). Frost's quotation is in the frontispiece, and his words seemed so relevant to the topic I intended to develop in this issue's parent column and is stated with so much elegance, that I couldn't resist using it to initiate an exploration of the roles of distraction, attention, exploration, and reflection in our attempts, as both parents and teachers, to foster the development of gifted potential in our children.