Very few of us think about what children need. Many lack time or motivation because we don't consider it important. Yet this might be the single most important thing parents could do. But most parents are not in a "space to give" when children are needy.
Parenting operates like glassblowing—working molten material that hardens if you pause and shatters if you rush. The gather must remain within precise temperature ranges whilst the artisan herself is exhausted, managing adjacent furnaces. When a child arrives with need, the parent is mid-rotation, the piece half-formed, arms trembling from sustained effort.
Consider how prisms separate light. Children experience attention like white light entering crystal—needing the full spectrum to develop properly. Parents emit fragmented wavelengths, having already passed through too many refracting surfaces. What reaches the child isn't complete illumination, but whatever colours survived the parent's own prismatic compromises.
This reveals "signal decay"—the gap between a child's articulation of need and a parent's capacity to meet it. In radio transmission, decay measures how signals weaken across distance. In parenting, it measures something devastating: the interval during which vulnerability travels through static-filled channels. By the time transmission clarifies, the child has already constructed elaborate theories about the silence, encoded the delay as rejection, begun learning which frequencies never reach reception.
The tragedy isn't indifference—it's depletion as structural constant. Parents aren't withholding attention maliciously