What 150 weeks of paying attention has taught.
A milestone — and what you've built by showing up
Week 150. Here we are.
One hundred and fifty weeks. Three years of Wednesdays. In my clinic in Vienna, I think about duration differently from the way I think about intensity. An intervention that lasts one afternoon — however good — leaves a different trace than a practice that continues, week after week, for three years.
What I've learned from working with families over many years is that the accumulation of small consistent attention is the most powerful parenting tool available — more powerful than the specific strategy, more powerful than the right book, more powerful than the most expertly timed conversation. The parent who has been paying attention, week after week, for three years is a different parent from the one who started. Not because they've been trained. Because attention compounds.
Two hundred and fifty thousand words, approximately, have gone into this newsletter over three years. That is not the point. The point is the attention you brought to each one — the week you read something that named something you'd been experiencing and didn't have a word for, the week you tried something in your kitchen or your car on the way home from school, the week you asked your child a question you wouldn't have thought to ask before.
The child of the parent who has been paying attention for three years is also different. Not because the parent got everything right — no one does. Because the sustained attention, over time, creates a specific kind of relationship: one where the child knows they have been noticed.
What I want to mark about this edition is not the number but the practice that the number represents.
A practice is different from a performance. A performance has an audience and a standard and a judgement at the end. A practice is just the continued doing of something, in the service of getting better at it, over time. You don't perform attention. You practice it.
The parent who has been reading this newsletter for three years has been practicing something. Maybe it's the habit of naming their child's feelings rather than dismissing them. Maybe it's the practice of asking the specific question rather than the general one. Maybe it's simply the habit of thinking about their child's inner life for five minutes on a Wednesday morning, which is enough to orient the whole day slightly differently.
The Austrian psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, who developed what he called logotherapy from his experience in the Nazi camps, described meaning as something that is found in three ways: through what we create, through what we experience, and through the attitude we choose toward unavoidable suffering. The attitude is the last resort — it's what is left when everything else is taken. But the experience — 'what we experience' — is where I think most conscious parenting lives. Not the grand gesture, not the perfect response, but the texture of the days: the Thursday after school when you listened longer than you wanted to, the Saturday morning when you chose the walk instead of the screen, the Wednesday reading that gave you a frame for something you'd been living without one.
One hundred and fifty editions. One hundred and fifty small invitations to pay attention to the thing that is happening right now, with the specific child in front of you, in this season, this week, this particular September or October or January.
Thank you for showing up. That is, in the end, what parenting is. And what this newsletter has been, from the beginning: a reminder to show up.
We'll be back next week. There is always more to pay attention to.
When you look back at the parent you were three years ago and the parent you are now, what is the most important thing that has changed — not in what you do, but in what you notice?
And: what is one thing about your child that you understand now that you didn't understand when they were three years younger?
If you wrote a letter to the parent you were when this newsletter started, what would it say?
This week: write down one thing you've learned about your child in the last three years that you couldn't have named when they were three years younger. Not an achievement of theirs — something about who they are. Keep it somewhere. It's the most important thing you know.
1. Write one paragraph to the parent you were three years ago.
2. What would you tell them that you know now?
3. What do you wish they'd been kinder to themselves about?
4. Keep it. Read it in three more years.
5. Optional: share one line of it with your child. 'I'm still learning this.'
Whatever you make on Wednesday evenings. After three years, you probably have one. That's the recipe.
Next week: January screens peak — and one specific change that makes a real difference.
Names of people and brands in these editions are changed. Whoever was there and reads this knows what we are talking about.
Marian adds, from London: What this newsletter has been practicing, week after week, is something that learning science calls 'retrieval-based learning' — the regular surfacing of information creates stronger, more accessible memory traces than a single intensive exposure. The parent who has read 150 editions hasn't just consumed information. They've built a network of retrievable concepts that activates when a relevant moment arrives: the October pickup when the child is tearful, the December dinner when the noise is too much, the January morning when the legs don't work. The knowledge is there because it was regularly surfaced. That's the mechanism. That's what 150 weeks is. — Marian