May 2026

This article operates as a research sidebar to what has taken place to date in the Mildred Fund’s participatory youth projects. 

Introduction

The Mildred Fund was established in 2022 to enable leading art organisations to develop sustained, place-based visual arts projects for underserved young people aged 13 to 19. The Fund was created in response to increasing socio-economic and educational pressures on young people and is grounded in existing and extensive research on the wellbeing benefits of arts engagement.

This short text takes a closer look at the idea of ‘attentiveness’, first articulated by Mildred Fund Research Lead Sarah B. Davies in her 2023/24 report, where she defines it as ‘a specific form of attentive behaviour that involves a hyper-focus on the needs of young people.’ She explores the benefits of this for those involved in the programme. Here, I aim to consider what this ‘specific form’ looks like in the second year of funding (2024/25), and to place it both in the context of, and in contrast to, the digital attention economy. Given that the Mildred Fund programme seeks to support and develop the wellbeing of young people through the visual arts and creativity, I’m keen to reflect on what this support might be, and to make an optimistic call on what it can achieve.

Context

On 10 December 2025, Australia enforced a ban on social media use for individuals under 16, citing its negative impact on their mental health. This is far from the first or only recognition of social media’s effects on children; the issue has attracted global attention, and numerous findings from around the world are at our fingertips, including UNICEF’s 2025 report, Childhood in a Digital World. In the documentary The Social Dilemma (2020), Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist in the United States, made clear, ‘There has been a gigantic increase in depression and anxiety for American teenagers which began … between 2011 and 2013.’ This timeframe coincides with the rise in social media use among young people and, while the extent of its influence on mental health may be debated, the fact that children’s mental health is at an all-time low in many countries is not.

The Mildred Fund’s research, focused on children’s wellbeing from the outset, has also highlighted additional contextual issues in the UK (2024/25), including the ongoing legacy of the pandemic, increasing educational pressures, and growing socio-economic strains. These factors have contributed to rising levels of loneliness and school absenteeism linked to poor mental health. In the digital sphere, these pressures appear to be particularly harmful for girls, especially those who spend more than three hours a day on social media. Many do; their attention has been grabbed. 

The Attention Economy

Google tells me that: 

‘The attention economy is a system where human focus is treated as a scarce, valuable commodity that businesses and platforms compete to capture, hold, and monetize, especially in the digital age of information overload.’

Claudio Celis Bueno, in his book The Attention Economy (2017), has a similar, if more emphatic, view. To summarise, he argues that human attention itself has become the core resource being extracted. Moreover, it’s not just a scarce resource to be allocated, but the key site of production. We are the product being sold for money or power, through our digitally ‘harvested’ habits, preferences and affective investments to businesses and to ideologically organised groups. Jaron Lanier, a founder in the field of virtual reality, provides nuance to this, suggesting: ‘It's the gradual, slight, imperceptible change in your own behaviour and perception that is the product.’ This is bad enough for adults, but for young people, it is even more sinister, since this perception change is of themselves, at a sensitive stage in forming their identity in relation to their peers. 

The attention economy is actively set up in ways that are designed to get under your skin and quite literally into your brain. As Tristan Harris, co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology in California, points out, the effect is to ‘re-programme you’ to behave in accordance with what you are given, of what you are notified, and what you ‘want next.’ He says: 

‘What they [social media users] don't realise is that there are entire teams of engineers whose job is to use your psychology against you.’  

They aim to keep you consuming and handing over data for the benefit of a handful of companies that are becoming ever more powerful and bewilderingly rich.

Attentiveness

It’s not a giant leap to see the connection to, or rather, the divergence from, the idea of attentiveness that Sarah Davies first described. Indeed, in the second year of the Mildred Fund research (2024/5), attentiveness was observed to have become a programme-wide ethos that encompassed listening, noticing, responding, reflecting, and inclusion at every level of planning and delivery in youth programmes. It entered through attitudes and behaviours as well as the particular and highly considered use of space, time, programmatic content, and methods of approach. Attentiveness, in contrast to the grab and take of the attention economy, aims to give to and grow young people. To pay close attention to individual and collective possibilities and to offer something more and different.

What we found through the research was that this attentiveness not only supported individual needs but created conditions for a sense of wellbeing as a shared, relational accomplishment; what happens between people, not just within them. Collective wellbeing appeared to arise through this ‘specific form’ of attentiveness across the entire ecology of participants: young people, artists, teachers, families, and institutions.

The research uncovered an increase in student engagement and enjoyment with practices that resisted – and invited young people to resist – rigid norms, embracing flexibility that enabled richer, more inclusive creative experiences for young people. We found that when programmes adapted to individual needs, offered genuine choice, and created welcoming environments, participation deepened, especially for those with complex needs. Co-production and youth agency proved central. Inclusive practices that built creative confidence, belonging, and social and creative connections operated as a constant. Young people developed artistic techniques and soft skills, and the rich, fun, diverse, and engrossing practices steered young people’s attention away from the machine-led and extractive nature of consuming and being consumed by social media to the generation of ideas and handmade content that invites questions and asks, ‘What if?’ They didn’t even consciously try to do this. It just happened when they were invited to focus on a diversity of different arts projects that invited them to look upwards and outwards.

As Davies expresses, this depth of attentiveness presented in the research is neither simple nor straightforward. It is often slow, meticulous and always relational, and it is challenged by systemic obstacles and instability in the youth and education sectors. Meaningful engagement and wellbeing are described in the Mildred Fund 2024/5 Annual Research Report not as linear or easily measured, but built through patient, persistent – and sometimes fragile – commitments. Institutions must balance what they give up (control, certainty) with what they gain (learning, connection, transformation) in this participatory, attentive mode.

Rewilding

It seems to me that engaging in relational artistic practice is a means of rewilding children and young people’s attention. In ecological terms, rewilding describes the restoration of natural processes and ecosystems by letting nature take the lead and reducing human intervention. Through the Mildred Fund programmes, I interpret this as the re-ignition and re-distribution of young people’s focus through imaginative experimentation. To re-wild attention to other ways of seeing and to resist and challenge received ideas through personal and artistic expression. Rewilding through the arts represents the reduction of algorithmic intervention designed for extraction and replaces it with relational dynamics across a diversity of visual art forms and practices actively designed for individuals to flourish. It’s only one way that this can be achieved, but it’s both an enjoyable and a powerful way that comes as part and parcel of what the arts have to offer; one of the many outcomes that they endlessly offer up when delivered with quality and care.

Conclusion

The Mildred Fund’s work suggests that attentiveness, when practised as a relational, creative ethos, can function as both a counterweight and an alternative to the extractive power of the attention economy. At a time when young people’s focus is relentlessly targeted, their identities shaped by opaque systems, and their wellbeing demonstrably under strain, these arts programmes offer a different kind of inclusive infrastructure: one built on mutual regard, flexibility, and shared making. By inviting young people to notice, to choose, to co‑produce, and to play, the programmes do more than simply divert attention away from screens. They help reconfigure what attention is for, and for whom. In this rewilded terrain, attention is not a commodity to be captured but a capacity to be nurtured – circulating between individuals, practices, and communities in ways that generate confidence, connection, and joy. While the arts cannot, and should not, be positioned as a cure‑all for the structural forces bearing down on young people’s lives, the Mildred Fund’s research indicates that, when grounded in care and quality, they can contribute powerfully to conditions in which young people not only cope, but might find a place to imagine and inhabit more expansive futures.