A child’s attention can make a familiar object worth looking at again.

Familiarity edits things out. You stop seeing the door handle, the pattern in the tiles, the way water behaves in a sink, because your attention has learned they contain no new information. A child has not made those decisions yet and stops at all of them. Standing next to that for a minute gives you back an object you have been walking past for years.

When a child near you stops to look at something dull, stop with them rather than moving them along. Look at the actual thing instead of watching them look.