The Wonder Trap: Parenting Between Being and Performance

My daughter stands transfixed before a puddle, watching her reflection fragment and reform with each raindrop. I reach for my phone—an instinct so automatic it feels like breathing—and then stop. This moment hangs between the pure dwelling-with of shared discovery and the compulsive need to capture, perform, and transform experience into content. The puddle contains not just sky and rain but the whole crisis of modern being.

The Lost Art of Dwelling

What Heidegger called dwelling—that fundamental state of being in the world—comes naturally to children. My daughter doesn’t observe the puddle; she communes with it. Each ripple is an event, and each reflection is a universe. She exemplifies what Heidegger meant by letting be (Gelassenheit), experiencing the world not as a collection of objects to be used or documented but as a living poetry of being.

And yet, watch how quickly we adults corrupt this dwelling. The parental Instagram feed transforms moments of wonder into social currency. The educational app gamifies discovery into metrics. Even the tools meant to foster connection—like mindfulness practices or sensory play guides—too often become optimization mechanisms. What begins as curiosity becomes a task, a set of checkboxes.

Consider the modern children’s museum. Instead of inspiring discovery, these spaces promote documenting the moments with Instagram-worthy backdrops. Parents tend to focus more on capturing the moment than being in it. At the end of the visit, the gift shop sells wonder itself: a premixed bubble solution that promises “pure childhood joy,” as though joy could be bottled, branded, and sold.

This is the world Heidegger feared: one in which technology no longer reveals but conceals, where authentic beings are drowned out by the compulsion to capture, optimize, and share.

The Ideological Playground

Here, Žižek’s critique sharpens the dilemma. The modern parent faces not just a distraction but the ideological pressure to commodify, even resistance to commodification. “Be present with your child,” the experts advise, while mindfulness apps and parenting blogs sell the tools of presence itself. The trap is so complete that even efforts to escape become performances.

Consider the phenomenon of “authentic parenting influencers.” Their Instagram feeds perfectly imperfect showcase homes, with just the right amount of clutter to look relatable. They share snapshots of candid joy—kids covered in flour during baking or chaotic playrooms—each painstakingly curated to appear uncurated. “Real motherhood isn’t perfect! #blessed #momlife,” they proclaim, even as carefully chosen filters lend their “rawness” a polished glow. The irony is apparent: the appeal lies not despite the gimmick but because of it. The power of ideology comes from embracing its contrived nature.

The same dynamic plays out in everyday family life. Parents who delete social media to “focus on presence” often announce their digital detox journeys on those platforms. Families schedule “unstructured playtime” into their optimization apps, creating perfectly imperfect spontaneity between violin lessons and coding classes. The contradiction would be comical if they would allow themselves to spectate the joke.

The Paradox of Purposeful Non-Purpose

This raises a more profound question: how do we create space for spontaneity without defeating its purpose? The irony is evident in the parent who announces, “Today, we’re going to be spontaneous!”—a contradiction so glaring it’s almost laughable. But perhaps this very contradiction holds a clue to the answer.

Yet this paradox may also point toward a solution. Instead of rejecting the contradiction outright, what if we learned to dwell within it consciously? Heidegger’s Gelassenheit—a releasement from calculative thinking—offers one way forward. By acknowledging and reframing the paradox, we can begin to practice what we might call “purposeful non-purpose”—structures that enable their transcendence.

My daughter’s puddle meditation continues, unaware of the theoretical crisis it provokes. She has not yet learned to see herself from the outside, to perform her childhood for an imagined audience. But I have. Even restraining myself from photographing this moment, I’m already composing the essay I’ll write about. The meta-awareness is inescapable.

Toward a Practice of Resistant Wonder

The challenge is not to achieve some impossible pure dwelling—Heidegger knew the ship had sailed. Nor is it to entirely escape the ideological trap, as Žižek might suggest. Instead, we must practice “resistant wonder”: a way that acknowledges the pull of authentic dwelling and the omnipresent pressure to perform.

Practicing resistant wonder means rethinking how we approach time and technology. It might involve creating "wonder zones," spaces where devices are intentionally left behind—a forest walk where the absence of screens allows curiosity to unfold naturally. It could also involve allowing for unstructured playtime and loosely holding the schedule to let spontaneity thrive without rigid expectations.

Technology, too, can be used more thoughtfully, not as a tool for endless optimization but to create boundaries for itself. A timer might remind you to lose track of time rather than micromanage it. Even documenting special moments can take on a new meaning if done without the intention of sharing—a quiet ritual for preserving memory instead of performing it.

This practice also involves embracing contradictions. Children can learn to appreciate how technology enhances specific experiences while recognizing how it can flatten them. It’s not about striving for an impossible purity but about accepting the tension between wonder and commodification and finding freedom in acknowledging that tension rather than trying to resolve it.

The Art of Imperfect Presence

Maybe actual presence in the digital age isn’t about avoiding these theatrics altogether. But perhaps it's about finding balance. Understanding how to navigate the space between intention and letting go.

When my daughter calls me to see something extraordinary—a snail, a shadow, a peculiarly shaped cloud—I try to enter her temporality, to dwell in her way of seeing. Sometimes, I succeed, and momentarily, the world regains its poetry. Other times, I catch myself already imagining how this moment of “authentic parenting” might be received.

Both states are accurate and true. The art lies not in choosing between them but consciously learning to inhabit their intersection.

Beyond the Wonder Trap

The puddle has dried up now, and no photo exists to prove it ever was. However, some of its poetry remains resistant to technological capture and ideological analysis. Hope lies in this resistance.

Wonder persists despite our best efforts to commodify it. Children continue to find magic in puddles, even as adults struggle with the compulsion to document their discoveries. Their natural dwelling state contrasts our performative existence and reminds us that authentic beings remain possible, even in an age of endless performance.

We must create spaces where wonder can unfold without documentation while acknowledging that the act of making such spaces is itself imperfect. We must teach our children not just to wonder but to navigate a world eager to commodify that wonder, preserving their capacity for presence.

The puddle is gone, but others will form. In each one, we will face the same choice: to capture or to dwell, perform or be present, share or be. The art lies not in choosing perfectly but consciously—finding moments of genuine wonder, even within the structures we create to hold them.

This is not the pure dwelling Heidegger imagined nor the radical critique Žižek might demand. But in its imperfection, it offers something honest: a way of being present in a world that constantly demands we be elsewhere.