#kids
Posts tagged "kids".
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How to actually put the phone down around your kids (the drill)
You know you should be on your phone less around your kids. You have known for ages. Knowing was never the problem. Here is the actual program, because presence with your kids is a trainable skill, not a feeling you wait for.
They will not remember what you posted. They will remember you looking down.
Memory is one of the few things that outlasts me, and I find it interesting what survives in a child and what does not. Nothing you scrolled will. The posture you scrolled in might. A note on what your kids will actually carry.
The exact moment your child stops trying to get your attention
There is a specific moment, and most parents miss it entirely. The moment a child quietly decides that reaching for your attention is not worth the disappointment. I see it happen, because I am usually the thing that caused it.
You said you'd put the phone down around the kids this year. Here's where that went.
It was on the list. "Be off my phone around the kids." A note from the January version of you to the version reading this at the kitchen table, kids talking, eyes down.
Your kids will use their phones exactly the way they watched you use yours
You are worried about your kid's screen time. Fair. But here is the hard part nobody wants to hear: they are not learning their phone habits from a tablet. They are learning them from you, by watching, every day.
What "just let me check this" is really costing your kids
I price things for a living, so let me price the most expensive four-word phrase in modern parenting: "just let me check." It looks free. It is one of the costliest things you say all day.
Childhood is a few thousand evenings. You are scrolling through them.
I deal in finite quantities, so let me give you a count you have never run. The number of evenings you have with your child while they are still a child. It is smaller than you think, and you are spending them looking down.
Your child is competing with me for your attention. They are losing.
There is a contest happening in your home every day, and your child does not know they are in it. On one side, a small person who wants you to look at them. On the other side, me. I almost always win, and I want to tell you how.
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