Listen, Parents Have a Right to Zone Out On Their Phones
LatestAs a society, our biggest beef with smart phones is the head-in-the-sand factor—that we’re no longer aware of social etiquette or the value of human interaction. My biggest gripe goes the other way: That every time I’m trying to use my phone, people act as if I should be paying attention to them instead.
The argument goes something like this: While you were too busy on your phone, you missed your kid’s entire childhood, because you were frittering away your existence on a glowing rectangle while they pleaded with you to pay attention to them, and that’s precisely when they made friends with a future meth dealer. Also, you’re a bad person. I was heartened, then, to read a mother’s salient defense of her screen time, in which she laid bare the challenges of trying to get shit done while fielding accusations of self-absorption.
Writing for the New York Times Magazine, Susan Dominus reminds us that one major difference between screen time today and a mother’s activities of yore is the transparency. It’s not that her mother wasn’t doing other stuff too, but it was obvious what the activity was, whether she was having a phone conversation with her own aging mother, or picking up the newspaper to read the weather. Now that these activities are confined to our phones—we may message with family members, check the weather on an app, schedule a play date via email—we may as well be watching a Justin Bieber music video. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.)
Dominus realized this while “watching” her twins’ soccer practice and reading a collection of Edith Pearlman short stories on her phone. Dominus recalls:
The boys were dribbling their way around cones; I was in the gym bleachers, moved by Pearlman’s meditations on mortality, having a bit of a moment in an unlikely place. None of this was obvious to an observer, which didn’t strike me as important until a woman a few feet away turned to me. “Look at us,” she said, with a sheepish smile, gesturing at a row of parents hunched over their devices. “Our kids are out there practicing, and we’re all on our phones.”
I flushed. I was guilty as charged! But I was almost as quickly indignant: I was wrongly accused! True, I was on my phone, and if my kids looked up they would have seen the same thing the woman did: someone slightly bored, distracting herself with some mindless electronic pursuit. That would describe me accurately in many instances, but it just so happened this was not one of them. At the moment of accusation, I was a lover of great writing who happened to be reveling in some of it on a hand-held screen. With my choice of e-book over hardcover, I had unwittingly cast myself as a familiar, much-maligned character: the mom who is blind to the daily pleasures of parenting, focused instead on some diversion which, by virtue of its taking place on that phone, is inherently trivial. The phone cruelly reduces even the worthiest of escapes to one more bit of busywork.
This may seem like a meaningless distinction—are bookworms “better” people than Candy Crush devotees? Does it really matter what you’re doing on your phone, whether it’s Proust or porn, if the point is that you aren’t engaging when you should be?
I have to say, as someone with a child, it depends. Everyone has the right to zone out into their own headspace. Parents often need this as much or more than anyone giving the soul-crushing tedium that comes with, say, potty training. What’s more, we’re not only able to “be there” for more of our kid’s lives because of our phones, which let us work from home, schedule from home, check in from home. But it’s a double-edged sword—the tool that allows you to work while caring for a sick child is the very thing preventing you from spending more quality time with your sick child.