“The most precious gift we can give anyone is our attention.” ~ Thach Nhat
Judy is the third time I miss it. She spent ten minutes firmly laying each sofa cushion on the floor of our living room in Vancouver, building what she considered to be an Olympic landing pad. She got on the couch, stretched out her hand, and passed it to me. You know that one. A child’s appearance gives you an instant before they do something that makes the heart beat in your throat.
“Dad, wait and see!” She shouted.
My phone is in my hand. It is always in my hands. I’m reading Slack messages or emails or maybe nothing, just a reflection of a pull down to refresh. I do not remember what it was. Zero. Whatever it was, it was completely dissolved about 4 minutes after I read it, because that’s what 90% of real alerts are: something that feels urgent and then disappears.
“One second, habibti,” I told her. My thumb continues to roll.
She jumped. I heard pillows strewn all over the hardwood floor. When I looked at her, she was gone, walking towards her room with a female elephant dragging behind one ear.
I went back to my phone immediately.
Nothing was registered at the time. Kids jump on furniture, parents check phones, no one puts under “something I’m sorry.” But that was the beginning of a model that I had not recognized for many years because this model was made absent and absent, almost invisible while they were being created.
For the next two years, the proposal continued. “Dad, look at this” “Dad came to see” “Dad is watching me” a little quieter than the last time. Each met with my technical version in the living room, but parked his mind somewhere in the 6.1-inch screen.
I ran an engineering team for a living. My entire professional identity is built around responses around keeping 14 articles simultaneously around not allowing messages to be unread for more than a few minutes. I’m really proud of how quickly I can change the context. I think it is a superpower. I carried that mindset through our front door every evening and never asked if it was there.
What I didn’t realize was that Judy kept the score.
There is this Saturday. She is about five years old. She set herself at the kitchen table with a sign and a large piece of paper, and she was drawing while describing the whole scene to me in the way children tell stories. The purple dog lives on the rainbow, and his best friend is Cloud Martin, and they are both invited to a birthday party on the moon, but the purple dog is scared because he has never been to space.
I was saying “wow” and “oh cool” then “what happened” at what I thought was convincing. My phone is under the table. I was reading an article about deployments that went sideways.
She stopped talking.
I did not immediately register the silence. Fifteen seconds passed, about twenty before I noticed and looked. She is looking at me. Her face is completely neutral. Not upset, not hurt in a practical way. Just look at me how you look at someone when you have already confirmed something you suspect.
That’s the face I think. Neutral face recognition. At the age of five, she was already learning math.
Children are paying attention no matter when, and especially when you think you are not. They do not need you to declare that your phone is more interesting than them. They take it from a half-second pause before you respond. From the direction your eyes continue to drift. From the way you say “Tell me more” while your thumb is still moving.
Sarah, my wife, was the one who showed me.
A few months later, Judy in bed, we were both sitting at the kitchen table, turning on our laptops. “She’s not asking you to watch anymore,” Sarah said.
Four seconds of silence.
“Did you notice it?”
I do not have.
I sat with him for a while after she said it. I tried to track it back. When did Judy grab my shirt and say “Baba look”? I can not find it now. It is not over. It has evaporated. A sound fades away and sometimes it disappears and you can never say for sure when it goes from empty to there.
All I could understand from sitting at that desk with my laptop still on and the light in front of me was that Judy did not stop wanting me to look. She stopped thinking I would.
That was a completely different story, and it was the worst thing I could ever do.
I did not sleep well that night. I looked at the ceiling and ran through an inventory that I did not like. How many times a day do I pick up the phone? I started counting the next morning and disappeared before lunch. I reached for it while brushing my teeth in my mouth. While the kettle is heating. When walking from the car to the front door, the distance is about forty feet, because obviously forty feet of not looking at the screen is too much.
At the red light. During meals. On the bed next to Sarah while she told me about her day. That one hit so hard when I forced myself to watch it.
I am not involved in any special programs. It is self-control. Constantly pulling somewhere else, someone’s conversation, someone’s emergency, someone’s idea of something I will forget in an hour.
My phone turned into a door I walked through a hundred times a day, and every time I walked by, I left the person in front of me standing in an empty room.
What changes is not the will. The first thing that has changed is that I let myself feel how much I have lost.
I thought about all morning with Judy eating Cheerios at the counter and telling me about the dream she had and I was staring at my phone. All those evenings on the couch where I was next to my daughter and mentally sort through my emails. That year. Practical years. You can not pick up those mornings. They happened once and I was somewhere else for most of them and that was permanent.
That’s the annoying part where no one warns you about being clear enough. It does not just take your time. It takes time to be once and never to be again and you do not know that they are taken until later, when the only thing left is the knowledge that they happened and you are not there for them.
Sarah and I had a series of conversations about what we really wanted our home to feel like. Not about screen time. We have tested the on-screen time rule before. We downloaded the daily limit tracker, made a deal that fell apart within a week, as the structure was always tightening and the restrictions were more exhausting. This time we talked about what we were preparing for. That is a different question and it leads to a different answer.
We start with small movements. Call into the kitchen drawer at dinner time. Then during the hour before bedtime. Then for the first hour on Saturday morning. We did not tell Judy that we were cutting the screen. We told her we were trying more here.
She noticed within days. Obviously.
In about two weeks, she walked into the living room with a book in her hand. I was on the couch with no phone, just sitting there, which I know makes me sound like some antique from 2004, but that’s something that feels awkward to sit on. She came up to me, dropped the book on my lap and started reading aloud.
She did not ask if I was interested? She can see that I am.
That is the beginning. Not a program or a system, but something like a set of family habits that we create together. We start hanging out in the morning and leave the phone at home. At dinner we would walk around the table: “What was the best part of your day?” We put a list on the column refrigerator for each of us with whatever habits each of us is doing. Judy holds us to us as we hold her to her.
And somewhere the question I asked myself changed. It comes from “How do I spend less time on my phone?” Go to “What do I want to be present for?” Those questions sound similar, but they are not. The first is about avoiding something. The second is about choosing something. The second really works.
Judy is twelve years old. She was sharp and funny and she started learning to code, which made me a little proud and scared about what she would be able to do in 5 years. She does not say “Baba look” the way she used to.
But she does what I love better.
She sits next to me and shows me what she is doing. A drawing. An application will not run due to missing brackets. The video she thinks is the funniest thing ever. And when she saw my reaction, I turned to look at her.
Not every time. I want to be honest about that. I have not become some of today’s perfect people. My hand still goes to my pocket. I still feel the pull when I am bored or stressed or standing in line with nothing to do.
But I notice it now. I noticed it and I chose. Sometimes I make the wrong choice. But the remark is the thing. That’s changed.
If you recognize any point, if you are reading this with a tight feeling in my chest, I want to say one thing to you. You are not late. I know it feels that way. I know the mistake is serious because I have been holding it for years and it is heavy.
But the people we love give us more opportunities than we might even deserve. Children in particular. They will let you back in if you show up.
You do not have to reorganize your whole life before going to bed tonight. You just hang up the phone later when your loved ones talk to you and watch them. Really looks. Leave the trembling things in your pocket unread for sixty seconds.
Sixty seconds. Start there.
Do you miss the moments you were afraid of? Recently created. They are in the next room, in the next conversation, the next time your loved one looks at you, hoping you will look back.
Have to look back.
About Sabry Ali
Sabry Ali is a father and husband in Vancouver, Canada. After years of engineering leadership at Life360, Reddit, Microsoft, and Amazon almost disappeared from his daughter’s childhood, he inspired him and his wife Sarah to find Habi together.https://habi.app) Family routine and screen time tracker. He writes about the presence of digital habits and the building of meaningful habits in habi.app/insights (https://habi.app/insights/)
