Gahhh this is so beautiful. And gives me all the feels because I’m the same. I just need a break and want to read my book on my phone but will this be the thing that ruins my child. We will know in 18 or so years
Aww thank you for stopping by to let me know even wiser folks sometimes also need to just catch a break and sadly most of our breaks lie on the other side of device mediated portals!!! How do you do it? Have you switched to physical books?
Everyone needs a break. If I had only one word to describe motherhood I’d choose “relentless”. It’s both relentless love like you’ve never known it AND a relentless neediness that most parents don’t know what to do with. So yes we go on our phones even if I wish I didnt.
I choose to believe it’s on me to teach them how to use the phone/device safely and responsibly. I do this by putting my phone in the room when it’s 1-1 connection time but otherwise I verbalise what I’m doing ie let me quickly order the groceries so I don’t have to leave the playground early.
I think there are two really important thing you're pointing to here. One is just how difficult modern life makes it to stay in presence with all the little dramas of each day, and the other is the occasional need to zone out from time to time. I think these are connected, because all the little pings and devices and non-natural environments we've adapted ourselves to each do things to our attention that just wouldn't happen if we were, e.g., still hunger gatherers. Fragmentation, contraction, scattering, suppression of emotion and body senses, etc, are all things that would have been actively difficult to achieve without modern life, but now we need to find a way to navigate in the environments that we're in.
> Of course my child doesn’t know that we run the world on little gleaming metallic cases of silicon and lights. She experiences all that I do and all that I am in the same way, as directed at her. And if I’m looking at a device, she sees my casual, neglectful indifference to her inner-world.
That's true! But I wouldn't be surprised if she observes a lot more than you think: she observes your self judgement and she observes your self compassion. My son is only six weeks old, so this isn't relevant to me yet, but the way I hope to navigate this is to teach him failure and then repair in myself in real time, as best I can... like "oh yeah I was just contracted into my phone, and now I realised, I'm going to gently defuse out again, make contact with the world, and... nothing 'bad' happened in any of that." If I can demonstrate the "nothing bad happened" move to my son, I hope I can teach him to be flexible to whatever states happen to show up.
Gahhh this is so beautiful. And gives me all the feels because I’m the same. I just need a break and want to read my book on my phone but will this be the thing that ruins my child. We will know in 18 or so years
Aww thank you for stopping by to let me know even wiser folks sometimes also need to just catch a break and sadly most of our breaks lie on the other side of device mediated portals!!! How do you do it? Have you switched to physical books?
Everyone needs a break. If I had only one word to describe motherhood I’d choose “relentless”. It’s both relentless love like you’ve never known it AND a relentless neediness that most parents don’t know what to do with. So yes we go on our phones even if I wish I didnt.
I choose to believe it’s on me to teach them how to use the phone/device safely and responsibly. I do this by putting my phone in the room when it’s 1-1 connection time but otherwise I verbalise what I’m doing ie let me quickly order the groceries so I don’t have to leave the playground early.
I love this!
I think there are two really important thing you're pointing to here. One is just how difficult modern life makes it to stay in presence with all the little dramas of each day, and the other is the occasional need to zone out from time to time. I think these are connected, because all the little pings and devices and non-natural environments we've adapted ourselves to each do things to our attention that just wouldn't happen if we were, e.g., still hunger gatherers. Fragmentation, contraction, scattering, suppression of emotion and body senses, etc, are all things that would have been actively difficult to achieve without modern life, but now we need to find a way to navigate in the environments that we're in.
> Of course my child doesn’t know that we run the world on little gleaming metallic cases of silicon and lights. She experiences all that I do and all that I am in the same way, as directed at her. And if I’m looking at a device, she sees my casual, neglectful indifference to her inner-world.
That's true! But I wouldn't be surprised if she observes a lot more than you think: she observes your self judgement and she observes your self compassion. My son is only six weeks old, so this isn't relevant to me yet, but the way I hope to navigate this is to teach him failure and then repair in myself in real time, as best I can... like "oh yeah I was just contracted into my phone, and now I realised, I'm going to gently defuse out again, make contact with the world, and... nothing 'bad' happened in any of that." If I can demonstrate the "nothing bad happened" move to my son, I hope I can teach him to be flexible to whatever states happen to show up.