How to be more present with your kids when your phone is always in your hand. My fourteen-year-old said eight words to me at the kitchen counter last spring that I’ve thought about every day since — and what they taught me about the small daily work of actually being there. Get the brand new e-book, Be Here Now with guidance & tools to help you increase your presence.
The short version: Being present with your kids isn’t about more quality time or grand gestures. It’s the small repeated decision, eight or twelve times a day, to look up when your kid walks into the room. To put the phone in a drawer in another room. To sit at the edge of the bed for five minutes. To be in the kitchen when you are in the kitchen. That’s the whole thing.
Three Minutes on My Phone
I had been on my phone for, I think, about three minutes. Not that long. Maybe four. I had been answering a text from a friend who had asked me a quick question, and the answer required me to look something up, and then I had gotten a notification about something else, and then I had checked it. The way you do. The way I do. Constantly, every day, with my hand on a phone and my body in a kitchen.
My oldest daughter was making a sandwich. She is fourteen. She is becoming, in front of me, the person she will be for the rest of her life, and most of the time I cannot believe how fast it is happening.
She had been telling me something. I had been responding with the sounds. “Mmhmm. Yeah. Oh, cool.” The sounds I am very good at making while my eyes are somewhere else.
I don’t remember what she had been saying. That is the worst part of this story. I don’t remember.
“Mom. You’re Not Really Here.”
She finished her sandwich. She put the knife in the sink. She looked at me, and she said, completely without anger, almost gently, like she was telling me something she had been thinking about for a long time, “Mom. You’re not really here. Ever.”
That was all. She didn’t elaborate. She didn’t make it dramatic. She picked up her sandwich and her water and she went to her room.
I stood at the counter holding my phone.
I had a hot feeling in my face that I think was shame, though it might have also been recognition, which is shame’s older cousin and often arrives at the same time.
She was fourteen years old and she had just said to me, with the calm of a person who had thought it through, that I was not really there. In her kitchen. In her childhood. In the small minutes that, somewhere down the line, would add up to her whole memory of growing up with me.
What I Did Next to Be More Present With My Kids
I want to tell you what I did next, because it changed the rest of last year — and it’s the foundation of everything I now believe about how to be more present with your kids when your phone is the size of your hand and full of dopamine.
I put the phone down. I put it in the drawer of the desk in my office, the one we don’t use very often, the one I have to actively walk to in order to pick it up. I closed the drawer.
I stood there for a minute thinking about what I had just heard.
Then I walked upstairs and knocked on her door. She said come in. I sat on the edge of her bed. I said to her, “I heard what you said. You were right. I’m sorry.”
She nodded. Just nodded. Then, after a minute, she said, “It’s okay, mom. I just wanted you to know.”
I went downstairs and I sat at the kitchen counter without my phone, and I thought about how my fourteen-year-old had been gentle with me about something that should not have been gentle, and how that gentleness was almost worse than if she had been angry, because the gentleness told me she had given up expecting me to be different.
That was the moment I decided to take a year off from writing to you all.
I don’t think I ever explained it to you. I think I just disappeared, around this time last year, and you probably wondered where I went. Some of you probably figured I had quit. Some of you probably moved on. That is fair. I want to tell you, finally, that I did not quit. I went into my own house and tried, slowly, to learn how to be in it.
The First Month Was the Hardest
The first month was the hardest.
I had not realized, until I tried to put the phone down, how much of my parenting had been done on autopilot with one eye on a screen. I did not know what to do with my hands. I did not know how to be at the kitchen counter for five minutes without something to look at.
I would sit with my coffee and feel, almost physically, a kind of itch in my fingers.
I would catch myself reaching for my pocket, where the phone wasn’t, and feel something like loss.
For a phone.
That had been in my pocket.
The whole time I had been with my kids.
The second month, something shifted. I started noticing things. Small things. The sound my second daughter makes when she’s reading a book she likes and finds something funny. The way my husband stands in the kitchen with his hands on the counter when he’s thinking. The texture of the light on the floor in the afternoon. None of these things had been invented in the past month.
They had been happening in my house for years. I had just not been there to notice them.
By month three, I started doing the islands. I picked three times a day when I would not have my phone. Morning, with breakfast. The first ten minutes after the kids got home from school. Bedtime. The phone was in the drawer for those three windows. The drawer was in another room, on purpose. I did not have to want to leave the phone alone. I just had to want it enough to go to the drawer, which was usually not enough.
By month four, I had not been told by my daughter, in any form, that I was not really there. Not once.
By month six, my fourteen-year-old started telling me things. Actual things. Things about school, things about her friends, things about a boy who said something to her that she wanted to think about with someone. She had not told me things like that since she was about 12 or 13. I had thought she had outgrown wanting to tell me. It turned out she had not outgrown it. She had outgrown trying to tell it to me when I was not there.
If you want to read more about why one-on-one time matters, especially as they get older, I’ve written about that too.
What Being Present With Your Kids Actually Looks Like
I am writing to you, now, after a year, because I think I have something to say that I did not have to say before. The work of being present is not what I thought it was. It is not about being a more attentive mom. It is not about more quality time. It is not about putting your phone away during dinner, though that is part of it.
It is about the small repeated decision, eight or twelve times a day, to look up when your kid walks into the room. To put the phone in the drawer instead of pretending you can have it in your pocket without checking it. To sit at the edge of the bed for five minutes. To be in the kitchen when you are in the kitchen.
That is the whole thing. It is small. It is repetitive. It is, in a strange way, the most boring spiritual practice I have ever encountered, and it has changed my life more than anything else I have done as a mother.
I wrote a book about this.
It’s an e-book called Be Here Now. It is short (just 48 pages), like all my books are, because I do not want to give you another thing on your list. It is about the small daily work of not being on your phone in your own kitchen. It is about the three islands. It is about the eight-word sentence my daughter said to me at the counter that I have thought about every day for thirteen months and how you too can make these changes at home.
She is fifteen now. She still tells me things. A lot of things. She still walks past me in the kitchen and finds me looking up. That is what I have.
I am, every day, deciding to keep it.
Common Questions About Being Present With Your Kids
How can I be more present with my kids when I’m always on my phone?
Move the phone, not your willpower. Put it in a drawer in another room — somewhere you have to physically walk to. Willpower fails with phones. Distance works. Start with three windows a day where the phone lives somewhere else.
What does “being present” with your kids actually mean?
It’s smaller than you think. It’s looking up when your kid walks into the room. Sitting at the edge of the bed for five minutes. Being in the kitchen when you’re in the kitchen. It’s not grand gestures or quality-time outings — it’s the eight or twelve small decisions a day to be where your body already is.
Is it too late if my kids are already teenagers?
No. My fourteen-year-old started telling me real things again within six months of me putting the phone down. She hadn’t outgrown wanting to tell me — she’d outgrown trying when I wasn’t there. The window your kids need you to be in is whatever window is happening right now.
You Might Also Like…
- One-on-One Time With Your Kids: Why It Matters and How to Make It Happen
- Mom Burnout Symptoms and Recovery
- Screen Time Rules That Actually Work (For Kids and for Us)
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