Continuing our tour of the new Bobbledy Blog features, I am happy to announce the first edition of Parents’ Roundtable, our biweekly forum for parents talking to parents about the issues that consume us. Our hope is to provide a space for the child-rearers among us to share ideas, ask questions, vent frustrations, or note amusing anecdotes. Thank goodness that children are occasionally amusing. I firmly believe that this is the one thing that keeps us from eating them.
Every other Thursday, we’ll be kicking off a new conversation, with hopes that parents will chime in. Here’s today’s Roundtable post, borrowed from the Bobbledy Blog.
New Year’s Parenting Resolutions
As most of you know, I’m a father of three. My kids are 5, almost 4, and barely 2. Every day, I participate in their care and upbringing. I make them food, I dress them for school (not well, mind you), and I give them my love. But am I doing it right?
After all, I wasn’t trained. I never read the manual. It a mostly instinct-driven enterprise, and who’s to say I’m not terrible at it?
Every once in a while (ok, pretty much every day), I stop myself and wonder if there’s a better way to do it. And sometimes I’m struck by an alternative approach that makes sense. When this happens, I feel relief. There is a better way!
But these moments of insight are usually doubling as moments of three-ring-circus, and so I slip into the next moment without changing my approach. And so I make the same mistakes again and again and keep feeling badly about them.
But one persistent piece of self-critique is the extent to which I use my phone around my kids, whether to check email or to play a game of Angry Birds while they put their boots on in the morning.
It’s only natural. I work from home, and so my phone is my tether to my livelihood. It’s how I know when I’m needed. It’s also my momentary escape when all three are in a bad mood and grumbling and I feel the need to turn to something as rational and predictable as knocking evil green pigs off of pedestals.
But they deserve more (the kids, not the pigs). They deserve me, present and accounted for.
My new year’s parenting resolution is to keep my phone in my pocket when the kids are around. I’m not saying I’ll never take a phone call in their presence, or that I won’t occasionally have to send an email, but my resolution is to significantly limit the amount of time I spend paying attention to my phone when they are around.
In addition to giving the impression that I’m more interested in a piece of electronics than I am in my kids, I’m teaching them habits I don’t want them to have. At least not yet. I know it’s inevitable that they will join the digital age, and probably sooner than I realize or am entirely comfortable with. But for now, I’d prefer they learn to recognize the pleasures of analog entertainment and the pleasures (and necessities) of genuine human relationships.
The Angry Birds will still be available when they are old enough to make their own decisions about phones, apps, and the like. (I can’t imagine how angry the birds will be by then.) For now, I’m the one who’s old enough to make the decision to keep the phone in my pocket when the kids are around.
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So…if you are a parent (and I know many of you are), or if you are not a parent but nevertheless have opinions to advance, please stroll on over to the Bobbledy Blog and add your thoughts in the comment field at the bottom of this post.
We look forward to hearing from you.
