Everyone Judges the New Parent Who’s Always on His Phone. I Totally Get Him.

Once, when I was scrolling, I came across the headline “Your Kids Think You’re Addicted to Your Phone” from the New York Times. I copied and pasted it to the place in my Notes app where I put all of the essay ideas that I mostly never write. Next to it, I put **, which is my No.
1 symbol for This might have legs, and wrote, “DO THIS ONE,” just in case I missed the symbol. Six months later, I finally read the article, which pretty much said what the headline said, while referencing a specific study from an organization I’d never heard of, and now here we are.

The problem with these sorts of essays is that often something born of out a pop-social-science-driven Aha! moment can never get any deeper than the original Aha! The thing has already been “proven,” so the job of writing becomes an act of extra confirmation, which turns anything that might have felt like a revelation into the opposite. There are too many anecdotes to pick just one. Or really, the problem is that the enormity and sameness of these anecdotes don’t add up to create what feels like a mountain of evidence but rather a redundancy of an idea that was probably too obvious to begin with, or it wouldn’t be that easy to exemplify. What frightens me the most are the things that are so plain to see that they don’t quite seem worth acknowledging.

A potential starting place, or at least the most recent memory: We were trying to potty train. It didn’t work, so this is not an essay about potty training, as there is nothing more to say beyond, Wow, horrible, and also, potty training books can be predictably sexist, even when they come recommended by Subaru types. One of the things that this potty training book demanded was a chunk of consecutive days in which you don’t take your eyes off your kid, since they are forbidden to wear clothing of any kind. We set aside Presidents Day weekend, and for good measure I canceled my office hours the following Tuesday. The book says this is supposed to be hard, don’t pretend it isn’t hard, but try to find the joy in the closeness and unfiltered attention that modern society usually robs from us.

In the days prior, my stress kept ratcheting up, but what I couldn’t manage to say out loud to my wife was that it had almost nothing to do with the piss and shit that would end up on the floor or the emotional toll of the I-am-causing-you-pain-but- for-a-reason fights that hadn’t occurred since sleep training, or even the great possibility of failure. Those looming intensities felt muted in comparison with the thought of a four-day weekend in which I would be with my family and not with my phone at the same time. At dinner, when we’d talk about what our plan was for different scenarios, I’d also be attempting to anticipate how time would move through those phoneless hours, and it wasn’t that I was certain those hours would be bad; it was that I could not conceive of that passage of time and how my brain might process it. I couldn’t imagine myself like that, the same way that I couldn’t imagine my daughter ever pulling down her jeggings and taking a clean piss in the appropriate location. It seemed inevitable that these two failures of personhood would come to a head in a moment when I snuck off to greedily tweet just as she began to diarrhea all over the couch. Excruciating—her shame and mine, all at once.

Long before parenthood, I began leaving my phone charging in the kitchen at bedtime so that the last and first thing I saw each night and morning was not a screen, and that’s been the most continually successful act of self-care I’ve ever undertaken. But the night before potty training began, I found myself not wanting to put the phone in its safe place. I was standing with all the lights out but one, plus the screen light, and I don’t remember what I was looking at, but I was looking at it long enough that when I finally glanced up, minutes had gone by, though I would have guessed only seconds, that sensation of falling asleep when you haven’t meant to, not long enough to find anything restorative, and then the gasp when you wake up, as though you’ve slid underwater. My wife was standing in the hallway in the dark. She said, Should we. … Her tone was gentle, which made it worse. We both speak to each other about our phones gently now; I’m not sure exactly when that started. It used to be fun—Gotcha, you fucking spaced out robot!—and then it was full-on annoyance, but at some point, we decided to go easy, which was the best way to say without saying it that we think the other one has a problem.

As the study in the Times (and a casual Google search revealing a million similar articles) suggests, the language of addiction feels appropriate here, but it brings diminishing returns. Well and good to say, Yeah, duh, we’re all addicted to our phones, man, but it gets clumsier and more toothless the longer the parallel extends. If I’m honest, I think I had a shred of hope that the potty-training experience and the days of pure, vigilant parental care would create a detox environment—some sweating, the shakes, a vomit or two before naptime, followed by the fever breaking and then a newly bright world. Did I even fantasize in the shower of one day telling people that my daughter and I shared a moment of mutual evolution fostered by my devotion to her? Who can remember, but the reality of that first morning, and the days after, too, was that the lack of my phone in my hand and my inability to glance at it every 10 seconds didn’t cause extremes of any kind. The world was not harder or brighter; I didn’t feel more present in it. I was sludgy. My eyes had their familiar medium-sting, even though there was no screen to blame it on.

The whole point of this exercise was that the moment my daughter showed any signs of soiling herself, I’d be so accustomed to her little tics and tells that I’d be able to grab her and carry her to the potty on time, but often she’d be standing there with piss running down her leg, and I’d be looking directly at this, as though from a great distance or from behind a pointlessly frosted glass door, and only when I heard the trickle on hardwood would I be aware enough to move. I was staring at her so hard I was staring past her.

My daughter was aware of what potty training meant and vehemently disagreed with the whole process, but what seemed to upset her most of all was the surveillance. Often I’d realize that she was looking over her shoulder back at me, tracing the way my eyes dutifully traced her, and the attention emboldened her to want to do something to earn it, which invariably made me annoyed at her, though as in almost all cases of me being annoyed at her, the root of the emotion was me: the novelty she clearly felt at my exclusive attention. I crawled over to her and sniffed her face like a dog, which made her laugh for 15 seconds or so. She always smells like some version of toast, and I told her that, which made her want toast, so I made toast, flipped her over and drummed on her butt while she got impatient waiting for the toast. Then she ate the toast, and we shared a banana. Six minutes. On the kitchen island, I could see a notification light up my phone screen, a dopamine rush too predictable to attempt to describe.

This isn’t working, my wife said periodically over those days. I’d get mad because that correct observation didn’t exactly change things, and also, we were in this deep already. What were we going to do, go through it again in the future? Yes, of course that was the answer, and when we quit, I snatched up my phone, and already, somewhere in the back of an ambient yet still crowded brain, I began to worry about the next stretch of days. My daughter pointed at my screen and yelled, Baby Shark, Baby Shark, which is this sort of unspoken agreement we’ve come to that if we get to have our phones, she can at least get her songs out of them. I played “Baby Shark,” set it to repeat, felt everybody in our home exhale back into normalcy. I thought about how good she’d gotten at singing not just the words but the melody, so I filmed her singing for a while; she looked back at me, my phone between us, trained on her, playing the song as she sang it back to the phone.

There’s a way to talk about being a parent to a young child that emphasizes boredom, said like that, an italicized weight on the shoulders. This implies a gritty, unromanticized beauty, introducing a narrator of the experience that, if not cuddly, can at least provide candor, which is less cringey. Boredom occupies outsized space particularly in the language of dads, I think, because boredom is a riskless emotion—not even an emotion, but rather a way of articulating the opposite of whatever seriousness the presence of emotion implies. Boredom stands in for depression, for helplessness, for resentment, for whatever the feelings are that mothers have and acknowledge and investigate. My dad has often told me that on the occasions he took his kids to the park solo, he’d look at another dad grinning through children’s games and feel certain that this man was trying to so hard to act like he wasn’t bored, a story meant to frame my father as imperfect yet at least honest and imply that this honesty was better than being an engaged liar. We have the kind of relationship where it’s important for us to think no one is bullshitting, and I don’t mean to make light of that value system because I’ve cherished it for a long time.

My father, my father-in-law, really any grandfather-aged man just now beginning to accept that there are some potential reasons for guilt—they often say that you cannot overstate how different expectations have become. Good different, but wow: another world. Yet bored dad is a trope that has stayed consistent into my generation, despite everyone wanting to be seen as the opposite of how our fathers were. The ideals flip, but the muted affect and the language for it remain—the old-school man is bored by and removed from children in a way he thinks his wife could never be; the modern liberal man doesn’t want to seem like he’s presuming to understand the depth of what a mother feels, so he deflects to something less. Either way: boredom, a compass that no matter how you turn it reliably points north to dad.

There’s this moment in the second My Struggle book, when the author, Karl Ove Knausgaard, has been riffing on trying to get his daughter home from a birthday party, all of her weirdness and shyness and the way she looks for him but then runs back to the action, doesn’t eat but wants his food, her legs wrapping around his waist as he carries her, and her shoes, where did her shoes go, he can’t bring her home barefoot. Pages and pages—his eyes are on her, she is magnificent and weird and common, and then suddenly he says, Irrespective of the great tenderness I felt for her, my boredom and apathy were greater. It’s like a rug being pulled out from under the reader, especially upon revisiting the passage. There’s this attention, so thorough that it can only be full of love, and that feels all too remarkable on the page, totally naked, but then we’re snapped back into this misanthropy that’s supposed to be risky, yet is far less so than the care. I guess the thing to love in Knausgaard is the honesty, but sometimes honesty is the easiest thing. Or maybe I mean that it doesn’t even read as honesty, just meeting the expectation of what honesty should sound like.

There’s an arrogance to boredom. It implies that there are things more worthy of your attention, a focus and a purpose that you’ve had and will again in a different situation. Very often when I’m with my daughter, I feel the opposite of boredom: an ever-present tension, a churning even when nothing is happening. Fear, timid hope, white-knuckle anticipation of … something. What I’m looking for, what I’m stoking with my half attention, is not the desire for something new or different, just the chance to make this experience in front of me a little softer. Are you ever bored? my father asked me once, watching me try to coax my sick daughter into drinking Pedialyte. I felt a murmur of annoyance, but it was overcome fast by silly, loud pride, at the chance to say, No, not at all, I can’t even imagine what you’re talking about. This is its own kind of semi-honesty.

For a long time, my daughter didn’t sleep, and I broke my no-phone-by-the-bed rule. In theory, this was because my wife and I each needed to have separate quiet alarms that could go off close to our ears, so as not to wake one another and also not wake the baby, even though the baby was invariably already awake and louder than the alarms. When it was my turn to give her the bottle, it was just us in the dark. I heard her little chokes and guzzles, her mewls tapering off into brief satiation, then hopefully sleep. The length of these minutes was unfathomable to me, unlike anything I’d ever experienced. I remember saying that they felt like a recurring pre-death moment, in that, faced with the silence and darkness but the ongoing need to have my brain awake, I’d start scrolling through what seemed like my entire life, replacing the algorithmic scroll with an autobiographical one. I’m sorry you feel like you’re dying, my wife replied when I said that, and I got a bit huffy because that felt like a willful misinterpretation; plus, we were huffy about everything in those days.

My wife didn’t talk about her own stretches of the night, a silence that felt important but impenetrable. I grew to dread these montages of extra consciousness that I had no control over, which always seemed to slow and delve in on memories that I had no desire to revisit.
Everyone in our household feared the nights. The baby’s mood would darken along with the sky, and then my wife would start crying. I would look at my phone so hard that I could feel my brow furrowing, my whole face pinching. Sometimes, we’d commiserate over the fact that nobody had been honest with us; either nobody remembers or everyone is a liar.

For a week or so, I tried to hold myself to not bringing my phone with me when it was my turn to tend to the baby in the night. This was my first stand, I guess, and first fast loss—but against what, exactly? I didn’t believe that the experience would be better if I had no screen to look at; rather, I thought that if I suffered through it without a buffer, I’d have more legitimate ownership over how difficult I found it to be. If I was to be more ill-equipped for this most important job than I’d ever let myself consider possible, at least I’d do it the right way. If you’re going to call it misery, earn the misery. The baby’s ability to be roused from sleep by any slight change in environment was at superhero levels, so I was able to create this binary choice: do the parental duty of allowing my baby any morsels of rest without which she would die—worst-case scenario, but still—or look at pictures of people from high school who had all remained friends, at a holiday party in an apartment with exposed brick, and risk it all.

When I broke, I sat with one arm wrapped around the baby, propping the bottle against her lips, the other hand holding my phone directly above my head, angled in a way that the light didn’t reach her. I craned my neck backward, held as still as I could, and the phone beamed down, almost blinding in the blackness around it, and this felt like sitting in the dentist’s chair with that spotlight on you, hearing the drill. I read most of an article about how modern parents were screwed by late capitalism and posted it with some comment that was meant to come off snarky but was really looking for sympathy, and a friend with an older kid said something dismissive about Just you wait, and I remember vowing then, at 4 a.m., to never speak to her again.

We had an app to track all the functions that might prove that the baby was alive and normal—we entered in every shit, piss, meal, stretch of sleep, any change in height and weight, any time my wife pumped and how long we could store the milk. It broke her down into measurable particles of human life, converted her to data, then presented that data back to us in flat, harmlessly cheerful emojis, a muted palette of pinks and blues. I scrolled to this app when the other apps felt raw. Holding my daughter, the most comforting distraction was this evidence of her life and my care for her. Those weird, maple-syrupy diapers changed, recorded, saved to the cloud; her soft breath as she slept and the warmth of her in that brief stillness, all saved, each minute accounted for, even the minutes I was living through as the blinking red circle reminded me that I’d begun to record this feeding.

The actual baby wriggled. I closed my eyes and wished as hard as I could that she’d settle. She did, just briefly, and I imagined sending the friend who had commented dismissively on my tweet a screenshot of the baby app, a little taste of my nights in case she’d forgotten what these times were like, and then I could tell her to go fuck herself.

Five years ago, there was a series that went viral by the photographer Eric Pickersgill, where he took images of people together in intimate ways that people often are, then edited all phones out of the images. The couple facing away from one another in bed, staring at the palms of their own hands; the newlyweds leaning against the hood of their Just Married car as though unaware of one another; the family of four around the dinner table, heads bent in what we’re invited to see as the modern bastardization of prayer. I think the photos are good—some of them are beautiful and clear in my mind years later—but it’s hard to know. They fit into one of the two extremes available in the increasing polarity of content—does it show a world entirely unrecognizable to my own, or does it show me literally myself? Escape or mirror; nothing too complex in between. Look at these photos, get that feeling of yourself unmasked, grotesque but at least grotesque in the way every single other person is, and then what?

Part of the ubiquity of the technology is that it begins to make you think it’s interesting, the way old drunks talk about drinking, and even if the point is critique or regret, that’s never what it sounds like. The art that’s easiest to remember is seen, then reseen on the device that it’s commenting upon, tailored to it, meant to evoke shame in the viewer but also dependent on the fact that the shameful behavior will continue. Look how empty they look (I look). Look how detached. Copy the link, send it—Seen this? Yes. Multiple times over the years, these photos have been shared across my screen on some platform or another, recycled into the loop, and to reencounter them doesn’t deepen them, just reminds me how much time has passed while this central thing hasn’t changed.

It’s the famous McLuhan line—the medium is indeed the message—but now the message is how much the medium hates itself. It’s the only vessel available for its own critique, which makes the critique seem more profound than it is, pre-weighted with the knowledge that it won’t change anything. We’re all standing at the bottom of a very deep hole, drawing pictures of the hole, and the pictures of the hole get better and better, what with all the practice, so it’s still moving to point at the picture and say, Wow that is a very accurate representation of the hole we’re in. 

To think about what we want for our kids is to place tracing paper over the childhood we remember having, deciding what lines to match, where to turn away. It’s never clean, of course—the ink bleeds; all the decisions our parents made that we feel hurt us or stunted us begin to blur in memory, until all we have is this certainty that we don’t want to repeat that pathology without any concept of what an alternative looks or feels like.

An example: We don’t want our daughter to feel that her whiteness is the unspoken center of the universe, because we, in our mid-30s, still do, as evidenced by this hand-wringing about what to do with our whiteness and hers. We send her to a daycare where she’s the only white kid in hopes that she’ll be less cloistered than we turned out to be. This is the beginning of what I assume will be a deeply fraught, constantly shifting process, already well documented by others in its ambitions and flaws. At the heart, though, is the reckoning with our own childhoods and the way they centered our comfort, our parents’ comfort, and our potential achievement, above all, and trying to hold to the belief that such an ingrained ethos is bad and to not progress past it is a failure. Ultimately, we’re asking our daughter to experience and internalize as normal something we still have no frame of reference for.

The way we think about kids and technology is the opposite but operates within the same stifling parameters. It’s the rare arena in which we can romanticize the customs of our childhoods, mourn what she’ll never have on her behalf. We can, often do, say, Remember how nondependent we were on screens? Remember just playing in your room? Remember imagination? Remember how weird and bored we were? And we can feel, for once, like we have wisdom to pass on about a better model for living. But amid that self-satisfaction, we’re still desperately foisting expectations on our daughter to live better than us—not better than we were at her age but better than we are now. Sometimes, she sort of floats in the hallway between where her toys are and the TV is, and tries to lean toward the TV without moving her legs, watching us to gauge our reaction. We say, Not yet. We say, It’s morning, baby, come on, we’re all hanging out, isn’t hanging out better? We say this, of course, with personalized screens that we’ve been nursing in little sips along with our coffee since the moment we woke up.

When she starts screeching and goes to the mirror to watch the machinations of how upset she can be, we say, What’s P for, baby? And (bless her) through tears, she screams, Patience! When I go to her in these moments, hold her little shoulders and breathe with her, tell her it’s OK to wait, to not get what feels like the only possible soothing thing right away, often I’m rushing to slide my phone back into my pocket like a kid caught in school, and in my haste, I might miss my pocket. The sound of plastic on hardwood is a gavel bang. She looks down, then up at me; sometimes, she points at it without comment. She’s old enough to understand that we’re trying to keep her from succumbing to an impulse we feed in ourselves. If a toddler understands anything, it’s injustice.

We’ve noticed recently that when she reaches for a wire and says, Is this a wire? in a cheerful yet threatening manner, it’s usually when we’re both on our phones at the same time. We snap our heads up and she smiles. What does she see change on our faces? Where does she think we’ve been? How long has she been holding the wire? How fast did she learn that the most efficient way to win a battle for our attention is to cry danger?

My daughter loves to be read to, probably more than anything, which you know if we’ve ever met or if you follow me online, because I don’t shut up about it. I can’t quite put into words how important this is to me, how I’m always a little nervous that this quiet, satisfied love will go away. There’s a book that should be too old for her that she sits through, and this is a source of enormous, pointless pride for me, and I think a source of joy for her. My mother brought it in a haul of what she used to read to me; I don’t remember it, but I can imagine her voice steadily moving through these exacting descriptions of weather, all the native plants in a lonely bog. My daughter sits on my lap and leans all her weight back into my chest, I hold the book up in front of our faces, and sometimes with my off hand, I touch the softest skin on the nape of her neck until she gets annoyed. She whispers along to the words she knows, and I coax her to say them louder; she’s beginning to take on this agonizing perfectionism, whispering any word until she feels confident, and only then opening into a bellow. A couple of pages before the end of the book, she starts preemptively going, Again again again again, and will only be pacified by agreement. This can stretch on for hours. That’s not true—this can stretch on for what feels like hours but is, at the most, maybe 40 minutes, though I still think that’s a lot. It’s the longest I’ll go without reaching into my pocket.

In a too-on-the-nose metaphor, my child is literally sitting on top of my phone, desiring nothing more than continued closeness with me, and to reach for my phone would be to shove her out of the way, so thankfully I don’t do that. During the failed potty-training days, she was naked, her feet cold, and the rest of her body very warm. She’d eventually decided to fight the training by refusing to pee at all, so I wasn’t worried about a disaster on the chair, and she was less likely to get enraged and pee spitefully when confined to my arms, so we stayed like that. If I had a simple, romantic idea of what fatherhood could be before I was a father, it would be this image—the physicality of this unselfconscious little body wriggling into mine, a child hypnotized by words the way I like to think I once was, and the way they reverberate from my chest when she lays her head on me. I felt the weight of the beauty and the need to somehow be worthy of it, which in my mind means to not think of anything but the beauty that’s happening, and by then I was out of it. I didn’t feel myself already longing for some next activity; I just felt the anxiety of knowing that I might quickly want this moment to be diluted, and then the anxiety manifested the desire.

Reading with her has become like driving to work—making the turns without realizing until suddenly you’re parked—so I could hear my voice carrying on, but my mind was revisiting the days when I researched my first book and didn’t have a smartphone, and it was just me in a beat-up hatchback driving through the Midwest, taking notes in a marble notebook in the bleachers of minor-league baseball stadiums, watching the sun trace noon to night across the sky. I cannot remember what it felt like to be that person, to be that alone, alternating between focus and some ideal of productive boredom. I think of that person a lot, wondering what he thought about, and I get to the point where I’m so certain he was better than me, able to observe the world, record it, create within it, with a clarity I’ll never get back. But that person had a pretty severe anxiety disorder and must have found the time trapped in his own mind to be excruciating. I’m not romanticizing clarity here or patience or presence; I’m romanticizing a life unencumbered enough to be productive, which was a life that I didn’t enjoy as I lived it. Back to the most central, and also maybe worst, part of phone life—the way even the moments without the phone, reflecting on what might be bad about the phone, centralize the phone. And I’m left thinking in the tonal extremities that this dynamic instills: either the slog toward self-optimization or the retreat into jokey nihilism.

And there was my daughter, still in my lap, listening away, maybe because she loved that engagement with her imagination or maybe because I hadn’t given her any other options. A combination—I think part of what she loves so much about books is that they’re the only space we’ve allowed in her life where she can be away from herself, that doesn’t come with any sense that she needs to ask permission, or that she’ll be told to stop. She can just sort of zone out, and we can feel like she’s doing something, and we are, too, because she needs our attention to do the thing we want her to do. She was still going, Again again again, but beginning to rub her eyes. She was impossibly adorable like that, the way she often is, but I didn’t want to lose it. I asked my wife, Can you take a picture? Can you send it to me?

Excerpt from Attachments by Lucas Mann. ©2024 by Lucas Mann. Used with permission of the University of Iowa Press.