SON VS. IPHONE – A REMINDER ABOUT AWARENESS

I was in New York last week and met with two wonderful women, Carol Cain and Issa Mas, two like minded parenting bloggers. I was telling them a story about me and my son that illustrates a main concept in Chaos to Connection. The concept is the idea of a message in a bottle, what our children are trying to reveal through their behavior. After I left the meeting, I started thinking about the story and learned more tha
I expected.

The story has changed the way I’ve been with my kids since I’ve been home. We were at the pool on a recent Saturday for the kids swimming lessons. I was taking some calls and replying to e-mails on my iPhone. My wife was with our daughter. My son started trying to get my attention by talking to me, and then he’d stopped and go back and play with some other kids.

Finally, my son came back to me and took my iPhone and started playing with it. I said, “Son, please don’t play with my phone,” because he has a tendency to push the buttons that deletes things. He looked at me. And then his fingers started to speed up and touch more of the phone. As I reached out to grab the phone from him, he began to back up. I moved forward. He backed up some more, and I moved forward. He backed up some more and then finally, his hands in a frenzy and the iPhone going crazy, he turned and dashed away, and ran into a glass wall. He bounced off the wall, and in his surprise, he let go of the iPhone.

The iPhone started flying through the air, and I reached for it, catching it. I did not reach for my son. He fell down, and I could tell his feelings were hurt. Not his body. And I had the worst feeling, as a parent, when I realized that I reached for the phone before my own son.

After telling this story, I walked away with a greater appreciation of the awareness I need as a dad, to be aware of my children, even on a lazy Saturday morning during swimming lessons. I need to be better aware that my children are children, and they have many different ways, with their voice and behavior, to show that they crave my attention and my engagement.

In recent weeks, I have purposely put my iPhone away. I realized I needed a break to reestablish making my children a priority over the technology in my life.