My 3-year-old son was off from preschool last week, and just between you and me, I played partial hooky from work to take care of him.
I’m asking you to keep it on the down low because as far my bosses and co-workers are concerned, I’ve been a busy bee. Last week, like every week, I wrote a column, conducted a half-dozen lengthy interviews, kept up with news about the industry I cover and tweeted obsessively and mercilessly. Also, here I am, writing this post, which is a kind of work, too.
And yet one day last week my son and I spent much of the morning and early afternoon at a science museum. At other times, we played with bubbles and toy woolly mammoths. He served me a baked lemon from his pretend food truck. I got him an ice cream in the park. We participated in a grad student’s child-development research study. We visited a construction site.
Sure, he watched some TV, too, and played by himself for a bit. Most of the time, though, there was little sign that I was hard at work.
If you’ve got kids and an amenable, digital-friendly job, you’ve most likely performed similar work-life acrobatic feats. These situations come with no small amount of guilt. You worry that while you’re trying to do two things at once, you’re accomplishing neither. You’re juggling work and parenting, and you’re inadequate at both.
This is parenting; there’s no getting around the guilt. But thanks to technology, I was managing to do a reasonably good job at work while being a fairly adequate parent. It wasn’t ideal. But it was probably far better than the alternative, which would be to ship my son off to a nanny or grandparent for the week while I spent all day plugging away at the office, not seeing him.
Technology generally gets a bad parenting rap — particularly smartphones. Every few months, there is a new article voicing concerns about how we’re all being terrible parents because we just can’t stop staring at our phones. Parental smartphone addiction has also been a rising worry among child-development scholars. The concern is justified; smartphones are changing how we relate to other human beings, so it’s reasonable to worry about how they’ll affect parenting.
But we rarely consider how, by liberating us from the office, smartphones have greatly expanded the opportunity for certain kinds of workers to increase their involvement in their children’s lives. Because you can work from anywhere thanks to your phone, you can be present and at least partly attentive to your children in scenarios where, in the past, you’d have had to be totally absent. Even though my son had to yell for my attention once when I was fixed to my phone, if I didn’t have that phone, I would almost certainly not have been able to be with him that day — or at any one of numerous school events or extracurricular activities. I would have been in an office. And he would have been with a caretaker.
That’s the trade-off few of us think about when we consider how phones have changed parenting. Before the modern portable office — before the Internet made it possible for a wide variety of workers to work from home, and before smartphones made it possible to work from anywhere — white-collar jobs required a central office. In pre-digital times, the office functioned as a nexus of collaboration and production, and the further you got from the office, the less you got done. So when a child-care emergency popped up, you had to make a choice between work and the child. Or you could try both, to disastrous ends — see Diane Keaton in “Baby Boom.”
Much of this is obvious, but we rarely consider the stifling past. Instead, when we think about how our phones intrude on parenting, the primary emotion is crippling guilt. There’s an entire online cottage industry devoted to shaming parents whose noses are buried in their devices. Check out the Parents On Phones Tumblr, which features an endless stream of absolutely damning pictures of people ignoring their kids. Its motto is: “Shining a light on the culture of mobile phones and parental neglect.”
That’s a smug attitude, but I admit I often feel that way. I feel awful when I reach for my phone while I’m with my children. And when I see another parent texting while at the park, I experience a thrilling sense of superiority because my phone is securely in my pocket — at least until it buzzes with an important message, and I pull it out — and ignore the kids while I respond to some supposedly urgent thing.
I feel guilty, but I use my phone anyway. Meanwhile, many of us are tapping away. Researchers at Boston University recently published an anthropological study of smartphone usage among parents. They visited several fast food restaurants, and observed 55 people with children; 40 were using phones. The notes from the study read like a sci-fi hellscape of parental obliviousness:
Female caregiver brings food over and sits down across from girl, they distribute the food and as [school aged] girl starts eating caregiver brings out her smartphone. There is no conversation. Caregiver appears to be typing into phone, holding it about 10 inches away from her face, looking into it for long stretches during which she does not look up. She stops typing and is staring at the screen, touching it at points, holding it with her right hand while she leans her chin on her left hand, her facial expression flat. She has been looking at it for about 2 min without any change of gaze, while the girl eats and looks around the room.
It’s a dismaying read. Yet studies like this are incomplete, because they can’t address two questions that are central to the debate about smartphones and parenting. First, how attentive would smartphone-distracted parents have been in pre-smartphone times? If we didn’t have phones, would we have been paying total attention to our children, or would we have found distraction in books, newspapers, TV or our own heads?
Second, in the absence of phones, how many smartphone-addicted parents would be forced to spend less time with their children because they didn’t have the technical capacity to skip out of the office? In the discourse about phones, we often assume that the operative choice, for parents, is between spending non-distracted time with your kids versus distracted time. But it’s a tough economy, and jobs are hard to find; if we couldn’t work away from the office, wouldn’t a lot of us just spend more time at the office?
These questions are difficult to answer. But they’re worth considering. For me, it’s far too soon to conclude that phones are, on balance, bad for parenting. I spent a lot of quality time with my son last week. He and I had a great time. I also got a lot of work done. And it was all made possible by my phone.