The author (not pictured) regrets her heavy phone use around her kids.
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My son was 11 when he volunteered to be the boy soloist at the school Christmas concert. Nobody else would do it. That alone made me proud. He stood up there looking like a young Aled Jones, and he was magnificent.The school hall was packed. Other parents leaned forward in their plastic chairs. So smart in his pressed uniform and surprisingly melodic. It was one of those moments that announces itself — pay attention, this is the real thing.I took out my phone to film him.I thought about how my own mom would have been in tears watching this. She'd died five years previously. So who on earth was I filming it for?Online life happened at the same time as I had kidsOnline life for me didn't arrive despite the children; it arrived with them, pretty much on the same day. I was the first of my friends to be married, the first to have a baby. While they were still in the real world, I was home with a newborn and a brand new computer, and a discussion forum was the only room where everyone else was also awake at 2 a.m. — or the only room I was in, anyway.And we all know what the early days led to. Facebook happened, and the phones got smarter. But it wasn't just the scrolling through social media — work was digital too. As the editor of a family page, my kids were becoming content, whether I liked it or not. I would run to my computer to write same-day scripts for the radio as soon as my second baby went down for his nap. Sitting beside the bathtub, Googling symptoms. Not even cooking without a digital recipe open on the screen. There was no switch off.
