Motherhood, Screened Off →

Susan Dominus, writing for The New York Times:

Parents today are often chastised for being distracted by their devices, for devoting more attention to their phones than to their children. I concede that Twitter provides, at times, a more witty conversation than the one I might have with a 6-year-old; that there is, in fact, always some excuse to turn to the device and tune out a small child’s rant about the problem with peanut butter; that the feeling of productivity the phone engenders is as addictive as it is false.

But it seems safe to say that our own parents probably gave more attention to their myriad daily tasks than they did to their children, too, and even did so in their children’s presence.

I’m a sucker for pieces that highlight the modern parent’s guilt over their technology addictions (bonus points if they are hypocritical parents, like me, who, at times, enforce technology rules on their children) while simultaneously pointing out that our concerns and guilt are mostly unfounded when compared to the supposedly “great” childhoods of yesteryear.