To reach our child's teacher, their doctor, their soccer coach, there's an app. We're on our phones a lot. And there's that guilt that creeps in when we've been answering emails, or tracking Grandma's flight, while our child is right there.
The phone is part of family life. Staying close to our child while it's in the room is a skill, and a small one.
In this short how-to episode, child psychologist Dr. Kirsten Kuzirian shares three habits, each one a sentence or a setting you can start tonight. They help us feel present with our child in the minutes we do have, and they show our children, who will have phones of their own one day, what it looks like to hold a screen and a relationship at the same time.
In this episode:
• Habit one — say what you're doing. "I'm checking Grandma's flight, and then I'm all yours." A phone is opaque from the outside, and one sentence tells a child what's pulling us and that it ends
• Habit two — phone manners for grown-ups. Batching notifications, a few phone-free anchors in the day, and the 2019 field experiment with adults that points to a doable middle between always-on and fully silent
• Habit three — the return. "Sorry — I was on my phone. Tell me again." The plain sentence, and why it hands our children a script for the day they're the one at the table
• The one-second deposit: looking up
• The Trust Fund deposits each habit makes — validation, regulation, repair, and delight
Mentioned in this episode:
• The Trust Fund — our child's current and future sense of security, their ability to trust in themselves, in the world, and in other people, built in small everyday deposits. The five deposits are walked through in full in "Why Every Child Deserves a Trust Fund"
• The AWAKE Method — five questions that give us a pause before we act on any parenting advice. The Trust Fund is what we're building, and the AWAKE Method is how we build it. Today leans on the Attachment question: will this bring us closer or create distance? Where the show starts: "The Science of Wide Awake Parenting"
• Learn more about the AWAKE Method: wideawakeparenting.com/courses
• Free parenting tools, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify: wideawakeparenting.com/links
Wide Awake Parenting is educational content distributed by Wide Awake Media, LLC. It is not therapy, not assessment, and does not establish a therapeutic relationship.
