It is gift to be observed

Because my family is on vacation this week, I wanted to bring a favorite post from last year out from behind the paywall. If you haven’t had a chance to read it yet, I hope you love it. If you have, I hope you enjoy revisiting! xo

Our oldest child is nine. Perhaps it’s the advent of fourth grade, but she is seeming to age years by the day right now. I try not to look at this too directly — soaking her up as she is while only squinting at a fuzzy future where she no longer lives in our home full-time — but lately, John has been staring into the sun. And he finds the horizon heartbreaking.

I do, too, of course. A home without our precious, unrepeatable children careening around corners or curled up on the sofa, reading, will feel empty. Shadowed. Somber.

Recently, I’ve also come to worry that it will feel purposeless. Or, at least, less purposeful.

It is nothing new to say that having and raising children gives great purpose and meaning to a parent’s life. Shepherding our children from helpless babies to healthy, happy, and whole adults is all-consuming and quite often awe-inspiring. It calls us up and out. I believe it is the grandest adventure life has to offer.

It can also, of course, feel like a suffocating burden: an endless stream of worries, what-ifs, regrets, and to-dos. We hear about the weight of emotional labor, the sublimation of a parent’s needs to their children’s preferences, the lack of sleep and alone time. The constant touching, the perpetual nearness.

But aside from a grand adventure and a suffocating burden, I have been thinking about another way to view the stage of parenting with children at home: as the strongest motivation and the easiest opportunity to live an embodied and human-centered life — the kind of life I believe we all want.

With their warm bodies, their mysterious stickiness, their plaintive desire to be held, their unpredictable needs, children effortlessly call us back from the digital void. Without screens of their own, they beckon us to run, play, laugh, sing, hug, and wrestle in three dimensions. If not conditioned otherwise, they demand our presence, our attention, our gaze. They expect it as if it is their birthright.

(It is their birthright.)

This is not easy to give. In our world of perfectly-tuned algorithms and endless information and platforms designed to capture and hold attention, it is not easy to give them what they deserve. But to me, their demand is a relief. A mission. A gift.

For as much as I think and write about low-screen living, and for as much as I care desperately about it, you’d think it would be easier to… just do it. But because I have chosen to live in the halfway land of using smartphones and social media in a limited way instead of disavowing them completely, it is not. I have great sympathy for the sedentary, the screentime-addicted, the isolated: it is all too easy to slump on the couch and consume. At the risk of sounding like a conspiracist, the tech giants want us that way.

And so I am grateful for tools like the Brick, that nifty little gadget that preserves the best parts of technology and protects me from the worst. But I am even more grateful for my children, because nothing helps me to choose the embodied and human-centered life more than knowing they are watching.

I dearly want my children to “revel in reality,” as Katharine Martinko has so elegantly phrased it, to exhibit joy and wonder and curiosity in the real world. And because I know that the most effective way to teach them is to do it myself, it is almost effortless to do it when they are by my side.

Each act of setting aside my phone is endowed with outsize purpose. Each act is a noble pursuit, part of a grand cause: I am teaching my children, one moment at a time, that there is more to life than the latest TikTok trend, that life here is better than anything they’d find on a pixelated screen.

And that is why the constant weight of their watching, something that could feel heavy, feels like a gift. I am already mourning the day when they are not by my side. Because I love and treasure them, above all, but also because being their role model has given me great purpose. It has pushed me to live the life I really want to live — one full of love, color, sight, and sound — instead of the life that’s easiest.

I may be shaping them as they grow, but their presence is equally shaping me — and for that, I will be grateful long after they have left my home.

Leave a comment

Friends, what would you add? If you have kids at home, do you feel a sense of purpose from modeling a low-screen life? Does it help you make the choices you want to make? And if you don’t currently share a home with children, is the lack of daily accountability from little eyes a challenge?

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