What My Son Taught Me About Being Present
By Will Angel
What does it mean to be present and available? This question has become more prevalent in my life as I have had more kids. My wife and I are relatively new parents, with our three kids aged six months to five years. It was when my son was just under a year old that I was confronted with a reality I had not noticed before, my own lack of self-control when it came to screens.
Truthfully, it caught me off guard. I didn’t have any social media and therefore assumed I was exempt from the temptations of the smartphone. It became clear this wasn’t true as I was scrolling through the internet on my phone one day and looked up, only to find my son staring at me as I stared at my phone. At first, I didn’t understand why it made me so uncomfortable. After all, it was only a few minutes of browsing the internet. As I reflected and prayed on it, I began to gain insight into why I felt the way I did.
As a parent, I find that I can generally identify the things or actions I need to limit my kids from engaging in. But I believe that in many cases, I can directly reflect those same limitations back on myself. As it relates to screens, I intuitively know my kids shouldn’t spend large amounts of time on smart devices. For example, even if I can’t fully articulate why, I know that my kids will have more meaningful friendships in person than they would virtually through social media. I also know that if my kids were to stay up late every night watching Netflix, they would certainly have poor sleep and behave poorly the next day. As true as these scenarios are for my kids, I believe they are also true for me. As I reflected on my own screen use, it became obvious that in some cases, it was being prioritized over time I could have been giving to my family.
God calls me to serve Him. If I’m consumed by my various screens, how present and available can I really be? I came across studies that show four primary harms from excessive screen use: sleep degradation, social degradation, attention fragmentation, and addiction. Staying up late into the night in front of screens contributes to a lack of sleep and rest, and through that, I find my capacity for others to be more limited. By spending more time in the virtual world, I’m less available in the real world. I see this when I walk into the lunchroom at my office and find my colleagues sitting together eating, but doing so in silence as they scroll on their phones. They are together in a certain sense, but at the same time alone. I find myself yearning for meaningful relationships, and though the internet and social media promise more connections and friendships, I end up with emptiness and a lack of contentment. The distraction that comes from my smart devices, with their endless stream of notifications, pulls me away from my own thoughts and deters interactions with other people, thus pulling me away from opportunities to pray or simply be available for those around me.
As I reduced my own exposure to screens, I noticed real change in my life. The worldly distractions I was beholden to started to fade, and by the grace of God, I was no longer enslaved by these technologies but free, free to serve Him, my family, and my neighbors.