“The most precious gift we can give anyone is our attention.” ~ Thich Nhat Hanh
Judy was three the first time I missed. He had spent a solid ten minutes piling every couch cushion on the floor of our living room in Vancouver, creating what he clearly considered an Olympic-level living room. He climbed onto the couch, stretched out his hands, and gave me that idea. You know that one. The way children look before they do something that makes your heart jump into your throat.
“Dad, be careful!” he shouted.
My phone was in my hand. It was always in my hand. I was reading a Slack message or an email or maybe nothing at all, just a pull-down idea to refresh. I don’t remember what it was. Zero. Whatever was completely dispelled about four minutes after reading it, because that’s exactly what 90% of notifications are: things that sound urgent and then disappear.
“One second, habibti,” I told him. My thumb kept scrolling.
He jumped. I heard the cushions scatter on the hardwood floor. When I looked up, he was gone, heading to his room with a stuffed elephant pulling his ear behind him.
I went back to my phone.
That moment didn’t register as anything at the time. Kids jump off the furniture, parents check their phones, no one puts them under “things I’ll regret.” But that was the beginning of a pattern that I won’t be able to see for years, because the pattern is made of absence, and absence is almost impossible to see while it is being made.
For the next two years, the requests kept coming. “Father, look at this.” “Dad, come and see.” “Dad, look at me.” Each one said a little more silence than the last. Each met a version of me who was technically in the room but his mind was parked somewhere inside the 6.1 inch screen.
I managed engineering teams for a living. My entire expertise is built on responding, by keeping fourteen threads running at the same time, by not letting a message remain unread for more than a few minutes. I was really proud of how quickly I could change context. I thought it was super powerful. I posted that thought on our door every evening and never once questioned who was there.
What I did know, which took me an embarrassingly long time, was that Judy was keeping score.
There was this Saturday. He was five years old. He was sitting at the kitchen table with markers and a large sheet of paper, and he was drawing while he told me the whole story in that wild way that children talk about things. The purple dog lived on the rainbow, and his best friend was a cloud named Martin, and they were both invited to a birthday party on the moon, but the purple dog was afraid because he had never been to space.
I was saying “wow” and “oh cool” and “so what” during what I thought were convincing moments. My phone was under the table. I was reading a thread about distribution that went sideways.
He stopped talking.
I didn’t register the silence right away. Fifteen seconds passed, maybe twenty, before I realized and looked up. He was looking at me. His face was completely neutral. Not upset, not hurt in any obvious way. Just looking at me the way you look at someone when you have confirmed something you already suspect.
That’s the face I’m thinking of. That neutral, familiar face. He is five years old and has already done the math.
Children pay attention even there, and especially if you think they don’t. They don’t need you to declare that your phone is more interesting than they are. They picked it up in the second half stoppage before you could react. From there your eyes keep drifting. In a “tell me more” way while your thumb is still moving.
My wife Sara is the one who made me see.
Months later, with Judy lying in bed, we are both sitting in the kitchen with our laptops open. Sara said, “He doesn’t ask you to look anymore.”
Four seconds of silence.
“Did you see that?”
I had never.
I sat with that for a while after he said it. I tried to follow it back. When was the last time Judy grabbed my shirt and said, “Dad, look”? I couldn’t find the time. It wasn’t over yet. It had evaporated. The way the sound fades and sometimes just disappears and you can’t tell when it’s crossed the line from little to nothing.
What I understood, sitting at that counter with my laptop still open and lit in front of me, was that Judy had not stopped wanting me to look at it. He had given up thinking that I would.
That’s something completely different, and it’s the worst thing I’ve ever heard.
I did not sleep well that night. I stared at the ceiling and ran through the kind of clothing I didn’t like. How many times a day do I pick up my phone? I started counting the next day and got lost before lunch. I took the toothbrush from my mouth. While the kettle is still hot. When you walk from the car to the front door, a distance of forty feet, because apparently forty feet of not looking at the screen was too much.
At red lights. At mealtime. In bed next to Sarah while she told me about her day. That one hit hard especially when I really forced myself to see it.
I was not connected to any particular app. It was an experiment in itself. Constantly pulling each other somewhere else, someone else’s conversation, someone else’s emergency, someone else’s opinion about something I can’t forget within an hour.
My phone had become a door I walked through a hundred times a day, and every time I walked through it, I left the person in front of me standing in an empty room.
What changed was not power. The first thing that changed was that I allowed myself to feel how much I had lost.
I thought of all those mornings with Judy eating Cheerios at the counter and telling me about her dream while I stared at my phone. All those evenings on the couch where I was next to my daughter and mentally sorting through my email. Years of that. Real years. You can’t get those mornings back. They happened once, and I was somewhere else for most of them, and that lasts forever.
That’s the part about the distraction that no one warns you about clearly enough. It just doesn’t waste your time. It takes moments that once were and will never be again, and you don’t even realize they’ve been taken until long after, when all that’s left is the knowledge that they happened and you weren’t there for them.
Sarah and I had a series of long conversations about what we really wanted our home to look like. It’s not about screen time. We’ve tried screen time rules before. We downloaded tracking apps, set daily limits, made deals that fell apart during the week because the structure was always about banning, and banning is exhausting. This time we talked about what we were making room for. That was a different question and led to different answers.
We started with a small movement. Phones go into the kitchen cupboard at mealtimes. Then within an hour before going to bed. Then it’s one o’clock on Saturday morning. We didn’t tell Judy that we were reducing the screens. We told him that we are trying to be here.
He noticed within days. Obviously.
In two weeks, maybe three, he walked into the living room with a book. I was on the couch, no phone, just sitting, which I realize makes me sound like some kind of relic from 2004, but that’s what it felt like, it really bothers me to just sit. He climbed up next to me, put the book on my lap, and started reading aloud.
He didn’t ask if I was paying attention. He could see that I was him.
That was the beginning. Not for a program or schedule, but for something more like a set of family habits we’ve built together. We started walking in the morning leaving our phones at home. At dinner we went around the table: “What’s the best part of your day?” We put a list on the fridge, one column for each of us, with any habits we’ve each been working on. Judy held us in ours as we held hers.
And somewhere the question I asked myself shifted. It went from “How do I spend less time on my phone?” that “Why do I want to be there?” Those questions sound similar, but they are not. The first is about avoiding something. The second is about choosing something. The second one really worked.
Judy is twelve years old now. He’s sharp and funny, and he’s started learning to code, which makes me proud and a little scared of what he’ll be able to do in five years. He doesn’t say “Dad, look” the way he usually does.
But you do something I like better.
He sits down next to me and shows me whatever he’s working on. A drawing. A program that will not work because of missing brackets. The video he thinks is the funniest thing ever created. And when he looks to see my reaction, I look back at him.
Not all the time. I want to be honest about that. I didn’t transform into the person I am completely. My hand is still in my pocket. I still feel the pull when I’m bored or stressed or standing in line doing nothing.
But I realize it now. I notice and choose. Sometimes I choose the wrong one. But awareness is something. That’s what changed.
If you see any of this, if you are reading this with a tight feeling in your chest, I want to say one thing to you. It’s not too late. I know it sounds like that. I know that the case is difficult because I carried it for years.
But the people we love give us more opportunities than we probably deserve. Children especially. They will let you back in when you show up.
You don’t need to rearrange your entire life before you go to bed tonight. You just have to put your phone down the next time someone you love talks to you, and look at them. Really look. Let whatever rings in your pocket go unread for sixty seconds.
Sixty seconds. Start there.
The times when you’re afraid you’ve lost yourself? New ones are currently being built. They’re in the next room, in the next conversation, the next time someone you love looks at you hoping you’ll be looking back.
Look back.
About Sabry Ali
Sabry Ali is a father and husband in Vancouver, Canada. After years in engineering leadership at Life360, Reddit, Microsoft, and Amazon, nearly missing out on his daughter’s childhood inspired him and his wife, Sarah, to found Habi (a habit tracking and screen time app for families. He writes about presence, digital habits, and creating meaningful routines at habi.app/insights (
