On a rainy morning earlier this spring, I pulled my car out of our driveway to take my seven-year-old son to school. After shifting from reverse into drive, I looked at my phone to listen to a podcast on Spotify. Then it happened. He said it.
“Dad, why do you have to look at your phone SO much?”
Dagger.
I knew it was coming. It was only a matter of time. Whether I was texting, emailing, or aimlessly flipping through Twitter, I had noticed him glaring at me recently while doing so.
With my car stuck between the driveway and the street as rain pelted my front windshield, I was equally stuck trying to respond. Eventually I muttered some lame explanation in a pathetic attempt to defend the indefensible.
I peered into the rearview mirror to see if he had bought it.
He hadn’t.
The look on his face said it all.
I pulled the car back into the driveway, turned around, and asked him plainly,
“Does it seem like I am ALWAYS on my phone?”
He replied,
“Well, not ALL the time, but a lot of the time. Why do you have to look at it so much?”
Want to know what stung the most?
It was that he didn’t seem mad. It was worse. He just seemed disappointed.
After repeatedly telling him and his brother to get off their iPads, TV, and other devices, here he was telling me to do the same.
Like the dad who gets called out for using drugs himself in the 1980’s War Against Drugs commercial, I was the definition of a hypocrite.
The question was, what was I going to do about it?
I told him I would look at it less, keep it in my room when I was home, and
