“The most valuable gift we can give anyone is our attention.” ~ Thich Nhat Hanh
Judy Three I missed it the first time. He spent a solid ten minutes stacking each couch cushion on our living room floor in Vancouver, which he clearly considered an Olympic-grade landing pad. He climbed onto the sofa, extended his hand and gave me that look. You know the one. The look kids give you before they do something like that makes your heart jump into your throat.
“Father, look!” she shouted
I had my phone in my hand. It was always in my hands. I was reading a Slack message or an email or maybe nothing at all, just the reflex of scrolling down to refresh. I have no memory of what it was. zero In any case it completely dissolved about four minutes after I read it, because that’s what 90% of notifications are: things that seem urgent and then disappear.
“One second, Habibati,” I told her. My thumb kept scrolling.
He jumped. I heard cushions scatter across the hardwood floor. When I looked up, she was already gone, walking towards her room with a stuffed elephant dragging behind her by one ear.
I went right 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 files this under “I’ll be sorry.” But it was the beginning of a pattern that I didn’t recognize for years, because the pattern was created by absences, and absences are almost impossible to see when they’re forming.
Over the next two years, the requests kept coming. “Dad, look at this.” “Father, come and see.” “Dad, look at me.” Each is a little cooler than the last. Everyone met a version of me that was technically in the room but had its mind parked somewhere inside the 6.1-inch screen.
I used to run engineering teams for a living. My entire professional identity was built around responsiveness, running fourteen threads simultaneously, letting any message sit unread for more than a few minutes. I was really proud of how quickly I could switch contexts. I thought it was a super power. I carry that mindset through our front door every evening and never once question whether it’s there.
What I didn’t know, which took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out, was that Judy kept score.
This was Saturday. He is about five years old. She would set herself up at the kitchen table with markers and a large sheet of paper, and she would draw while narrating the whole scene to me the way children tell stories. The purple dog lived in a 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 nervous because he had never been to space.
I was saying “wow” and “oh cool” and “what happened next” in what I thought were believable pauses. My phone was under the table. I was reading a thread about a deployment that went sideways.
He stopped talking.
I didn’t immediately register the silence. Fifteen seconds passed, maybe twenty, before I noticed and looked. He was watching me. His face was completely neutral. Not upset, not hurt in any obvious way. You’re looking at me the way you look at someone when you’ve confirmed something you already suspected.
That face I thought about. That neutral, familiar face. Five years old and he already does math.
Children pay attention even when, and especially when, you think they are not. They don’t need to announce that your phone is more attractive than theirs. They pick it up from a half-second pause before you can react. From which direction your eyes are drifting. The way you say “say more” while moving your thumb.
Sarah, my wife, who made me watch it.
Months later, Judy is in bed, we’re both sitting at the kitchen counter with laptops open. “He doesn’t ask to see you anymore,” Sarah said.
Four seconds of silence.
“Did you notice that?”
I was not.
After he said this I sat with him for a while. I tried to trace it back. When was the last time Judy grabbed my shirt and said, “Dad, look”? I couldn’t find the moment. It’s not over. It was vaporized. The way a sound fades and at some point it’s gone and you can’t quite tell when it’s just crossed the line from being there to not being there at all.
From what I realized, sitting on the counter with my laptop still open and glowing in front of me, Judy hadn’t stopped wanting to see me. He stopped thinking that I would.
It’s a completely different thing, and it’s the worst thing I can think of.
I didn’t sleep well that night. I looked at the ceiling and ran across a sort of inventory that I didn’t enjoy. How many times do I pick up my phone each day? I started counting the next morning and lost track before lunch. I reached for the toothbrush while it was still in my mouth. While the kettle was heating. Walking from the car to the front door is maybe forty feet, because apparently a forty foot screen is too much to look at.
red light meal time In bed next to Sarah as she told me about her day. That one hit especially hard when I actually forced myself to see it.
I’m not tied to any particular app. It was checking itself. The constant pull to somewhere else, someone else’s conversation, someone else’s urgency, someone else’s opinion about something I will forget within an hour.
My phone became a door I walked through a hundred times a day, and every time I walked through it, I found the person in front of me standing in an empty room.
What changed was not willpower. The first thing that changed was that I realized how much I had already lost.
I thought about all those mornings where Judy was eating Cheerios at the counter and telling me about the dream she had and me staring at my phone. All those evenings on the couch where I was physically next to my daughter and mentally sorted through my emails. That year. actual year You can’t get those mornings back. They happened once, and I was in another place for most of them, and it’s permanent.
This is part of the distraction that no one clearly warns you about enough. It doesn’t just consume your time. It takes moments that once existed and will never exist again, and you don’t even realize they’ve been taken until much later, when the only thing 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 feel like. Not about screen time. We’ve tried the screen time rule before. We used to download tracking apps, set daily limits, make contracts that fell apart within a week because the structure was always about limitations and limitations became tiresome. This time we talked about what we were making room for. That was a different question and it led to different answers.
We start with small moves. At dinner the phones went into the kitchen drawer. Then in the hours before bed. Then for the first hour on Saturday morning. We didn’t tell Judy that we were coming back to the screen. We told him we were trying to stay here longer.
Within days he noticed. Obviously.
Within two weeks, maybe three, he walked into the living room with a book. I was on the couch, no phone, just sitting there, which I realize makes me sound like some kind of relic of 2004, but that’s how it felt, really distracting to just sit. He climbed up beside me, dropped the book in my lap, and began reading aloud.
He didn’t ask if I was paying attention. He could see that I was.
That was the beginning. Not a program or a system, but more like a set of family habits we’ve developed together. We started walking in the morning and left our phones at home. At dinner we want to go around the table: “What was the best part of your day?” We kept a list on the fridge, a column for each of us, of whatever habit we were each working on. Judy holds us as much as we hold her.
And somewhere in there the question I was asking shifted. It’s “How do I spend less time on my phone?” “What do I want to appear for?” These questions sound similar, but they are not. The first is about avoiding something. The second is to select something. The second one actually worked.
Judy is now twelve. He’s sharp and funny, and he’s starting to learn to code, which makes me proud and a little terrified of what he’ll be able to do in five years. He doesn’t say “Daddy, look” the way he used to.
But he does things that I like.
He sits next to me and shows me that he is working. A drawing. A program that won’t run because of missing parentheses. A video he thinks is the funniest thing he’s ever made. And when he looks up to see my reaction, I look back at him.
Not every time. I want to be honest about that. I did not transform into the present person perfectly. My hands still go in my pockets. I still feel tension when I’m bored or stressed or standing in line with nothing to do.
But I’m noticing it now. I notice it and I choose. Sometimes I make the wrong choice. But things to notice. That has changed.
If you recognize any of this, if you’re reading this with a tight feeling in your chest, I want to tell you something. You don’t delay anymore. I know it feels that way. I know the guilt is heavy because I’ve carried it for years and it’s heavy.
But we give the ones we love more than we deserve. Especially children. They will let you back in if you show up.
You don’t have to rearrange your entire life before you go to bed tonight. The next time someone you love is talking to you, all you have to do is put down your phone and look at them. Really look. Let whatever is ringing in your pocket remain unread for sixty seconds.
Sixty seconds. Start there.
Are there moments you fear you’ve already missed? New ones are now being formed. They’re in the next room, the next conversation, the next time someone you love is looking at you hoping you’ll already look back.
Look back.
about Sabri Ali
Sabri Ali is a father and husband in Vancouver, Canada. After years in engineering leadership at Life360, Reddit, Microsoft, and Amazon, his daughter’s childhood loss inspired him and his wife, Sara, to co-found Hubby (https://habi.app), a habit tracker and screen time app for families. He writes about presence, digital habits, and creating meaningful routines habi.app/insights (https://habi.app/insights/)
