“The most valuable gift we can offer anyone is our attention.” ~ Thich Nhat Hanh
Judy was three years old when I first dropped her. He spent ten minutes stacking every couch cushion on our living room floor in Vancouver and building what he clearly thought was an Olympic-grade airstrip. He climbed onto the couch, spread his arms wide, and looked at me. You know the one. The look kids give before they do something that makes your heart jump into your throat.
“Baby, listen!” she shouted.
I had my phone in my hand. It was always in my hand. I read a Slack message or an email, or maybe nothing, just the reflex to pull the update. I don’t remember what it was. Zero. Whatever, it completely dissolved about four minutes after I read it, because 90% of notifications are really just that: things that seem urgent and then disappear.
“Wait a minute, habibti,” I told him. My thumb continued to roll.
She jumped. I heard pillows being scattered across the hardwood floor. When I looked up, he was already gone, walking towards his room with a stuffed elephant behind him by one ear.
I immediately went back to my phone.
This moment meant nothing at the time. Kids jump off furniture, parents check their phones, no one writes under “things I regret”. But it was the beginning of a pattern that I didn’t recognize for years because the pattern was one of deficiency, and deficiencies are almost impossible to spot while they’re forming.
Over the next two years, the requests kept coming. “Baby, look at this!” “Baby, come look.” “Baby, listen to me!” Each is quieter than the last. Each was met by a version of me that was technically in the room, but its mind was parked somewhere inside a 6.1-inch screen.
I led engineering teams for a living. My entire professional identity is built on responsiveness, on being able to handle fourteen threads at once, and on never leaving a message unread for more than a few minutes. I was honestly proud of how quickly I could switch contexts. I thought it was a superpower. I carried that mentality through our front door every night and never questioned whether it belonged there.
What I didn’t know, which took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out, was that Judy was keeping score.
It was this Saturday. He was five years old. She set herself up at the kitchen table with markers and a large sheet of paper and drew while she told me the whole scene, the way children tell 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 nervous because he had never been in space before.
I said “wow”, “oh well” and “so what happened” at convincing intervals. My phone was under the table. I read a thread about a botched installation.
He stopped talking.
I didn’t register the silence right away. Fifteen seconds passed, maybe twenty, before I noticed and looked up. He was watching me. His face was completely neutral. Not upset, not hurt in any obvious way. He just looks at me the way he looks at someone when he’s confirmed something he already suspected.
This is the face I mean. That neutral, knowing face. He’s five years old and he’s already figured it out.
Kids pay attention even when you think they don’t. They don’t need you to announce that your phone is more interesting than them. He picks up from the half-second pause before he answers. From the direction where your eyes keep drifting. The way you say “tell me more” while your thumb is still moving.
Sarah, my wife, was the one who showed it to me.
Months later, Judy is in bed and we’re both sitting at the kitchen counter with our laptops open. Sarah said, “He’s not asking you to watch anymore.
Four seconds of silence.
“Did you notice that?”
I didn’t have it.
I sat next to him for a while after he said it. I tried to track it back. When was the last time Judy grabbed my shirt and said, Baby, listen? I couldn’t find the moment. It wasn’t over. It evaporated. As a sound fades and at some point it just disappears, and you can’t tell exactly when it has crossed the line from just barely to not at all.
What I understood as I sat at the counter with my laptop open and glowing in front of me was that Judy didn’t want me to stop looking. He stopped thinking that I would.
This is completely different and the worst thing I have ever felt.
I didn’t sleep well that night. I stared at the ceiling and ran through some kind of inventory that I didn’t enjoy. How many times a day did I answer my phone? I started counting the next morning and lost track before lunch. I reached for it with the toothbrush still in my mouth. While the kettle was heating up. By the time we walked from the car to the front door, it was maybe forty feet away, because apparently forty feet without looking at the screen was too much.
At a red light. While eating. Next to Sarah in bed as she told me about her day. This especially hit me when I forced myself to see it.
I didn’t stick to any one app. It was the inspection itself. The constant pull somewhere else, someone else’s conversation, someone else’s emergency, someone else’s opinion on something that I forget within an hour.
My phone turned into a door I walked through a hundred times a day, and each time I walked through it, I left the person in front of me in an empty room.
It is not willpower that has changed. The first thing that changed was that I let myself feel how much I had already lost.
I thought about the mornings when Judy was eating Cheerios at the counter and telling me about a dream and I was staring at my phone. Those nights on the couch when I was physically with my daughter and mentally sorting through my emails. Years of it. Actual years. You can’t get those mornings back. They’ve happened once and I’ve been elsewhere for most of them, and it’s constant.
This is the part of distraction that no one warns about clearly enough. It doesn’t just eat up your time. It takes moments that once existed and will never exist again, and you don’t even realize they’re gone until much later, when all you’re left with 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 screen time rules before. We downloaded tracking apps, set daily limits, made agreements that fell apart within a week because the structure was always about restriction, and restriction drains you. This time we talked about what we are making room for. That was a different question and led to different answers.
We started with small movements. Phones were found in the kitchen drawer during dinner. Then at bedtime. Then Saturday morning in the first hour. We didn’t tell Judy we were cutting back on the screens. We told him we would try to be here more.
He noticed within days. Obviously.
After two weeks, maybe three, he walked into the living room with a book. I was sitting on the couch, not on the phone, just sitting, and I realize it sounds like a relic of 2004, but that’s what’s really confusing about sitting. He climbed up next to me, dropped the book in my lap and started reading aloud.
He didn’t ask if I was listening. He saw it was me.
That was the beginning. Not about a program or a system, but about something like a set of family habits that we built together. We started walking in the morning and left our phones at home. During dinner we went around the table: “What was the best part of your day?” We put a list on the fridge, a column for each of us, whatever habit we are working on. Judy held us to ours as we held her to hers.
And somewhere there, the question I asked myself shifted. The “How can I spend less time on my phone?” the “Why do I want to be present?” These questions sound similar, but they are not. The first is about avoiding something. The second is about choosing something. The second one actually worked.
Judy is now twelve years old. He’s sharp and funny, and he’s started learning to code, which makes me both proud and afraid of what he’ll be capable of in five years. He doesn’t say “Baby listen” like he used to.
But it does something I like better.
He sits down next to me and shows me what he’s working on. A drawing. A program that fails to run because of a missing parenthesis. A video he thinks is the funniest thing ever made. And when he looks over to see my reaction, I look back at him.
Not every time. I want to be honest about this. I haven’t transformed into a perfectly present person. My hand still reaches for my pocket. I still feel the pull when I’m bored, stressed, or standing in line with nothing to do.
But now I notice. I notice and choose. Sometimes I make bad choices. But the point is the observation. That’s what changed.
If you recognize any of this, if you read it with a tight feeling in your chest, I want to tell you something. You’re not late yet. I know how it feels. I know the guilt is heavy because I carried it for years and it’s hard.
But the people we love give us more chances than we probably deserve. Children mainly. They’ll let you back in if you show up.
You don’t have to rearrange your whole life before bed tonight. You just have to put down the phone the next time someone you love is talking to you and look at them. Really look at it. Let whatever buzzes in your pocket go unread for sixty seconds.
Sixty seconds. Start there.
Have you missed those moments when you are afraid? New ones are currently being formed. They’re in the next room, in the next conversation, the next time someone you love looks over at you, hoping you’ll look back.
Look back.
About Sabry Ali
Sabry Ali is a father and husband in Vancouver, Canada. After years of engineering leadership at Life360, Reddit, Microsoft, and Amazon, he and his wife, Sarah, founded Habi (https://habi.app), a habit tracker and screen time app for families. He writes about presence, digital habits and creating meaningful routines here habi.app/insights (https://habi.app/insights/).
