One of the unexpected goods of having children is the way is teaches you how to value your time. The daily growth and transformation of an infant breaks us completely from the relative sameness of one adult day after the next. A “busy season” of half a year might take you away from a quarter of a toddler’s life. John Muir said of the great American forests “nothing dollarable is safe,” and this is surely most true of our time. Everyone is trying to dollar our time (even in it’s smallest moments of “engagement”) but the time of a child is profoundly undollarable and to miss it such a high cost.
The thing children need is attention and attention is the spending of time. The poet David Whyte says “the only way to change the past is the quality of attention you give to the present.” Our past is created in the present. If you don’t want to regret missing the days of your children being young you can only accomplish that right now by saying no to something and giving them your time as it passes. If you have a choice (many do not) you are paying at a punishing exchange rate to be so busy now that you miss those few precious moments of early life.
Though there are fewer things now than ever that I’m willing to be dogmatic about, I feel absolutely certain that there is no amount of putting your phone away that you will regret. All its enticements are shallow and vapid, they do not transform the past in a positive way. One of its main functions is to strip the present of any depth and vibrancy. We view our surroundings between sips of amusement, always wondering if the new thing on the screen is more exciting than our static environment. It never is, it only seems that way because we have failed to give a high quality of attention to our surroundings.
Think about it and you will see that this is right. What sweet memories do you have of time spent clutching your phone, hunching your spine and squinting at the glow?
I read somewhere that by age 12 a child has, on average, spent 75% of the time with her parents she ever will. By age 18 is is 90%. Those numbers seem about right to me. I’m not sure if we have much control over changing those ratios, but we can certainly change how much time each of them contains.
When it comes to children, there is no later. There is only now, quickly becoming the past.