Accidental Neglect: Strategies for Better Phone Etiquette Around Kids

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The term “accidental neglect” might sound a little harsh, but it also describes what your child experiences when you’re on your phone. You might be disconnecting from your kid without realizing it. Today, I’m talking all about what your child sees and feels when you are on your device and strategies for better phone etiquette around kids.

As a society, we really aren't doing our kids a solid by having a distracted parenting experience. It's actually changing our children's nervous systems and their brain patterns. I believe that we can figure out new ways of relating to tech so that we can have a more connected experience for our kids and future generations.

Accidental Neglect

Even as an adult, I’ve noticed that I feel a little lonely when I am in a conversation or with someone and they look at their phone. 

You see them kinda glaze over, and their mind becomes totally consumed with whatever they’re looking at on the screen. 

And when someone is on their phone, you don't know what they're doing. You don't know if they're responding to a message, reading a news article or playing a game. You can't really see what's on someone else's device.

As adults, we can imagine what they might be doing because we also have these online worlds that exist on our devices that we engage with. We can take a guess at when they’re doing and soothe ourselves. 

Kids who don’t yet have an online life don’t have the ability to go through this mental process and put themselves in your shoes. They have no mental map of that online world. They don’t understand what you’re being drawn to.

So, when you are having a conversation with your child, helping them with their homework or playing a board game and you pick up your phone to check a notification, your kid feels rejected. They experience that moment as neglect, even though that’s not your intention. To them, the phone is almost like a sibling that they’re jealous of. 

When you get distracted, they get dysregulated. Next thing you know, you’re frustrated with your kid and think they’re being rude by interrupting or bothering you when you’re on your phone. You find yourself in a conflict or disciplining them. 

But in this situation, their nervous system is truly being affected. They feel like they’ve lost connection with you. It’s unsettling, and they don’t know how to deal with it. 

Real Life vs. the Online World

In real life (aka not online), when there is an interruption, the other person can see what’s happening. There is etiquette that we practice around this. 

With real-life interruptions, like an in-person conversation or a phone call, your child sees the other person or hears the phone ring, watches you pick it up and hears you speaking to the person on the other end. They experience it along with you. 

We also usually explain what is happening. We say, “Excuse me for a minute, I need to step outside and talk to my colleague.” You probably give them something else to do, like look at a book or color a picture. 

We communicate a lot of information and let them occupy themselves. You pause and provide a little mental map so that your child knows what is happening. They don’t see you as absent for an unknown amount of time. 

Online interruptions are not something your child can embody in this way. It’s nothing they can see or hear. What they see is that you are leaving them, you’re distracted and you seem to drift away. 

The goal here is not to never be on your phone. That just isn’t realistic for most of us. What I want you to do is begin to practice communicating to your child what it is you're doing.

Strategies for Better Phone Etiquette Around Kids

Kids under 10 years old really don’t have the ability to cognitively connect dots. That’s why it’s so important for you to narrate and communicate what is going on to help your child understand what’s happening. 

These strategies also help us to have a healthier relationship with our technology, create better boundaries about when we use technology and when we don't and decide on times that we want to fully connect with our kids.

Retrain your brain. The pings and dings coming from your phone create a sense of urgency to respond. But that urgency is fake. Very few things actually need your attention right then and there. Slowing down and remembering that this is not an emergency will help you so much.

Turn off notifications or put your phone on “do not disturb”. This gives you more power over when you interact with your device.

Pause and communicate what’s happening. Let your child know what you’re doing, how long it's going to take and give them a little idea of what they can do while they wait. You can think of this as a preview, letting your kid know what to expect. 

For example, “Excuse me, honey. I need to talk to the doctor for a minute to change an appointment. I'm gonna be on my phone for 5 or 6 minutes solving this problem. And then I'll sit down with you and have a snack.”

This is also a great exercise in self-awareness, because sometimes your explanation might be, “I’m feeling restless and I want to scroll social media for a few minutes.” You might find that you don’t love all of your reasons for picking up your phone. 

Work on your habits. There are two habits involved here - the way you relate to your phone and the way you relate and communicate with your kid. 

The first step in changing any habit is awareness. You start to catch yourself after your response. When this happens, you can reflect and decide how you want to handle it next time. 

Next, you might catch yourself in the middle. You might be looking at your phone and realize that you didn’t give your child that preview. So, you pause, put your phone down and communicate with them now. 

Eventually, you’ll train yourself to the point that when you get some information from your phone, you pause, connect with your kid, narrate what’s going on, do what you need to do and come back to them. 

As always, I encourage you to be gentle with yourself. If you’ve had a pattern where you’re on your phone a lot or super distracted with your kids, there’s no need to beat yourself up. Being mean to yourself will only get you stuck in self loathing and guilt.

Instead, you can simply say, “You know what? I don’t want to do that anymore. I want to be more connected and slow things down in my life. And so I'm going to be really cautious about letting my phone distract me. If it distracts me, I'm gonna talk about it with my kids. If my kids are getting dysregulated, then I'm going to stop what I'm doing, connect with them, regulate them and then try to go again.”

Your child's relationship with you is always open to improvement, and your children's brain is plastic and moldable. Everything can be healed.

You’ll Learn:

• Why your kid often bothers or interrupts you when you’re on your phone
• How kids experience your phone use
• The difference between real-life and online interruptions
• 4 simple strategies to be more intentional with your tech and connected to your kid

Previous Episode Mentioned:

• Episode 145: The Art of Thriving Online with Amelia Knott