“The most precious gift we can offer anyone is our attention.” ~Thich Nhat Hanh
Judy was three the first time I missed it. She had spent a solid ten minutes stacking every couch cushion on our living room floor in Vancouver, building what she clearly considered an Olympic-grade landing pad. She climbed up on the couch, stretched her arms out wide, and gave me that look. You know the one. The look kids give you right before they do something that makes your heart jump into your throat.
“Baba, watch!” she yelled.
My phone was in my hand. It was always in my hand. I was reading a Slack message or an email or maybe nothing at all, just the reflex of pulling down to refresh. I have no memory of what it was. Zero. Whatever it was dissolved completely about four minutes after I read it, because that’s what 90% of notifications actually are: things that feel urgent and then vanish.
“One sec, habibti,” I told her. My thumb kept scrolling.
She jumped. I heard cushions scatter across the hardwood floor. When I looked up, she was already gone, walking toward 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 furniture, parents check their phones, nobody files it under “things I’ll regret.” But that was the beginning of a pattern I wouldn’t recognize for years, because the pattern was made of absence, and absences are nearly impossible to see while they’re forming.
Over the next two years, the requests kept coming. “Baba, look at this.” “Baba, come see.” “Baba, watch me.” Each one a little quieter than the last. Each one met by a version of me that was technically in the room but had his mind parked somewhere inside a 6.1-inch screen.
I ran engineering teams for a living. My entire professional identity was built around responsiveness, around keeping fourteen threads going simultaneously, around never letting a message sit unread for more than a few minutes. I was genuinely proud of how fast I could context switch. I thought it was a superpower. I carried that mentality through our front door every evening and never once questioned whether it belonged there.
What I didn’t know, what took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out, was that Judy had been keeping score.
There was this Saturday. She was about five. She’d set herself up at the kitchen table with markers and a big sheet of paper, and she was drawing while narrating the entire scene to me in that wild way kids narrate things. The purple dog lived on 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’d never been to space.
I was saying “wow” and “oh cool” and “then what happened” at what I thought were convincing intervals. My phone was under the table. I was reading a thread about a deployment that had gone sideways.
She stopped talking.
I didn’t register the silence immediately. Fifteen seconds went by, maybe twenty, before I noticed and looked up. She was watching me. Her face was completely neutral. Not upset, not hurt in any obvious way. Just watching me the way you watch someone when you’ve confirmed something you already suspected.
That’s the face I think about. That neutral, knowing face. Five years old and she had already done the math.
Children are paying attention even when, and especially when, you think they aren’t. They don’t need you to announce that your phone is more interesting than they are. They pick it up from the half-second pause before you respond. From the direction your eyes keep drifting. From the way you say “tell me more” while your thumb is still moving.
Sarah, my wife, was the one who made me see it.
Months later, Judy in bed, both of us sitting at the kitchen counter with our laptops open. Sarah said, “She doesn’t ask you to watch anymore.”
Four seconds of silence.
“Have you noticed that?”
I had not.
I sat with that for a while after she said it. I tried to trace it back. When was the last time Judy had grabbed my shirt and said, “Baba, watch”? I could not find the moment. It hadn’t ended. It had evaporated. The way a sound fades out and at some point it’s just gone and you can’t say exactly when it crossed the line from barely there to not there at all.
What I understood, sitting at that counter with my laptop still open and glowing in front of me, was that Judy hadn’t stopped wanting me to watch. She had stopped thinking I would.
That is a different thing entirely, and it is the worst thing I have ever felt.
I did not sleep well that night. I stared at the ceiling and ran through a kind of inventory that I did not enjoy. How many times per day did I pick up my phone? I started counting the next morning and lost track before lunch. I reached for it while the toothbrush was still in my mouth. While the kettle was heating. While walking from the car to the front door, a distance of maybe forty feet, because apparently forty feet of not looking at a screen was too many.
At red lights. During meals. In bed next to Sarah while she told me about her day. That one hit especially hard when I actually forced myself to see it.
I wasn’t hooked on any particular app. It was the checking itself. The constant pull toward somewhere else, someone else’s conversation, someone else’s emergency, someone else’s opinion about something I would forget within the hour.
My phone had turned into a door I walked through a hundred times a day, and every single time I walked through it, I left the person in front of me standing in an empty room.
What changed was not willpower. What changed first was that I let myself feel how much I had already lost.
I thought about all those mornings with Judy eating Cheerios at the counter and telling me about a 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 sorting through my email. Years of that. Actual years. You cannot retrieve those mornings. They happened once, and I was elsewhere for most of them, and that is permanent.
That’s the part about distraction that nobody warns you about clearly enough. It doesn’t just consume your time. It takes moments that existed once 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 actually wanted our home to feel like. Not about screen time. We had tried screen time rules before. We’d downloaded tracking apps, set daily limits, made agreements that fell apart within a week because the structure was always about restriction, and restriction gets exhausting. This time we talked about what we were making room for. That was a different question and it led to different answers.
We started with small moves. Phones went into the kitchen drawer during dinner. Then during the hour before bedtime. Then for the first hour on Saturday mornings. We didn’t tell Judy we were cutting back on screens. We told her we were trying to be more here.
She noticed within days. Obviously.
Two weeks in, maybe three, she walked into the living room carrying a book. I was on the couch, no phone, just sitting there, which I realize makes me sound like some kind of relic from 2004, but that’s what it felt like, genuinely disorienting to just sit. She climbed up next to me, dropped the book in my lap, and started reading out loud.
She didn’t ask if I was paying attention. She could see that I was.
That was the start. Not of a program or a system, but of something more like a set of family habits that we built together. We started taking morning walks and leaving our phones at home. At dinner we’d go around the table: “What was the best part of your day?” We put a list up on the fridge, one column for each of us, with whatever habits we were each working on. Judy held us to ours as much as we held her to hers.
And somewhere in there the question I was asking myself shifted. It went from “How do I spend less time on my phone?” to “What do I want to be present for?” Those questions sound similar, but they are not. The first one is about avoiding something. The second one is about choosing something. The second one actually worked.
Judy is twelve now. She is sharp and funny, and she has started learning to code, which makes me proud and also slightly terrified about what she’ll be able to do in five years. She doesn’t say “Baba, watch” the way she used to.
But she does something I like better.
She sits down next to me and shows me whatever she’s working on. A drawing. A program that won’t run because of a missing bracket. A video she thinks is the funniest thing ever created. And when she looks over to see my reaction, I’m looking back at her.
Not every time. I want to be honest about that. I have not transformed into some perfectly present person. My hand still goes to my pocket. I still feel the pull when I’m bored or stressed or standing in a line with nothing to do.
But I notice it now. I notice it and I choose. Sometimes I choose wrong. But the noticing is the thing. That’s what changed.
If you recognize any of this, if you are reading this with a tight feeling in your chest, I want to say one thing to you. You are not too late. I know it feels that way. I know the guilt is heavy because I carried it for years and it is heavy.
But the people we love give us more chances than we probably deserve. Kids especially. They will let you back in if you show up.
You do not have to rearrange your entire life before bed tonight. You just have to put your phone down the next time someone you love is talking to you, and look at them. Really look. Let whatever is buzzing in your pocket stay unread for sixty seconds.
Sixty seconds. Start there.
The moments you’re scared you already missed? New ones are forming right now. They’re in the next room, in the next conversation, in the next time someone you love glances over at you hoping you’ll already be looking back.
Be looking back.
About Sabry Ali
Sabry Ali is a dad and husband in Vancouver, Canada. After years in engineering leadership at Life360, Reddit, Microsoft, and Amazon, nearly missing his daughter’s childhood inspired him and his wife, Sarah, to co-found Habi (https://habi.app), a habit tracker and screen time app for families. He writes about presence, digital habits, and building meaningful routines at habi.app/insights (https://habi.app/insights/).
