Don’t Text While Parenting — It Will Make You Cranky

The study summarized in Time Magazine looked at adults in a fast-food restaurant, who are using their smartphones while in a group with two or more children.

One child reached over in an attempt to lift his mother’s face while she looked down at a tablet, but to no avail. Another mother kicked her child under the table in response to the child’s various attempts to get her attention while she looked at her phone. A father responded in curt and irritated tones to his children’s escalating efforts to tear him away from his device.

“What stood out was that in a subset of caregivers using the device almost through the entire meal, how negative their interactions could become with the kids,” she says. —TIME.

The above story about distracted parenting reminds me of a time about 6 years ago when I was riding on a train with my kids, and a mother in the row in front of us was almost completely ignoring her 12-month baby, while playing games, watching movies, and using social media on her laptop.

Every so often the baby would let out a shriek. Another passenger must have scowled at the mother, because I heard her say, rather helplessly, “I don’t know why he’s doing that.”

I knew why her baby was doing that. It was because my own kids were making faces at him, making his toys dance for him, and playing peek-a-boo with him. For hours.

What could she have been writing on her Facebook page, that was more important than turning her head to see why her baby was shrieking for joy? —Flu, Babies, and Joy