My son was 11 when he volunteered to be the boy soloist at the school Christmas concert. Nobody else would do it. That alone made me proud. He stood up there looking like a young Aled Jones, and he was magnificent.
The school hall was packed. Other parents leaned forward in their plastic chairs. So smart in his pressed uniform and surprisingly melodic. It was one of those moments that announces itself — pay attention, this is the real thing.
I took out my phone to film him.
I thought about how my own mom would have been in tears watching this. She’d died five years previously. So who on earth was I filming it for?
Online life happened at the same time as I had kids
Online life for me didn’t arrive despite the children; it arrived with them, pretty much on the same day. I was the first of my friends to be married, the first to have a baby. While they were still in the real world, I was home with a newborn and a brand new computer, and a discussion forum was the only room where everyone else was also awake at 2 a.m. — or the only room I was in, anyway.
And we all know what the early days led to. Facebook happened, and the phones got smarter. But it wasn’t just the scrolling through social media — work was digital too.
As the editor of a family page, my kids were becoming content, whether I liked it or not. I would run to my computer to write same-day scripts for the radio as soon as my second baby went down for his nap. Sitting beside the bathtub, Googling symptoms. Not even cooking without a digital recipe open on the screen. There was no switch off.
I was physically present, but not really there
Back then, if you’d asked me, I’d have told you I was completely present. Physically, I was. My kids would tell you something different.
My youngest is 19 now. Recently, he said that he had to ask me three times for anything. “I didn’t know if you were working or scrolling. I was getting the same lack of reaction either way,” he added. To a child, the face looking at a screen is still the same face.
All three of my kids are now adults. And I still see what I did when they were little everywhere — the phone and the stroller, the row of parents on their screens while the children play nearby. I know that parent. I was that parent. I probably still am that parent.
But the regret isn’t really about the big moments. It’s about the minutes. The small, unremarkable minutes that slipped by while I was half somewhere else. Minutes that don’t feel like much individually but that add up, and keep adding up, until one day you do the maths and 25 years have gone by.
I regret scrolling all the time
I don’t regret working. I don’t regret the career, the deadlines, the ambition. But the rest — the mindless checking, the reflexive scrolling, the being physically present and mentally elsewhere — What was it all for? What did I actually gain?
Reading my son’s words again, I keep coming to the same answer. Time you’ll never get back.
We’re talking about banning phones in schools, restricting social media for under-16s. None of it means anything if the adults collecting them at the gate cannot put their own down.
