Dad Admits He "Felt Like Sh*t" After Blatantly Ignoring His Son to Be on His Phone
It's no surprise that putting our phones down when we're around others leads to more personable, genuine human connections, but one dad had to remind himself of this fact the hard way after ignoring his young son to scroll through Facebook. Although he knew that his son Knox was blatantly trying to get his attention one afternoon, after spending two days apart, Brad Kearns, who runs the DaDMuM Facebook page, admits he didn't look up from his phone but instead provided his son with a generic response that had no energy behind it.
"Eventually I looked up from my phone and said, 'Daddy's busy mate, can you go and play with Finn?' He walked out of the room and began playing quietly in the other room with his brother. I continued scrolling," Kearns wrote. "He came back in and the same thing happened. I hadn't seen him in two days due to my work hours. He was bored and he missed me and he just wanted my attention. Yet there I was 'too busy' to even look up. And I dismissed him. I realized shortly after and put my phone away. I felt like sh*t."
The dad continues, sharing that he decided to make a radical change by not only putting his phone down on that day, but by being more present in his sons' lives for a month.
I was being the dad I never wanted to be. I'd had enough. So I went into the other room and asked him to play. His entire face lit up. He said 'sure' and scooched over to make room for me next to him. We played all day and I left my phone on the bench," he shared. "That was a month ago now. I gave myself a much needed time-out. And it's been the best month with my boys. I can't post every day. Sometimes I will miss a week. I don't mind.
In the last month Kearns has changed his relationship with technology, despite running a very popular Facebook page that he once posted to every day. Although his followers (and us) will no doubt miss his frequent posts, we're all about his message, and are going to do our best to remember it when we're around our own kids: "Kids don't give a sh*t about the world. All they care about is you being right there with them. We need to put the phones down when we're with them.