(VIDEO) Your Kids Want You To Put Down Your Phone

My husband and I periodically grow concerned about our smart phone use. We use them for everything. These little devices have been lifesavers in many situations! We're grateful for our smart phones for many reasons, but we're also aware of the dangers they pose.

I get concerned about my husband's inability to ignore his phone, including answering messages on the drive home from work. I also hate the way he whips it out to fill any moments of silence at the dinner table. He worries about the amount of time I spend reading articles and trying to write work related communications from my device, sometimes even picking it up to check emails at 4:00 am when I just can't sleep.

We have given our son an old iPhone.  He uses it on long car trips and to occupy himself in places where he needs to be quiet and still like restaurants and the doctor's office. He has learned a lot from the interactive books and games we download on his device, but we worry about his strong attraction to the device. His occasional unwillingness to give it up when the food arrives at a restaurant or the tears and tantrums when we tell him he cannot have his phone because it's time for bed make us nervous about his attachment and what we might be teaching him.

We are certainly to blame for his tech craving. We started out intending to minimize his interactions with technology during his childhood, but quickly broke that rule as desperation, exhaustion, and bribery won out. Meanwhile, we swing on a pendulum between tech abusers and tech avoiders depending on our current mood and anxieties.

Maybe one day our kids will be telling us the same things as the kids on the next page.

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