I have kids. Unbeknownst to them, they are quick to snap me back to reality when I start feeling the pressure of being an athlete! It's a breath of fresh air to have two people to focus on; their happiness erases all the pressures I have on myself.
That's one of the surprises in the research, that's it's not young people who are smitten with their phones. It's their parents who are not paying attention to them.
You're watching your kids playing football, and you're not present. It's like the worst... it's horrible. I despise myself for it. I think it's a particularly male thing. Being present and in the moment with your kids is something a lot of men struggle with.
The father spent his time talking and thinking of religion. He proclaimed himself an agnostic and was so absorbed in destroying the ideas of God that had crept into the minds of his neighbors that he never saw God manifesting himself in the little child that, half forgotten, lived here and there on the bounty of her dead mother's relatives.
Little League baseball is a very good thing because it keeps the parents off the streets.
Parents are often so busy with the physical rearing of children that they miss the glory of parenthood, just as the grandeur of the trees is lost when raking leaves.
Children are supposed to help hold a marriage together. They do this in a number of ways. For instance, they demand so much attention that a husband and wife, concentrating on their children, fail to notice each other's faults.
Everyone's entitled to their opinion about my father. Some people think he's a distraction and takes some of my shine away, but, for me, that's not the case.
I have three daughters and I find as a result I played King Lear almost without rehearsal.
My parents were singularly uninterested in me. My father was too self-centered and too busy with his own practice to pay a lot of attention to me, and my mother was probably deflected more by my sister.
Dad is always hiding in his book.
I remember the feeling. Whenever my father got so absorbed in a book that we might have been in visible I felt like taking a pair of scissors and cutting it up.
You have family and kids, you get home and they want to play with you but you just end up on your phone. I caught myself doing that when my little one wanted a kickaround and I decided I'd had enough.
Statistically you take thousands of photographs of your first kid, and then with your second kidyou take about half of that. And then with your third kid, you, like, pawn off your first and second kids' photographs and tell them they're theirs.
It is painful to watch children trying to show off for parents who are engrossed in their cell phones. Children are nostalgic for the 'good old days' when parents used to read to them without the cell phone by their side or watch football games or Disney movies without having the BlackBerry handy.
I always have a camera now that I've got a kid, but I don't think I've got one picture of anyone other than my daughter.
She'd be one of those parents who left a kid behind at a rest stop, driving for miles before she noticed. We'd hear about her on the evening news.
