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Do you feel guilty when you use your phone in front of your children?

It seems to be technology week on La Tela di Carlotta. After writing about the responsibility of raising a grandson abroad, I stumbled upon this beautiful article. If you don't have time to read it (I highly recommend it, though), here's a short summary for you.

The writer remembers her mother using her address book, paying the bills, reading a book. How everything was "transparent" and how that transparency has disappeared in the smartphone era—where we can do it all while hiding behind a screen. Not only she feels guilty, but sometimes even judged; like that time when she was reading an interesting book at her kids' football practice and another mother came up to her and said something like, "Look at us, our kids are playing football, and we're playing with our phones". "I wasn't playing, " she thought, but couldn't help feeling guilty. And that guilt made her start narrating her use of the phone to her kids, "I'm emailing your teacher, I'm writing X's mum as you asked".

It made me think. Do we really have to justify our use of phones to our children?

I stopped long time ago feeling guilty for something as inevitable as letting technology improve my life.

I’m 29, I don’t remember a life without computers and mobile phones. I got the first iPhone the year it came out, so sometimes it’s even hard to remember the pre-smartphone era. Technology is in every aspect of my life. My husband and I love decluttering, we live in a rental apartment, we move often. We don't own CDs, DVDs, hardcover books, photo albums, boardgames. All our life is digital. It might sound sad to some, but I like it and I think it’s OK.

And there's more. For me, there’s more to technology than paying bills, reading books, replying emails, and looking up recipes for dinner. I spent the last 10 years abroad, away from my home country, Italy, and my extended family. I'd have never stayed and I’d never go back. I'm happy here in Marbella. But distance is by all means an illness and it does kill relationships, even the strongest ones. Luckily, it has a cure: technology.

“Technology is the only cure for distance. Why not use it?”

Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0],p=/^http:/.test(d.location)?'http':'https';if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src=p+'://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js';fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document, 'script', 'twitter-wjs');<p>So yes, I often walk down the street pushing the stroller with one hand and holding my iPhone up with the other one: I’m FaceTiming with my dad and showing him his 6-month-old grandson sitting in his “big boy” pushchair. I sometimes sit on a bench in front of the sea and take out my iPhone instead of enjoying the view: I’m messaging with my sister who might not have wi-fi later (you know, college students!). I pick up my phone 200 times a day to take a picture or a video of Oliver: in the evening I’ll post them to the Family Photo Album, which will make my mum’s day. And yes, maybe I do pick up my phone 150 times more than I want to—and I’m often on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest and what not—but why fight it?</p><p>Like it or not, my son will grow up in our digital world and the only thing I can do is to teach him how important it is to sometimes make a conscious effort, put the phone down and just enjoy the moment, the view, the silence, the crowd, the weekend. The very same thing I myself learnt to do over the years. And somehow, when you know you can put your phone down and resist the urge of picking it up, all the guilt disappears.</p><p class="text-align-center">What do you think? Let me know in a comment.
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