And Danielle says, how can I stop my digital minimalism principles from going out the window after having a baby? So she talks about, I'm going to condense this some, um, she's on her phone a lot more because she's taking pictures to send to her family. And there's also useful things for her baby that she uses on the phone, like controlling the lights or the white noise in the room.

And reading, she really emphasizes reading when you're doing those feedings in the middle of the night. And then she ends up, I'm quoting her, quoting her here, doom scrolling, the guardian online at 5:00 AM to check the latest COVID news, et cetera. All right. She says, uh, the bad phone habits have now set back in like rot.

My phone seems like the most efficient way to stay occupied during this long feeds. I don't want to give myself too much of a hard time, but I don't want my son pretty much ever to see me on my phone. Once he's old enough to be able to recognize it, you know, what do I do?

Well, Danielle, first you're right to go easy on yourself when you're in the infant stage. I mean, anything goes survival, not a time to be really on yourself about your phone habits on exercise and food on, are you properly socializing with people? It's a little bit of an all hands on deck, at least until you sleep train.

And I do hope you sleep train Danielle, because you got to balance the needs of the baby with your own. One concrete thing I'll just offer from our own experience is when we had our first, my wife had the same issue with the phone reading during the late night feeds.

So she bought a Kindle paperwhite. That's when the pin Kindle paperwhites first came into our lives. So you could read a book during the feeds and the paperwhite has its own built-in backlight that is not disturbing. It doesn't fill the room with light. It's not going to bother the baby.

It doesn't change you into, Oh my God, it's daytime. And so the Kindle paperwhite is not a bad idea for distraction during late night feedings. That is not going to send you down a doom scrolling rabbit hole. The other thing she innovated in our household was also like the, uh, the go basket next to every place you might feed.

It had all sorts of various things like snacks, water bottles. I'd read, I get, you know, fresh ice water and good insulated things before the night, um, towels, you know, for the mess. He had these go baskets next to all the places you would, you would feed and see if your paperwhite and all the stuff you need, you just got to make that as easy as you can.

I like your idea by the way of not having your kids see you on the phone all the time. It doesn't matter with an infant. It doesn't matter even with a one year old or two year old. I do think it matters. We should talk about this more as a culture.

When you're talking about a five year old, a seven year old, a 12 year old, they see you on your phone all the time. You can have a hard time convincing them they shouldn't do the same. (upbeat music)