The Weekend My Family Put the Phones in a Drawer

We didn't announce it as a detox. I said we were doing a quiet weekend and there would be pancakes, which bought me approximately four hours of goodwill.

The seven-year-old was fine by lunchtime. The teenager was fine by Sunday, after being extremely not fine on Saturday evening — mostly because her friends were making plans somewhere she couldn't see. We agreed she could check messages twice a day, which felt like a defeat and was actually the thing that made the weekend work.

The person who broke first was me, in the kitchen, looking up a recipe I already knew. My daughter pointed this out with tremendous satisfaction. Fair enough. We do it monthly now, with the twice-a-day rule written on the fridge.