Why I started writing this at 11pm.

It was eleven at night and I was sitting at the kitchen table with my laptop open and a cold cup of tea I kept forgetting about. My youngest had taken an hour to fall asleep — she kept coming out to show me things, a drawing, a question, the particular way she'd folded a piece of paper — and now the house was finally quiet and I was trying to figure out why I felt like I needed to write something.

The thing is, I'm not a writer. I'm a father of three, I work in design, I live in Barcelona. I've read the studies and I've ignored the studies and I've done the compromises that every parent does: one hour today, no iPad before dinner, yes to the nature documentary, no to the video game before school.

But something happened last week that I keep turning over. My son — he's nine — was watching me check my phone during breakfast. I wasn't doing anything important. Just checking. And he said, without looking up from his cereal: 'You do that every morning.' He wasn't accusing me. He was just reporting. The way children report things they've been watching long enough to notice as a pattern.

I put the phone down. And I thought: when did this become a pattern? And who taught him to watch for patterns?

I'm not sure I had an answer to his question. I'm still not sure I have one now. But the act of noticing — of catching the pattern in my own behaviour through my son's eyes — felt like the beginning of something. Not a solution. A different kind of attention. That's still true.

I don't think this newsletter is going to change anything about how you parent. I'm suspicious of newsletters that promise that. What I want to do is something smaller: think out loud, once a week, about what it actually looks like to raise children while also living in a world that is extremely good at taking your attention and giving it back to you in fragments.

I've been trying to do this differently for about two years. Some weeks it works. Some weeks I'm back to the same patterns. I've learned some things that seem to be genuinely true rather than just appealing, and I want to share those. I've talked to a paediatrician in Vienna who changed how I think about screen time more than anything I've read. I want to share that too.

But mostly: I started writing this at eleven at night because my daughter kept coming out of her room to show me things, and I wanted to be the kind of parent who was there for that, and I wasn't entirely sure I was. This is my attempt to think about why.

If that sounds like something you want to read, you're in the right place. See you next Tuesday.

The thing about writing this down is that it forces a level of honesty I don't always achieve in real time. In real time I put the phone down and felt vaguely embarrassed and went back to the cereal. Writing it means sitting with the embarrassment long enough to understand what it's about. What it's about, I think, is this: I would like to be a certain kind of parent, and certain kinds of evidence suggest I am not always that parent. The phone at breakfast is evidence. My son noticing the phone at breakfast is different evidence — evidence about what he is learning from watching me.

That's what this newsletter is actually about. Not the research. Not the strategies. The gap between the parent you intend to be and the parent you demonstrably are, and what happens when you pay attention to that gap.

When did someone in your family last report something about you that you hadn't noticed about yourself?

What did you do with that information?

This week: put your phone in a drawer from dinner until after the children are in bed. Not forever. One week. Note whether the quality of the evenings changes.

No recommendation this edition — just the fact that you're here. That's enough for week one.

Names of people and brands in these editions are changed. Whoever was there and reads this knows what we are talking about.