Pants-Free Parenting: Smartphones can be a lifeline for parents

By Lyz Lenz, correspondent

I often feel so alone raising my children. There are times when everyone is crying and I can't even buy the milk we need, because I can't get anyone into the car without five timeouts and two diaper changes. There were the late-night nursing sessions when I felt like the only person in the world who was awake and I would cry because I couldn't imagine a time when I would ever sleep again. Or the times there was poop on the floor and tears in everyone's eyes. Those times and others, the times I feel most alone, I reach for my phone.

It's not hard to find articles, books, and blog posts chastising parents for using their smartphones around their children. I've had friends vow to never pull out their phones in front of their kids. One friend told me a story of her daughter, who said, 'Mommy you love your phone more than me!” She told me that story with tears in her eyes. My own kid once asked me if I would die without my phone.

But I don't buy into the warnings. As a parent, my smartphone has saved my life. There were so many times when I thought I was going to lose my sanity or my temper and a quick text to a friend made me feel less alone. There was that time when a friend on Facebook saw my posts about sick kids and offered to drop by with Tylenol. There are so many people on Twitter who have given me tips for handling kids with colds and who kept me company on those long, lonely nursing nights. I use my phone to buy clothes, diapers, and school supplies. My phone helps me plan meals, find healthy recipes, read the news, and learn that the rash on my baby's foot is actually just a callous. But it's so much more than that. A quick Tweet, status update or text, sometimes feel like my only lifeline in this isolating journey of raising my children.

When I hear people encourage parents to put down their phones, I wonder what that parent was doing on their phone. Looking up a recipe for dinner? Making a doctor's appointment? Texting their husband to bring home whiskey? All of the above? And how is that not just as important as watching your child drive a car across the carpet, over and over and over?

It's ludicrous to assume that parents are more distracted than they have ever been. Previous generations had to plow fields, do the laundry by hand, and make bread without a bread machine. In the 'Little House on the Prairie” series, Laura Ingalls Wilder recalls hours of unsupervised exploration on the wild prairie with her sisters, while Ma and Pa, worked the earth so the family wouldn't starve. A documentary about babies around the world, title 'Babies” depicts a baby in Mongolia who is tied to a post while his parents tend their small family farm. These parents weren't being neglectful, they were doing what parents have been doing since the dawn of time: surviving.

The truth is our smartphones are a time and labor-saving device. A 2014 study found that mothers are more likely to use their phones for purposes other than calling. A friend of mine told me that she used Snapchat to get her through long nursing sessions with her first baby. Another friend read e-books. Another uses her phone to keep track of her son's physical therapy sessions. Smartphones aren't enslaving mothers, they are freeing us.

Thanks to labor-saving devices invented in the past century, the job of mothering has gotten significantly easier. Ma Ingalls would have wept if she saw a washing machine or experienced the miracle of Amazon Prime. But all that time we've saved on household chores and ordering pizza, is now being consumed by guilt. How dare we look at our phones while our children play at the park - even if we are reading a novel on that phone or, god forbid, emailing a source for a story.

Because of my phone, I can do what I do. I can write for this newspaper and many other outlets, I can field emails from the children's museum and set up interviews from the park. And I refuse to feel guilty. Because even though I am sometimes distracted, I am here. I am here when I wouldn't otherwise be.

' Lyz Lenz is a writer, mother of two and hater of pants. Email her at eclenz@gmail.com or find her writing at LyzLenz.com.