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.