Open Hideaway Book on a coffee table with a phone resting inside the hidden compartment, alongside a stuffed bunny, wooden blocks, and a coffee mug in a warm sunlit living room

Phones and babies: a calm, practical guide for parents who still need their phone

If you have ever checked your phone while holding your baby and felt a small pull of guilt, this guide is for you. The short version is reassuring. A glance at your phone is not going to harm your child. What shapes a child is the pattern they see repeated, day after day, in the first few years. You do not need to put your phone away forever. You need a calmer way to think about it, and a few small changes that make the habit your baby watches a little less about screens.

This is the long version of that answer.

Why your baby notices your phone at all

Babies are built to watch. Long before they can talk, they are studying faces, hands, and objects, working out what the people around them care about. They learn by copying. A baby who watches a parent wave learns to wave. A baby who watches a parent stir a pot reaches for the spoon. This is one of the most reliable things we know about early childhood. Children absorb the habits they see repeated.

You may already plan to limit their own screen time. There is good reason to. A 2019 JAMA Pediatrics study found that higher screen use in children aged three to five was linked to lower integrity in the white matter tracts that support language and early literacy. So a lot of parents make a quiet decision early on: keep the baby off screens, or close to it.

The harder question is the one most of us do not ask. How well does that decision hold once they are old enough to want what they have been watching us hold for years? Babies do not understand work emails. They cannot tell the difference between you replying to your boss and you scrolling out of boredom. They only see repetition. When they repeatedly see you pull out your phone and engage with it, the phone is what becomes interesting to them. But if books were to be repeated, books would become the item of interest.

This is also the part where most parents start to notice their own dependence on the thing in their pocket. Thinking about the example you are setting tends to reveal a habit you had stopped seeing in yourself.

None of that makes a phone bad. It makes a phone noticeable.

The number most parents have never calculated

Here is a small piece of arithmetic that tends to land harder than any warning.

Picture an ordinary day. Say you check your phone twice an hour. Not scrolling for an hour, just answering a text, the kind everyone does. Say your baby is awake and with you for eight hours of that day. That is sixteen times your baby watches you check your phone. In a week, it is over a hundred. Across a baby’s whole first year, it climbs close to six thousand.

Even a very light version of this adds up. Once an hour, across the hours you are together, still passes two thousand moments in a year.

This is not a figure to feel ashamed of. It is just a number most parents have never stopped to picture. Once you have, it is easy to want to throw the phone in a drawer and be done with it. But your phone has become part of daily life. You need it for work, to stay in touch, and to look up whether or not your baby’s poop is supposed to be that colour. So the goal splits into two: reduce your own screen time a little, and reduce how often your baby sees you on it.

This is not about guilt

It would be easy to turn all of this into one more thing parents are failing at. That is not the point, and guilt is a poor motivator anyway.

The realistic goal is not a phone-free life. It is to be a little more intentional about what your baby sees on repeat, especially during those key developmental years. You are allowed to use your phone. You are allowed to be a real parent having a real day. This is about the pattern, not about any single moment.

What you can actually do

A handful of small changes do most of the work. None of them require you to be a perfect parent.

  1. Turn off non-essential notifications. This is the big one. Most phone checks are not really choices, they are reactions to a buzz, a banner, or a little red dot. When you reduce notifications, you remove most of the triggers, and the unconscious pick-ups drop right along with them. Open your settings and strip everything back to calls and your calendar. If it is not time-sensitive, it does not need to interrupt your day.
  2. Charge your phone in another room. Out of sight really is out of mind. When the phone is not in the room, the automatic reach has nothing to reach for. A cheap alarm clock means the phone does not need to live in the bedroom overnight, and it does not need to sit in the living room during time with your little one either.
  3. Pick a few phone windows. Instead of checking whenever the urge hits, choose three or four set times across the day. Maybe after a feed, during a nap, and after bedtime. Your total screen time might end up similar, but your child sees it far less, because it is no longer scattered in small bursts across the whole day.
  4. Switch your screen to grayscale. Grayscale removes the bright, colourful design that makes apps feel rewarding. A grey screen is genuinely boring to look at, so you put the phone down faster and pick it up less. On iPhone it is Settings, then Accessibility, then Display and Text Size, then Colour Filters, then Grayscale.
  5. Keep books visible. This is the quiet half of the strategy that often gets missed. It is not only about fewer screens, it is about more of the thing you want them to copy. A board book left out on the coffee table, picked up and read often, teaches its own lesson. Children reach for what they see you reach for.

And one for the moments you cannot avoid. Some phone checks genuinely cannot wait or move to another room. That is where the Hideaway Book comes in.

A note for when they are older. Once your child is old enough to follow your reasons, naming what you are doing helps too. Saying “I am texting Grandma” turns simple screen use into an understandable moment, and it teaches them to be intentional about their own use later. For babies, though, it is the pattern they see, not the words, that matters most.

Where the Hideaway Book fits

Hideaway Tales started with exactly this problem. I am not a parent myself, but my sister became a mom, and I watched her hide her phone whenever she was with her baby. She did not want her daughter to grow up seeing a screen in her hands all the time. It made her almost impossible to reach, and I missed out on a lot of baby visits because my messages would go unanswered. Maybe a little selfishly, I set out to solve it.

So I designed the Hideaway Book. It is a book for the parent, with a hidden, foam-lined compartment inside that holds a phone. When you need to check something and you cannot step away, you do it inside the Hideaway Book. From your baby’s point of view, you are holding a book and reading. The moment they see, the moment that gets repeated, looks like reading.

It pairs with a children’s storybook, Drift: Journey to Mount Chilly, a cozy dragon adventure for when your little one is ready to be read to. I had been planning to make Drift for my niece anyway, and I wrote it with my sister. One book for you, one for them.

It is worth being honest about what this is and is not. The Hideaway Book is not a substitute for being present with your child. It does not replace reading together or real attention. It is a tool for the unavoidable phone moments, so the example your baby sees on repeat tilts a little more toward books and a little less toward screens. Designed for real parents, not perfect ones.

You can see how the Drift Hideaway Book Set works here.

Keep going

If you want to dig into one piece of this, these go deeper:

Frequently asked questions

Is it harmful for my baby to see me use my phone?
A single glance is not harmful. Babies learn from patterns they see repeated over time, not from one moment. The useful goal is to be intentional about what they see most often, not to eliminate phone use entirely.

At what age does my baby start copying me?
Babies begin imitating gestures and actions in their first year, and copying becomes very visible around the time they start walking and exploring. The early years are when watching and imitating do the most work.

Do I need to stop using my phone around my child?
No. Modern parents need their phones for work, family, and daily life. The realistic aim is to be more intentional about your own use, so your child sees screens a little less and books and real interaction a little more.

What is the Hideaway Book?
It is a book for the parent with a hidden phone compartment inside. When you check your phone within it, your child sees you holding and reading a book. It is a tool for the phone moments you cannot avoid, not a replacement for being present.

What is the simplest first step?
Turn off non-essential notifications and start charging your phone in another room overnight. Small, consistent changes work better than dramatic ones.

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