The phone rang at 5:07 AM. It wasn’t a number I knew, just a string of digits that felt aggressive in the blue-dark of the bedroom. For a split second, that jolt of adrenaline, that primal system check for disaster-is a parent in the hospital? Is the world ending? No. It was a man with a low, gravelly voice asking for someone named Maria. I told him he had the wrong number, and he apologized with the unique sincerity of someone who also knows the sacred quiet of 5 AM. I hung up, but sleep was gone, replaced by a low hum of displaced energy. My brain, now fully and uselessly online, started thinking about signals, about compelling interruptions, about what it takes to yank a consciousness from one state into another.

Which, of course, led me to thinking about my kids and their screens.

I once did it myself. I stood in the middle of the living room, puffed up with parental righteousness, and announced, ‘No more iPads for the rest of the day!’ My two kids looked up from their respective devices, their faces holding the same blank surprise as that man on the phone asking for Maria. It was an interruption they hadn’t requested.

I looked around. The living room was clean. The books were neatly shelved. The ‘creative toys’ were tucked away in their aesthetically pleasing wicker baskets. I had engineered a perfect living space for a minimalist design magazine, not for a child. I had no answer for him. The silence that followed was more damning than any tantrum.

We haven’t lost a war against technology. We’ve lost a war against boredom, and we’ve been fighting on the wrong front. Screens are not addictive because they are inherently evil. They are ‘addictive’ because they are the most compelling, frictionless, and dynamic thing in a world we have meticulously curated to be safe, tidy, and utterly uninteresting.

He explained that the worst thing you can do for a long line is to just let it be a long line. You have to introduce distractions, smaller rides, interesting things to look at, characters who interact with the crowd. You have to make the wait less like waiting.

It was a devastatingly accurate analogy. Our homes are a single-ride theme park. The ride is a dazzling, algorithmically-perfected, dopamine-dispensing rollercoaster. And we expect our kids to be thrilled by the prospect of getting off that ride to go stand in the empty parking lot. It’s an absurd expectation. I see this now. I also see how I contributed to it.

My big mistake, born from desperation and Pinterest-fueled anxiety, was buying a ‘Boredom Buster Box’ for $237. It was a curated collection of artisanal wooden toys, ethically sourced craft paper, and non-toxic watercolor paints. It looked beautiful on the shelf. My kids played with it for exactly 7 minutes, then went back to designing neon-colored, gravity-defying cities on their tablets. The box wasn’t a compelling alternative; it was just a quieter, more beige version of the same structured, adult-approved ‘fun’ I was already offering. It was another empty parking lot.

We’ve conflated ‘safe’ with ‘boring’. We’ve optimized our children’s lives for cleanliness, order, and a lack of scrapes, bumps, and messes. We buy them toys that have a clear, singular purpose, that get packed away neatly. We design rooms that are easy to vacuum. We tell them not to run, not to climb on the furniture, not to make a mess. Then we get angry when they retreat to a digital world that offers them what their physical world doesn’t: agency, risk (of the digital kind), and endless, chaotic novelty. The digital world is loud, messy, and infinitely explorable. Their physical world is quiet, tidy, and has boundaries marked by beige area rugs.

I used to criticize parents who let their garages and basements fill up with ‘junk’-old workout equipment, half-finished projects, piles of wood. It looked chaotic. Now I see it differently. I see a landscape of possibility. A messy garage isn’t a sign of failure; it’s a sign of a compelling alternative. It’s a place where things can be built, taken apart, and experimented with. It’s a space that hasn’t been fully optimized for adult comfort. That’s why building a truly engaging physical world is so crucial. It’s not about buying more toys. It’s about creating zones of acceptable chaos. It’s about building a home that competes for their attention by being genuinely more interesting. This could be a dedicated art corner where spilling paint is fine, a collection of old electronics they can safely dismantle, or a garage gym package that offers a physical challenge instead of a digital one. It’s about providing an alternative path in the queue that is just as, if not more, appealing than the main ride.

It’s a strange thing, this parenting journey. I spend so much time telling my kids to be less like me-less rigid, less orderly, less worried about the state of the cushions on the sofa. And yet, I was the one imposing that rigidity on their entire world. I’ll rail against the education system for its lack of unstructured play, and then I’ll come home and schedule their afternoon down to 7-minute intervals. The hypocrisy is staggering once you see it. We want them to be free-range kids, but we give them a hamster-cage environment to do it in. Lucas would say we’ve built a world-class queue for a ride they don’t even want to be on.

The answer involves more work. It involves more mess. It involves tolerating a level of chaos and unpredictability that most of us have been conditioned to eliminate. It means accepting that a living room full of a sprawling pillow fort, with cushions pulled from every piece of furniture, is a sign of a healthy, engaged childhood, not a failure of housekeeping. It means seeing a kid covered in mud not as a laundry problem, but as evidence of a successful afternoon.

That 5 AM phone call was an unwelcome interruption, a signal that broke through the quiet. It forced my brain into a new state. Our kids need those interruptions too. Not another timer telling them their screen time is up, but a genuine, compelling call to a different kind of action. A call that says, ‘There’s something better over here.’ A physical world so rich with possibility that the tablet becomes just one option among many, and often not the most interesting one. We have the power to build that world for them. We just have to be willing to get a little messy.