How We Deepened Our Bond with Our Son in One Evening

What would happen if your family put the phones away—just for one evening a week? Could you strengthen your parent-child connection?

Maybe you’ve felt that tug lately—the sense that your teen is drifting into their screen while real conversations, teaching opportunities, and connection get squeezed out. You want more meaningful moments together . . . but between schedules, resistance, and the constant pull of devices, it feels almost impossible.

In this episode, we share the simple practice we  have started recently in our own home—and why we’re so glad we did it. By setting aside one night a week with no phones, we created space for deeper conversations, practical life lessons, spiritual moments, and genuine connection with our son in his final year at home. And the best part? It’s actually working. It's been a parenting win!

AS YOU’RE LISTENING, YOU’LL DISCOVER:

• The common mistake parents make that limits deeper family connection—and how to fix it in one small shift.
• A step-by-step breakdown of our “No-Phone Sunday” routine, including life skills, spiritual discussions, and fun that actually keeps teens engaged.
• Why intentional, distraction-free time helps teens open up, stay accountable, and even start meaningful conversations on their own.

Whether you try a full “no-phone night” or simply adapt one piece of what we’re doing, you’ll walk away with ideas you can use this week to strengthen your parent-child bond.

00:00 Introduction and Free Resource
00:28 Intentional Parenting Wins and Episode Overview
00:59 Meet Ethan: Our Busy Teenager
02:36 Implementing No-Phone Sundays
07:48 Family Activities and Lessons
09:57 Reflections and Benefits
13:42 Encouragement and Next Episode Teaser

When you finish listening, we’d love for you to connect with us on social media!

Follow us on Instagram and like our page on Facebook to keep the conversation going. AND Get our FREE resource, "30-Second Micro Moments of Intention with Your Kids", by going to: parentsmakingtime.com/freeresource

Parenting is hard. Intentional parenting can seem even harder. Motherhood, fatherhood, marriage, and all that goes with those important aspects of life can make it difficult to prioritize tasks, embrace intentional living, focus on present parenting, and build family bonds. We're here to help ease your parenting anxiety so that you can stop feeling overwhelmed, find joy in your parenting journey, and build family bonds that last for generations. Here at Parents Making Time, we are all about that parent-child connection, self-care for parents, and helping you overcome mom guilt and dad guilt. If you have a question or would like to share an experience about your own parenting, please feel free to reach out to one of us! Please note, we may use your question and/or comments as a part of a Q&A Parenting Advice segment on one of our episodes.

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Transcript

Jennifer: [00:00:00] Hey, before we get started today, I wanna remind you of a free resource that we've created for you. It's called our 30-Second Micro Moments of Intention with Your Kids. This is a list of quick and easy things you can do to have meaningful connection with your kids in about 30 seconds or less. You can get that by going to our website at parentsmakingtime.com/freeresource.

Go there today so you can start building lasting memories one micro moment at a time. You know those parenting wins, you wish you could go back and start sooner. Well, we just found one and we want to share it with you. In this episode, we're talking about the simple thing that's been working for us right now, and we absolutely wish we'd done it sooner.

Anthony: This is parents making time. The show that helps busy parents put family first without burning out. We are Anthony and Jennifer Craiker. We don't just give parenting tips. We help you become the parent you want to be.

So our [00:01:00] son, Ethan, is a senior in high school. He's 17 years old and he's very busy. During the week he's very involved with theater and choir and those kinds of things. Along with other school responsibilities. He's also, I wouldn't necessarily say addicted to his phone, but he uses his phone a lot.

Maybe he's addicted, I don't know. But like a lot of teenagers, he's always on his phone. At times he can kinda lack motivation. He needs reminders to do things. He does struggle with ADHD. So that's been something we've been kinda working through the last few years. He's actually a really good kid.

He is talented, he's passionate about the things that he is interested in, and he's super smart and when he applies himself, he does really well, but we realized as his parents who are about to send him out into [00:02:00] the world in less than a year. That's 

Jennifer: crazy. 

Anthony: Yeah. That we were, that we needed to spend some

more quality time with him and, and be more intentional about the time that we're spending with him because he's going to be potentially leaving home and, you know, going to college or working or what, whatever it is that he decides to do. And we, we realized that there are some things that we need to try to help him be prepared for.

We need to expedite that process of preparing him. So we decided a few months ago. That we would set aside Sunday evenings from dinner time around five o'clock or so up until time for bed to spend as a family, and that none of us would have access to our phones or other electronic devices like

tablet, like I use my tablet a [00:03:00] lot and Ethan always jokes that I'm an iPad kid. Now I should say that we've always kind of had Sunday evenings as family time. And when our girls were here you know, we would, we would do things together as a family, but not necessarily the entire evening. And we never set a hard and fast rule of no phones.

But now it's from dinner time. Up until bed, no phones. And it's very intentional family time. And there's some very specific things that we're doing that we are finding are helpful for Ethan and have resulted in some great family discussions and conversations. And so we wanna share a little bit about that with you today.

Jennifer: Yeah. And it's not only been helpful for Ethan, I think it's been helpful for us and all three of us together, even actually helpful for our family as a whole, I would say. And so. What we're talking about, like he said, is this idea of a, a set aside time of without phones. And the mistake that I think we were making and [00:04:00] others make is we're not carving out that time, not giving us that space away from phones to really just focus on one another.

And for us overall, our mistake was not thinking of the of this sooner. 

Anthony: Yeah. 

Jennifer: But really the mistake is not being intentional in carving that time out. 

Anthony: Yeah, I, I wish we had thought of this sooner but we didn't. But we're making the, the most of it now. I think maybe one of the reasons it hadn't occurred to us before is because we, we probably would've thought he, he might not have engaged with us like we were hoping he, he would during this time.

Well, it's 

Jennifer: hard to, it's hard to engage when we're looking at our phones, and so you assume. Because the person's looking at their phone, they don't want to. 

Anthony: Yeah. We, and we thought it would be too difficult to take the phones away and maybe not worth the battle. And, and maybe that's true. May, maybe it would've been more of a battle had we tried to do this a year ago.

May, maybe now is just the right time possible to do it. But in, in any event, [00:05:00] a lack of intentional time together as a family. Without the distractions of digital devices and, and things like that is a real missed opportunity to be present together and to not just have fun, although we do have fun when we do this.

But to have good family discussions and to bond together as a family. I think we'll look back on this time with our youngest you know, in his last year or so at home, and we'll, we'll think fondly about the, the time that we've spent every, pretty much every Sunday evening, 

Jennifer: right? I mean, there's things that get in the way of it every now and again, like last Sunday, we couldn't, but let's be real for a second though.

It wasn't. Necessarily easy to pull that phone away when, when we brought it up, this wasn't a discussion that we had as an entire family. This was a discussion between Anthony and I. We made this decision and then we shared it with him and we shared it [00:06:00] with him on a Sunday when we were about to do it.

And so there wasn't real warning. And when Anthony said, we're going to put our phones away, we're going to go put them on the counter over here. What did he say? 

Anthony: Well, he, he resisted you. Could you, you could actually see his body kind of tense up during the conversation. That's true. Like, like literally he was, he was uncomfortable with the idea of not having his phone on him and he kind of pushed back, but he.

He didn't push back so far as to say, I, that's ridiculous. I'm right. I, I, I am, should be allowed to be on my phone. He said, well, I don't wanna put it on the counter, but I'll keep it in my pocket. Yeah. And we said, okay, well can you do that without. Constantly pulling the phone out. And he said, yeah, but I, I think I should be allowed to keep it on my pocket.

Now, his rationale for that, he's Ethan's so, so he's smart. He, he's very smart. I'm trying to think of of the right word for it. But [00:07:00] anyway, his, his rational. For that was that if it's important to not be on his phone, he needs to learn how to do that while having his phone on him. Now, how could I, how could we argue with that?

Right. That, I mean, he's so smart. It's pretty logical, but I think in reality, I think in. He felt a little bit anxious about the idea of not having his phone on his person. Right, right, right. So maybe he is addicted. I said earlier he wasn't necessarily addicted. Maybe he is addicted. I think we're all kind of addicted.

It's something we're working on. But, but anyway, we agreed to that. We said, okay, as as long as you can keep it in your pocket and not pull it out on Sunday nights. During this time period that we've allocated for our family, that that's, that's good enough. 

Jennifer: Right? Right. And he, and he really has, so let me give you a rundown of what our Sunday evening looks like.

So we're, we're kind of early dinner eaters, especially on Sunday. So it's about 5:00 PM like Anthony said earlier, we [00:08:00] eat dinner together and that's the moment your phones go, whether it's the counter, whether it's your pocket. I typically end up putting mine on a charger, but we eat dinner together. No phones.

And then there's a few things that we do after that. 'cause we have about five hours there from five to 10:00 PM so we have chosen to add in there some practical life lessons. Like we said, he's getting ready to leave the Leave the nest. We wanna make sure he's able to be independent. And so we've covered things and you'll laugh, but we've covered things like how to clean a bathroom, washing your bedding.

Cooking. You are like, we'll make a treat. And I'll say, Ethan, you're making the treat tonight. 'cause he is never been one to really help us in the kitchen. We've also covered things like possible careers or possible paths for college. Do you wanna go to college? Do you not want to co go to college? What are the benefits and and stuff of that.

We've talked about finances. We did one where we had a spreadsheet of here's what college costs, here's all the costs that you, I mean. Kids have no idea, like money is difficult for them to wrap their head around, and so we [00:09:00] wanted him to see clearly on paper, these are the costs that you need to be prepared for.

We've even talked about the science of gratitude and how that would really benefit his life, not just in a spiritual way, but like a very scientific. Way as well. But we also do have spiritual lessons. We, we choose, you know, our faith is very important to us and so we choose to take some of that time to share our faith with him, to share our values, to teach him things that we think he needs to know.

And then we just do something fun as a family. So we've played games a couple times, but most often it's been a movie. And like we said, he's really interested in theater and so we've chosen to watch some old musicals with him. We watched Music Man. Mm-hmm. We watched Newsies. 'cause you hadn't seen it just.

Done some fun things together as a family. And then we have our prayer and we go to bed and the phones aren't really touched. I mean, we've told him he can look at it maybe for five minutes if there's like a message he needs to respond to. But really it's plug your phone in and go to bed after that.

Anthony: Yeah. And. The, the miracle of all of this is that [00:10:00] it, it has worked and, and it's working and it's something that we look forward to. And he, somewhat, to my surprise, he has been amazing about not pulling his phone out. He does keep it in his pocket like we agreed to, to let him do but he actually monitors.

And there, he's caught us a few times. Yeah. There have been a couple of times where Jen and I have violated the rule, but I think we're for good reasons. But nonetheless, we, we broke the rule. Yeah. And he, he called us out on it and. He, he was absolutely right and I'm grateful for that because I've learned how attached to my phone I am mm-hmm.

As a result of this. And even on the Sundays where he might kind of roll his eyes or, or say, oh, great. What are we gonna be learning about tonight? He is genuinely curious. Like he does look forward to it. He may not admit it, but, but he does. [00:11:00] He, he wants to know, Hey, what, you know, what are we doing tonight?

And he's fully engaged when we're together. And he's brought up some, some really important questions and, and thoughts and, and it's allowed us to have bigger conversations about the future and help him to think through what he wants his life to look like and be like when he, like you said, leaves the nest and spreads his wings and, and hopefully flies.

And I, I think he will. 

Jennifer: Oh yeah. Yeah. I think also those conversations have even continued past Sunday, so we really know he's thinking about them because he'll bring it back up two days later. There was one where we had a conversation midweek. Not even attached to Sunday. And he shared with us that day all he'd been thinking about between that whatever day we talked about during the week and the Sunday.

He had, yeah. Remember he had, he went and got the whiteboard and then wrote it all out for us. That's right. 

Anthony: That's right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So it, it's been really, really cool. And it, it just shows. Goes to [00:12:00] show the power of setting aside time and being really intentional and it, it takes up a whole evening.

You know, and this could be adapted, right, based on your family situation. Maybe, maybe it's one hour, maybe it's two hours, or maybe it's not on a Sunday, it's on a a weeknight what, whatever. But being intentional and setting aside time to. Not just be together as a family, but put away the distractions, put away the phones and be intentional about what you're talking about.

And then have fun too. Right? And fun is a big part of it. We, it, it does need to be fun and and meaningful, but we've. I, I've been just so grateful that this has been a successful endeavor idea that we came up with. And it's not something that's fizzled out and it's not something that he really has, has resisted all that much.

And in fact, I, I wouldn't really say he's resisted it at all. He, I think he was a little [00:13:00] skeptical when we presented the idea for sure. Like, oh boy, here, here we go, mom and dad, you know, doing their thing. But it's, it's been wonderful. 

Jennifer: I mean, let's think Today is Saturday. He's already asked about tomorrow.

We've already had that conversation today about tomorrow, 

Anthony: and the whole idea came because we were discussing, Jen and I were discussing our son's specific needs and, and how we could address them now. And so we invite you to do that for your families, as parents, talk about the needs, the specific needs that your kids have in whatever season of life

that they're in and then, you know, take this idea and adapt it and, and make it work for you. I, I think you'll see a lot of benefits if you do. 

Jennifer: So. If you got something out of today, we would love it if you leave a rating and review for us, wherever you've listened to our podcast and we'd love it even more if you would share this with a friend.

Say, Hey, I heard. Listen to this, see what you think, and that would be awesome. 

Anthony: Yeah. And in the next episode, we're gonna be talking about the importance of traditions [00:14:00] in families and how they can help you create stronger bonds and lasting memories. We're gonna be talking about how you can create your own simple, yet meaningful traditions without adding a bunch of stress to your life as a parent.

So stay tuned for that episode. Until next time, make time to become the parent you want to be.