"It's how I switch off after work"

The phone is the small thing that's yours. You've spent the day answering to people and the twenty minutes with your feet up and the feed is where you go slack, and it happens to be the twenty minutes when the house is full of people wanting to tell you things.

The need is real. Everyone needs a stretch of the evening that's theirs, where nothing is asked. The trouble isn't the phone and it isn't the need. It's the timing. The slack twenty minutes has landed exactly on top of the twenty minutes when your partner has things to say and your children haven't seen you all day, and both are trying to happen in the same chair.

The result is that neither happens. You don't switch off, because someone's talking to you and you're half-answering. And they don't get you, because you're half in the feed. The glance is the seam where the two are stitched together badly. You get a worse rest and they get a worse you, and the phone gets the twenty minutes anyway.

The fix is to give the phone its twenty minutes on its own. Before you walk in, in the car, at the end of the platform, on the bench outside. Twenty minutes with the feed and nobody talking. Then go in, and the phone goes away, and the people get the rest of the evening. Or do it after, once the children are down, with the sofa and the partner both agreed on what's happening. What doesn't work is trying to have both at once and calling the result listening.

I'd add one thing. The feeling of "this is mine" that the phone gives is strongest when it's being taken from you, and a child saying "Dad, Dad" is the taking. Give it its own time and the child stops being the thing between you and your rest. If bringing the whole job home in your head is the larger problem, that's a later book in this series. This one is only about the phone in the chair.