Parenting is hard. A freshly-minted parent has so many good resolutions.<p>After eleven years of parenting we had five weeks of summer without holidays (holidays meaning staying at least three nights not at home). We just had some events like zoos, museums, hiking, rope parks, grocery shopping, household chores, and so on, and each week about two or three days of doing nothing at home. And in the last week I found a way to curb the excessive online time when being lazy. Alternate between being online and offline every hour and use something like a tomato timer and switch when it buzzes off. I also was not telling the kids what they can do when offline. They had to figure out themselves what to do when bored. After two days of this regime, my older son told me he liked it and was not in a hurry to go back online.<p>I keep thinking about this experience. Why is it so hard not to be online?<p>On the days we were not at home, we all had almost no online presence. More often than not I told my older son not to bring his cell phone along, and we parents also left our cell phones mostly in the bag, sometimes even in airplane mode.<p>But it is really hard.<p>That's what has changed when I was a child. Online presence is difficult to avoid. And that's what's making parenting difficult today.<p>Sometimes I have to look up things to organize a short trip while the boys aren't allowed to be online. I always feel guilty towards them that I can't stop being online and still don't allow them the same. There are a few applications which could be understood as not being online, like reading an ebook, but others don't, like playing Exponentile or being on Hacker News.<p>By the way, my wife and I are early retired because of some serious health issues, so we don't need to do business, but sometimes we are exhausted. I know all parents are exhausted sometimes, but perhaps we are more than others.