this is what naive adults think, don't you remember how it was when you were a kid?

I seriously, I feel like so many people just somehow magically forget their entire childhoods, maybe selectively?

I lack the ability to lie to myself like that unfortunately

Changing habits is hard enough on it's own. parenthood and modern life makes that even more difficult

It is possible to make changes, I would say this is one of the easier bad habits to beat. The best is to start with fixed moments where you as a family decide phones are forbidden. For example, shortly after our daughter was born, we decided "no phones during eating (breakfast/lunch/dinner)". When both parents are in, it is easy to mutually enforce. For over a decade, we have never used a phone during dinner and it's one of those moments of family time.

Now we are always surprised when we have dinner together at a restaurant that some people are on their phones half the time (sometimes doing useless stuff like checking Facebook/insta), rather than enjoying each other and dinner. It's so weird.

Another good method is to remove addictive social media from your phone. Primarily games and apps with algorithmic timelines like Facebook, Instagram, X, Reddit, etc. I removed all those from my phone. I noticed with apps that do not have an algorithmic timeline, like Mastodon, you catch up once and after that it's not interesting anymore.