This week, my seventeen year old son’s Blackberry broke. No big deal, we’ll get it fixed I thought, but how wrong was I? After 24 hours he’s been pacing around nervously, looking at the messages he can see are coming through, unable to read them or know who they’re from, and when I told him we would have to send it away to be fixed, his reaction, in my opinion was completely out of proportion with the actual situation. Taking a Blackberry away these days from a teenager is like putting him in solitary confinement.
Now if you’d said to me two years ago that he would even have a Blackberry, I would have laughed at you, but now, they seem to be the most popular way of teenagers communicating with each other. Forget talking on the phone they are constantly “BBMing” each other (for those of you not in the know that’s Blackberry Messaging) and I have no idea what they are talking about. How can they have anything to say to each other at 8am before school, or on the way home from an evening out, when they’ve just spent four hours together? But they do, and whatever it is, is far more important than anything I might have to say to them.
When I stopped to analyse what annoys me in particular about this, I wondered if maybe it is because when I was younger, I was brought up to believe that whispering in someone else’s company is rude, and in a way, that is what they are doing. You know they’re communicating with someone, but you don’t know what they’re saying and you’re not included in the conversation, so it ends up irritating me and I also begin to wonder, as a parent, what is so secretive?
And what about Facebook, Skype, Myspace, Twitter and all the other online sites in which teens participate constantly, it is becoming increasingly difficult for them to switch off and just be themselves, on their own. Their friends are ever present, as are those they don’t necessarily want intruding in their lives.
As parents should we be accepting this new wave of technology as just the new way, and how our children will view the world? In some respects it is a wonderful thing that my son is able to chat with his friend he knew from primary school as he gets his breakfast in England and his friend waits for his teacher to arrive in the class in Spain. Staying in touch with friends from around the world, or even from our past was much harder work when I was younger but to what extent is this new way of communicating, detracting from their face to face social skills and increasingly intruding in family life? What parent of teenagers can honestly say they don’t find it tempting to BBM them in their rooms from downstairs, as it is the most effective way of getting their attention?!
Join us for an interactive evening for mothers and fathers, discussing parenting teenagers of the technology generation.
