Working parents obsess over gadgets
December 23rd, 2006 | Published in Relationships, Culture, Technology
Katherine Rosman has written an interesting perspective on Blackberry-mania, and is worth reading. An excerpt:
As hand-held email devices proliferate, they are having an unexpected impact on family dynamics: Parents and their children are swapping roles. Like a bunch of teenagers, some parents are routinely lying to their kids, sneaking around the house to covertly check their emails and disobeying house rules established to minimize compulsive typing. The refusal of parents to follow a few simple rules is pushing some children to the brink. They are fearful that parents will be distracted by emails while driving, concerned about Mom and Dad’s shortening attention spans and exasperated by their parents’ obsession with their gadgets. Bob Ledbetter III, a third-grader in Rome, Ga., says he tries to tell his father to put the BlackBerry down, but can’t even get his attention. “Sometimes I think he’s deaf,” says the 9-year-old….
Emma Colonna wishes her parents would behave, at least when they’re out in public. The ninth-grade student in Port Washington, N.Y., says she has caught her parents typing emails on their Treos during her eighth-grade awards ceremony, at dinner and in darkened movie theaters. “During my dance recital, I’m 99% sure they were emailing except while I was on stage,” she says. “I think that’s kind of rude.”
Emma, 14, also identifies with adults who wish their kids spent less time playing videogames. “At my student orientation for high school, my mom was playing solitaire,” she says. “She has a bad attention span.” Her mother, Barbara Chang, the chief executive of a nonprofit group, says, “It’s become this crutch.”
Safety is another issue. Will Singletary, a 9-year-old in Atlanta, doesn’t approve of his dad’s proclivity for typing while driving. “It makes me worried he’s going to crash,” he says. “He only looks up a few times.” His dad, private banker Ross Singletary, calls it “a legit concern.” He adds: “Some emails are important enough to look at en route”….
Still, like teenagers sneaking cigarettes behind school, parents are secretly rebelling against the rules. The children of one New Jersey executive mandate that their mom ignore her mobile email from dinnertime until their bedtime. To get around their dictates, the mother hides the gadget in the bathroom, where she makes frequent trips before, during and after dinner. The kids “think I have a small bladder,” she says. She declined to be named because she’s afraid her 12- and 13-year-old children might discover her secret.