I have started to feel a little guilty about my last post - - I don't want to come off holier-than-thou and I am afraid I did. My issue is not only the specific examples, but the broader issue they illustrate. You can hardly go a few days without hearing how children just don't have the respect they used to have, or the attention spans they had a few decades ago. Well where in the world do children learn these things? How do children learn to have conversations? By having real, meaningful conversations. How do children learn to mitigate difficult social situations? By observing appropriate social behavior in the adults around them. How do children learn to persist at tasks, learn new vocabulary, use imagination? Believe it or not the answer is not video games. The research is so prevalent I cannot even begin to list it, and I am sure that is not what people are coming to my blog for. (If you are, let me know! I'm on it!)
I make many many mistakes every day as a parent. I never claim to be perfect or have all the answers. I hope that is not the message I sent!
Now I am putting my soapbox away (for now). . .my phone is ringing.
Tuesday, January 06, 2009
Sunday, January 04, 2009
I'm not judging - really, I'm not
Ok - I guess really I am. But I just cannot let this go another day. I don't know if I just don't get out much and this has been going on for some time, or it is a new phenomenon. Maybe it has something to do with what people got for Christmas. But in the last few weeks I have been absolutely blown away by the number of times I have seen parents sitting at the table of a restaurant with their children (or out other places with their children) and not interacting at all with them. Can you take a wild guess what those parents are doing? They are on their Blackberry-IPhone-Smartphone-Human Substitute. When it really kills me is when the kids are also on their Nintendo DS (or whatever), so there are three or four people a a table 'together' and totally plugged in to some virtual, electronic world somewhere else. Now granted, I have no idea what these people's lives are like outside of the little window of time that I have stalked them at Chick-Fil-A or Tumbleweed. They very well could have planted a winter garden together, played family board games all afternoon and then ran out for a quick bite to eat where they spent their once-per-week electronic time. Maybe.
But for the purpose of this post I am going to go with my gut and assume that what I have observed is mostly typical behavior for the numerous families I have seen this way in the last few weeks. Here is an extreme example that illustrates my point: A family of three was waiting next to us for a table at Tumbleweed at abut 7 PM. (Our wait was about 30 minutes, they were there before us.) None of them were talking to each other. The mom was on her Blackberry about 75% of the time. The little girl got impatient and wanted to look through her mom's purse, her mom said no, and the girls started to cry. The dad angrily but quietly told her to quit crying, and just sit there. Both parents told her to dry her eyes several times. I then got a quick glimpse of the little girl, who couldn't have been more then three years old. They gave her a pacifier and then both parents got out Blackberrys and stayed on them until their table was ready.
During this scenario, another family of five walked in - mom, dad and three older kids. They sat across from us while they waited for their table, and both parents stayed on their Blackberrys the entire time we sat there. The mom did speak to one of her sons about what she was doing on the Blackberry, but the father did not speak to the rest of his family once.
Seriously I could describe at least four more similar examples in the past two weeks. What are people doing that is so important? I must really be missing something big.
But for the purpose of this post I am going to go with my gut and assume that what I have observed is mostly typical behavior for the numerous families I have seen this way in the last few weeks. Here is an extreme example that illustrates my point: A family of three was waiting next to us for a table at Tumbleweed at abut 7 PM. (Our wait was about 30 minutes, they were there before us.) None of them were talking to each other. The mom was on her Blackberry about 75% of the time. The little girl got impatient and wanted to look through her mom's purse, her mom said no, and the girls started to cry. The dad angrily but quietly told her to quit crying, and just sit there. Both parents told her to dry her eyes several times. I then got a quick glimpse of the little girl, who couldn't have been more then three years old. They gave her a pacifier and then both parents got out Blackberrys and stayed on them until their table was ready.
During this scenario, another family of five walked in - mom, dad and three older kids. They sat across from us while they waited for their table, and both parents stayed on their Blackberrys the entire time we sat there. The mom did speak to one of her sons about what she was doing on the Blackberry, but the father did not speak to the rest of his family once.
Seriously I could describe at least four more similar examples in the past two weeks. What are people doing that is so important? I must really be missing something big.
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