Reclaiming Conversation (13 page)

And what is that different way? For Leslie, that would be in the kind of family where there are no phones at breakfast or dinner, not just rules against it that parents break. She wants a family where you have conversations at meals. But some children who have spent their early years eating at silent tables worry that they won't know how to be in that kind of family. Recall the young man who told me, “Someday, someday soon, but certainly not now, I'd like to learn how to have a conversation.” He added the “certainly not now” because right then, at that moment, he preferred to text rather than talk. He is not confident that he can express himself without a chance to edit his messages. He knows he needs practice in conversation.

The notion of practice is key. Neuroscientists talk about the “use it or lose it” quality of our brains. Nicholas Carr, who introduced the notion of “the shallows” to help people think about how their brains adapt to life on the web, said: “
We become, neurologically, what we think
.” If you don't use certain parts of the brain, they will fail to develop, or be connected more weakly. By extension, if young children do not use the parts of their brain activated by conversing with an attentive parent, they will fail to develop the appropriate circuitry. I think of this as the “missing chip” hypothesis. The name, of course, is a bit of levity, but my concern is serious: If young children are not engaged in conversation, they will start out a step behind in their development.

There is an analogy between children's relationship to conversation and to reading. Teachers complain that students—from middle school and beyond—are less able than their peers of only a decade ago to read
books that require sustained attention. Cognitive neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf studies this shift away from what she calls “deep reading.” Today, adults who grew up reading serious literature can
force
themselves to focus on long texts and reactivate the neural circuits for deep reading that they may have lost after spending more time online than with books. But children need to develop these circuits in the first place. Wolf suggests that to get children back to reading, the first, crucial step is to
read to children and with them
.

The parallels with conversation are clear. To get children back to conversation—and learning the empathic skills that come from conversation—the first, crucial step is to talk with children. These days, it is often children who seem least afraid to point out that technology is too often getting in the way.

O
f course, the fear that technology can get in the way of family conversation is nothing new. Television prompted similar anxieties. Considering the case of television makes the point that we use technology in a context and that context counts. As a little girl in the 1950s, I watched
I Remember Mama
and
The Molly Goldberg Hour
with my family. Commercial breaks provided precious time to discuss the characters' problems and how our family would do things differently. More recently, as I wrote this book's chapter on solitude, I binge-watched
True Detective
with my daughter and we paused every ten minutes to argue fine details of the plot. As I wrote the chapter on friendship, we watched
Game of Thrones
, and in this case the conversation included a fair amount of
talking back to the television
. What was happening on the screen couldn't possibly be happening! Too many of the main characters were being killed off!

Technologies come with affordances. Television can be watched socially or alone in one's room. Television can isolate a family, but if you
take advantage of the fact that it can be used socially, it can also bring families together.

I interview Alli, fifteen. The installation of a new flat screen television in her family's kitchen did not make it a family hearth. During meals, Alli eats silently, watching television, while her parents retreat to their phones. Alli misses her parents. When she needs advice, when she has questions about boy trouble, school trouble, friend trouble, she goes to her anonymous Instagram account, on which she has over two thousand followers.

Right now, Alli says, she is looking for advice about a “friend problem,” so she recently posted a picture and a question on Instagram and got back hundreds of answers from all over the world. Alli says she uses Instagram “carefully” and knows how to keep safe. When someone asks if they can send her a personal message, she declines. In Alli's fluency with Instagram, we see a virtue of the online world: Teens now have a place to ask questions and have conversations that might not feel comfortable in their local surroundings. To take a classic example of how this works: Gay or transgender adolescents in a small, culturally conservative rural town can find a larger community online; a circumstance that once would have been isolating no longer needs to be. If your own values or aspirations deviate from those of your family or local community, it is easy to discover a world of peers beyond them.

But in this particular case, Alli
wants
to talk to her parents. She's going to the network because her parents are going to their phones.

The irony is that if Alli and her family were separated by distance, if her mother had to work in a different city, they might well be using apps on their phones and computers to bring them together. Dinner might be a time to Skype. Families use social media to keep everyone informed of big events and milestones. But living together, the members of Alli's family let their devices isolate them.

Like Alli, fifteen-year-old Hillary says that when it comes to personal matters, she would rather turn to her mother than the network, but “When my mother is texting, she can't be reached.” And, like Alli,
she doesn't know how to get her mother's attention. But on Instagram or Facebook, someone is always listening.

Hillary describes how her mother shuts down conversations. “When I am talking to my mom and she's emailing someone, she's like, ‘Wait.' Or she's talking to me and she stops her sentence in the middle to finish her email and then keeps talking. And then stops and starts.” Hillary says that the effect of these stops and starts is an erosion of trust. She says, “Trust . . . knowing that someone is not understanding you, not paying attention, makes it easy to lose trust. . . . If someone was on their phone and not really in the conversation, I don't feel like I can trust them as much.”

For the psychoanalyst Erik Erikson, basic trust is the building block upon which all other development rests. For the infant, trust takes a primitive form: “When I am hungry,
I shall be fed
.” Later in life, trust is built in other ways; beyond being fed, one wants to be heard. Hillary says she has never confronted her mother about how she uses her phone. In contrast, Austin, fifteen, says that he frequently calls out his parents for being on their smartphones when “house rules” forbid it. He says, “My mom will always be like, ‘Stop using your phone, you're addicted to your phone.'” But moments later, his mother will be on
her
phone. Austin says, “Whenever I'm having a conversation at the dinner table or something, she'll have her phone out . . . you'll ask her a question and it'll be the shortest answer possible. Like, she'll say, ‘Okay.' The shortest possible answer. Or sometimes she just won't even hear me. It's like a bubble around her head. [She's] in her phone, not noticing the people around.”

So Austin challenges his mother: “I say to her, ‘Why are
you
on
your
phone all the time?'” Usually his mother answers that she is using her phone for a work project. But Austin says that when he looks at his mother's phone, he is more likely to see text messages and games. Austin pauses. “If you're always on your phone, you just miss so many things in life.” What he doesn't say is that his mother has “missed” him and he misses her.

W
e cannot know if the parents we see ignoring children would be more attentive if they didn't have phones. What we do know is that our phones are seductive. When our phones are around, we are vulnerable to ignoring the people we love. Given this, it doesn't make sense to bring a phone to dinner with your children. Accept your vulnerability. Remove the temptation.

There is another story here. Parents have become preoccupied with technology just as our links to community have become more tenuous. Tod, fifteen, imagines, nostalgically, that his parents grew up in a world of greater community, but he doesn't see that world. He doesn't go to a neighborhood school. He lives in a run-down part of town and his parents don't want him out on the street or even out with friends who live close to his house. When Tod comes off the school bus, his parents want him to go straight home. He expresses his dependence on his family by saying he “doesn't really have a town.” What he means by this is that he doesn't really know his neighbors. And his parents have disappeared into their phones. So now he's starting to feel that all he has is what social media can provide. Tod imagines the days before cell phones:

In the olden days, people were friends with their neighbors. They weren't friends with people who lived ten miles away. So nowadays, people aren't so close with their neighbors. Their friends don't live close by. And there's more traveling, and you're associated with people everywhere, but in the olden days, you basically knew what you were familiar with. Your town, your people.

Now, if you don't have your phone, you are alone. . . . People used to know their neighbors; now all you've got is your phone.

I meet Tod when I visit
a device-free summer camp
. The ten boys in his bunk describe a vicious circle. Parents give their children phones. Children can't get their parents' attention away from their phones, so
children take refuge in their own devices. Then, parents use their children's absorption with phones as permission to have their own phones out as much as they wish.

Everyone thinks that everyone else is occupied and preoccupied. The most realistic way to disrupt this circle is to have parents step up to their responsibilities as mentors. They can't do this if they are texting or doing email while their children are trying to get their attention.

Of course, distracted parents are nothing new, but sharing parents with laptops and mobile phones is different than sharing parents with an open book or a television or a newspaper. Texting and email take people away to worlds of more intense and concentrated focus and engagement. This difference is something that children comment on. (One teenage boy says: “I could interrupt my father if he was reading the paper. We used to read it together while we watched Sunday sports and if I had something to talk about, I just had to ask. His laptop is different. He's gone.”)

Here is a fifteen-year-old boy, disappointed and resigned: “When I come home from school, my mom is usually on her computer doing work. . . . Sometimes she doesn't look up from her screen when I am talking to her.” One of his friends says that his mother, too, is usually unavailable. Once his family took a vacation where there was a bad Internet connection and his mother became so stressed that she almost cut the vacation short. “She said, ‘I can't wait to get back from vacation because I feel like I am missing all the stuff I have to do.'” He sums up what he makes of his mother's stress: “Obviously, the Internet has helped us create a lot of jobs, but it can definitely be a hindrance to life.”

Mitch, fifteen, who lives in rural Pennsylvania, feels he has lost his parents to their phones. His mother's rule is no phones at dinner, but she brings her phone to dinner all the time. He expresses a thought that I hear more and more: He is going to learn from his parents' mistakes.
He says, “I'm going to raise my children the way my parents think they are raising me. Not the way they really are raising me.”

We know how Mitch is being raised: with phones at dinner and no conversation. How do his parents think he is being raised? That would
be closer to the way they themselves grew up, in a simpler and lower-tech way. Mitch thinks his parents have the right idea when they keep this idealized picture in mind. He says, “I think it is a good sign. It's a sign that they can see that technology is not leading to good things even if they can't help themselves from using it.”

Mitch has worked out his own theory of why conversation is disappearing: People are getting out of practice.

I think my mom has forgotten how to talk. I kind of feel the reason why so many of us keep using our phones even though it takes away from meaningful conversations is that some people have kind of forgotten how to really have a good conversation because they've used their phones for so long that they don't really know what else to do but text. It gets awkward talking in front of real people—they haven't done that. I think really they just don't know what to do.

The young people I interview are in conflict. They talk about the Internet as a “hindrance to life.” They say they want a different kind of life for themselves and the families they will build in the future than what their parents are providing for them. But for now, they lead the life their parents model. They carry their phones at all times. They sleep with their phones. Some post to their networks rather than talk to their parents when they need emotional support. They say it's easier, and besides, they are not confident they can command their parents' attention for the amounts of time it takes to really sort things out. And some doubt if their parents have the needed resources to help them. They are more confident that the right information will be available online, accessible from strangers or search.

Young people have grown up in a world of search, and information is the end point of search. They have been taught that information is the key to making things better—in fact, to making everything better. Family conversation teaches another message. Talking to your parents doesn't just offer up information. You experience the commitment of a lifelong relationship. A parent may have no immediate “solution” for you
but may simply say, “No matter what, I will always love you.” And “I'm staying around for another conversation; we'll keep talking this out.” Even if a family is broken and a parent lives at a distance from a child, this last message is what a child wants to hear, no matter what the circumstances.