Reclaiming Conversation (14 page)

I
t's easy, as Alli found, to post a picture with a question on Instagram and get hundreds of suggestions back. She says that doing this makes her feel good; it makes her feel less alone. But despite the pleasure of positive feedback from her followers, Alli knows that the “hearts” she gets on Instagram and the “likes” she gets on Facebook are not about affection. They are more like a rating system that tells her if her problem is interesting. Online, even the statement of a problem is a performance.

I have said that, in some measure, all of our behaviors are performances. But there are important differences among them. A tearful conversation with your mother and a sad blog post are both a kind of performance, but they ask and offer very different things. Ideally, the conversation with your mother can teach how empathy works. It is an opportunity to watch her attend to how you look and sound. It is an opportunity to notice that when she pays attention to you, her responses will begin to mirror your tone and body language. You can observe that when she says, “I don't understand,” she leans forward, signaling that she is trying to put herself in your place. Children learn empathy by observing the efforts of others to be empathic toward them.

Why do parents turn to their phones and away from their children? They tell me that they simply become distracted by something they see online, often something that relates to work. And then one thing leads to another. And sometimes, more is in play: Parents want to “shut down” the stress of family life. We've met Melissa, eighteen, a high school senior whose parents are on the verge of divorce. There is constant
bickering and dinner is often the place where things come to a head. Melissa's father will make small aggressive gestures—he'll put too much pepper in the spaghetti sauce even though he knows his wife dislikes pepper. When a fight blows up, as it does practically every night, Melissa's mother explodes in rage and Melissa follows, screaming.

Melissa says that when this happens she wants to talk to her mother, but in the chaos at dinner, with everyone yelling, cell phones come out. Her mother disappears to get support from her friends on her phone. And Melissa does her version of the same thing. She goes to her phone and to Facebook—her network.

It is hard for Melissa's mother to turn to her upset daughter and give her the quiet conversation she needs. Our phones are not the cause of the new silences in our families. But they make it easy for us to avoid difficult conversations. From the point of view of our children and their development, these difficult conversations are necessary conversations.

Left to her own devices, Melissa is not getting the help she needs. When someone is being empathic toward you, you learn that someone is listening to you, and that they have made a commitment to see things through. Melissa's mother is in a position to express this commitment to her daughter, to say to her, “This situation is bad. I'm sorry that as an adult I've put you into it. Tell me how you feel. I can't necessarily help right now, but we are in this together and I'm working to get us out of this.” Instead, she goes to her phone.

Some parents tell me that (at least in some measure) they don't put down their phones because they are intimidated by their children, who seem to live in an online social world they don't understand. Parents say they are afraid of being “shown up” and so they try to keep up. They don't want to feel irrelevant. “My phone feels like an equalizer,” says one mother in her early forties.

Parents should not be looking for an equalizer, because all things are not equal. If parents fear their children's technological expertise, it can lead parents to forget that they have a lifetime of experience to share—
that their children don't have.

Your fifteen-year-old daughter who can set up your household
network—printers, cable, and smart TV—is afraid to talk on the telephone because she has no confidence that she can find her words. She doesn't know what to do about a bully at school. She dreads a face-to-face meeting with her teachers. She needs you.

And we've seen that sometimes, parents will interrupt conversations to do online searches because they think it will make family conversations richer. From the parents' point of view, they are not turning away from their children at all. They think they are bringing more data into the conversation. But that is rarely how children see it.

Recall the fifteen-year-old who stopped her dad when he went online to “fact-check” a question that had come up at dinner. She said, “Daddy! Stop Googling! I want to talk to you!” She wants her simple presence to be enough. She doesn't want to be trumped, quizzed, edified, or in competition with the whole online world. A college junior whose father is in the habit of taking out his phone during dinner in order to make conversations more accurate describes its effect as putting conversations on a punishing “time-out.” He says, “It's like pushing the reset button that takes things back to square one. Conversations aren't given a chance to develop.”

Haley, a college junior, says that her parents “always placed a premium on talk and sitting down to dinner together as a family,” but this “broke down when my parents both got iPhones.” Now “they are hooked and they don't even know it.”

Only two days into Haley's last visit home, there was a dinner table quarrel about the table settings at Thanksgiving the previous year. Both her parents took out their iPhones to call up photographic evidence.

Haley asks her parents to put away their phones during dinner but they cannot hear her: “They don't feel bad. They tell me they are looking at something quickly or checking the weather or writing a quick email and that they are sorry.” According to Haley, even when her parents don't bring their phones to dinner, their phones are on their minds. All through the meal, she says, her parents are waiting for it to be over, and then, as soon as they possibly can, “they both stand up from dinner and get their phones.”

Only a few weeks earlier, her parents took out their phones when the three of them were having dinner with her grandfather, her mother's father. Haley says that when the phones came out, her grandfather was “flustered,” and as for her, she felt betrayed. When the four of them had been eating dinner and talking, she had felt she was in a special place, a closed circle that crossed generations. The phones broke the circle: “It felt like something stopped . . . and we had to start from square one.” But they couldn't. The mood had shifted.

When Haley talks to her parents about her concerns, they accuse her of being a hypocrite. They see their daughter on
her
phone and don't think she has any standing to be the “technology police.” But Haley thinks she does have standing. She is a child who wants to talk to her parents. That should be standing enough.

These days, Haley says that her strategy for talking to her parents is to save up things for when she thinks they are open to listening. “Sometimes this means waiting for the next day. Or maybe I will wait to talk to my mom the next time I see her.” By adolescence, children have learned that they are not always on their parents' minds or the only things on their minds. But it makes them feel safe to know that they can always get their parents' attention when necessary. Haley has lost that confidence.

R
elationships between parents and children are not symmetrical. It is natural that children want parental attention but don't necessarily want to give attention back. In fact, children who say they want to talk to their distracted parents may make a show of shutting them out. Amelie, a graduate student, now twenty-seven, looks back on the “asymmetries” of her teenage years:

When I was a teenager I would be angry at my parents for their using their phones, but at the same time, when my mother would reach to hug
me or get close, I turned away from her and looked down at my phone. . . . That was just to frustrate her. I needed to separate from her. To show her I didn't need her.

Yet Amelie admits that she appreciated her parents' phone-free dinner table conversations, often so engaging that they continued on past dinner. “Sometimes we would have people over—a neighbor or a relative—and they would continue talking after dinner. They would go into the living room and have coffee and cake. And my sister and I would follow and listen and sometimes say something. I would not have admitted it, but I really liked that.”

I am reminded of Amelie when I talk with adolescents who grudgingly admit how much they appreciate conversations that family rules (such as no phones at the dinner table) make possible.

Marni, fifteen, keeps up a small rebellion against her family's “no phones at dinner” policy by keeping her phone tucked under her thigh so she can take quick looks. Nevertheless, she is happy with the “no phones” rule.

She wants the rule and she wants to break it, just a little. I think of my students who tell me that in class they like to be able to glance at their phones, but that they also like it when professors insist, as I do, on class discussions with no phones. One says, “It shows that the professor cares.”

As Amelie put it, when young people hit adolescence they have to push away from parents. Gratitude for rules you want to break seems a developmental norm. These days, it can express itself by declaring fealty to the world on your phone while being grateful to your parents for insisting that sometimes you put your phone aside.

Thus Doreen, fourteen, expresses a grudging appreciation for her mother's insistence that all family matters be discussed in person, face-to-face. Sometimes, she says, if there is a family problem, “my mother will play Monopoly and Clue with us” and the conversation will happen over the board game. “And no electronics are allowed in our bedrooms. We have this thing called the dock. And it has all of the chargers and stuff. So, like, at the end of the day all of the phones and tablets and
laptops, they all go there.” Doreen is not happy to put her phone in the dock—she doesn't want to miss any messages—but she admires what her mother is doing: The ritual of the dock frees the family up for talk. And she can get to sleep at night—her phone is off-limits.

P
aradoxically, the technology that offers us so many new ways to connect to each other can also make it harder to find each other.

Jon, thirty-seven, wants a closer relationship with his seven-year-old daughter, Simone. A recently divorced management consultant in Los Angeles, Jon eagerly looks forward to time with Simone but he also finds it stressful. His time with his daughter is sporadic and out of their previous domestic routines. So, Jon explains, there are only so many times that it feels reasonable to take Simone to the museum or the American Girl store or the zoo. He finds it difficult to “just hang out” with her. That was easier when he lived at home with her mother. Then, his exchanges with Simone came easily. Now, things seem forced. So when Jon hears that Simone's second-grade class is going on a field trip, he welcomes the chance to be on the bus. He looks forward to a “natural” way for them to spend time together.

When I meet Jon, the field trip is fresh in his mind. He describes the time on the bus:

Naturally, I brought my phone. Without my phone, I can't work or read emails, or write to the women in my life. I can't write to Simone's nanny. I can't take pictures of my daughter. You can't do anything. The phone is you—a phone is your extension of your body. It's like, “What can you do if we take your hands away for the next four hours?” . . .

So number one, I took eight hundred pictures and I was sending out every picture, sending out every picture while I'm on the field trip. And then I'm writing and texting and people are responding to pictures, “Oh! So cute. Where are you?” And I'm writing, writing, writing. And
all of a sudden I'm realizing as I'm sitting there that Simone has been sitting there for, like, an hour without me saying a word to her.

And then I was like, “I've got to put my phone down.” Granted, it was all revolving around pictures of Simone—and I'm telling everyone I'm texting that I'm on a field trip. But then [on the bus] Simone said, “Put your phone down.”

Jon wants to be with Simone, but talking with her makes him anxious. He loses confidence when he isn't holding his phone. He tells me that recently his phone died when he was at a museum with Simone and he felt he had lost his inner world. “It was just like, ‘I'm not even a person.'” And talking to a seven-year-old takes patience and knowing how. Instead of settling down and figuring out what to say to his daughter, it is easier for Jon to show love by taking pictures and posting them to the network.

I've said that a first step toward reclaiming necessary conversations can be to create device-free times and places for them to happen. For families, those places would be the kitchen, the dining room, the car (and in Jon's case, the bus). Sometimes people take exception to this approach and suggest that it makes more sense for families to focus on how to spark engaging conversations. If people find that their devices help them have better conversations, the devices should be welcomed.

When people make this argument, I ask them to illustrate with an example, a story. One mother of two teenagers talks about how her family, when discussing
Game of Thrones
, likes to pull up memorable gory scenes on their tablets. Another mother of three children in their twenties recalls a political conversation at a large holiday dinner. She wanted to make the point that politicians could start significant national conversations. She took out her phone and showed a few minutes of Barack Obama's speech on race during his first presidential campaign. “Taking out the phone to show that—it made the conversation richer.”

If you apply this way of thinking to Jon's case, he could, if he is feeling shy with Simone, use his phone to find a photo of a trip they had taken together and begin a conversation about it. Or he could use his
phone to play a scene from a recent movie they had seen together and start to talk about its characters.