Reclaiming Conversation (15 page)

But this is not what Jon does. When he brings out his phone in what he says is a high-stakes family situation (he hasn't been spending enough time with his daughter—the field trip is his chance), he ends up using it in a way that isn't good for his daughter or for his feelings about himself as a father.

We imagine (as when the mother of three describes “screening” a political speech at a family dinner) that bringing out a phone will enhance conversation. And sometimes it does.
Sometimes it does.
But more often, once a phone is out, it is hard to resist the temptation to also check our email. Or we notice that a text has come in. And we give it a quick response. When we have our phones in our hands, we are invited to stay in the world of our phones.
Our phones give the false sense of demanding little and giving a lot.
One of the most consistent lessons I have learned from studying families: We have to be more compassionate with ourselves. We are vulnerable. Our phones exert a strong holding power and we want to stay with them. But our families need us.

Jon never considered going on the school trip without his phone. The idea of time without his phone makes him feel less than himself, like “half a person,” a man “without hands.” Jon has to find a way to see himself as a whole person without his phone so he can bring that person to a conversation with Simone. She has to learn that she, too, can grow up to be a whole person without her phone. Right now, her father can't teach her that.

Jon's story illustrates how we have all learned to put our face-to-face relationships “on pause” when we send or receive a text, image, email, or call. And Jon did all of this without thinking. It was only, he says, after more than an hour on the road that he realized he hadn't said a word to his daughter.

When on late night television Louis C.K. discussed why he doesn't want to give cell phones to his daughters, he was led to a meditation on the importance of feeling the deep sadness of life. He said that when he
senses this feeling coming on, his first impulse is not to let himself feel it, but to “get the phone and write ‘Hi' to, like, fifty people.” And then
wait for the responses to come in
. Louis C.K. was talking about using phones to block sadness, but we use them to block other feelings as well. Jon, feeling uncomfortable, disrupts the potential for quiet time with Simone by sending out a blizzard of messages to friends, relatives, and women he is dating.

So, Jon's frenetic sharing is part of a larger story. We become accustomed to seeing life as something we can pause in order to document it, get another thread running in it, or hook it up to another feed. We've seen that in all of this activity, we no longer experience interruptions as disruptions. We experience them as connection. We seek them out, and when they're not there, we create them. Interruptions enable us to avoid difficult feelings and awkward moments. They become a convenience. And over time we have trained our brains to crave them. Of course, all of this makes it hard to settle down into conversation.

When I speak with Jon, he makes it clear that, as he sees it, he began the field trip with the intention to spend the day with his daughter but his phone stood in his way. He admits that his phone also stands in the way of talking to Simone when they are at home. He says, “If I want to talk to somebody, whatever, I will put on a cartoon so she can watch. I don't usually acknowledge this, but I am right now. . . . You know, I don't think I'm so bad with her, but I am somewhat bad with her.”

Here is how Jon describes Simone's objections when he plants her in front of a television cartoon: As on the bus, she puts up with it for a while and then objects. (Jon speaks in the second and third person—describing Simone as “she” and himself as “you”—when he talks about Simone's objections.) “She will tell you to put your phone away and stuff . . . and then you get sad. You are like, ‘God! I've been on my phone a lot.' You know? . . . I think kids are probably suffering a lot.”

Indeed, for many parents, knowing their children's unhappiness is not enough to make them put down their phones. There is a flight from responsibility. It can be addressed.

First, parents need a fuller understanding of what is at stake in conversations with children—qualities like the development of trust and self-esteem, and the capacity for empathy, friendship, and intimacy.

Second, parents need to move beyond thinking of their own attachment to their phones with simple metaphors of addiction or, more usually, a smiling reference to a “semi-addiction,” as in “I'm semi-addicted to my phone and can't do anything about it.” The fact is, we are all vulnerable to the emotional gratifications that our phones offer—and we are neurochemically rewarded when we attend to their constant stimulation.

Once we recognize the affordances of a technology—what a technology makes easy or attractive—we are in a position to look at our vulnerability with a clearer eye. If we feel “addicted to our phones,” it is not a personal weakness. We are exhibiting a predictable response to a perfectly executed design. Looking at things through this lens might put us halfway to making new choices, needed changes.

In our families, we can take responsibility for using technology in the same way as we take responsibility for the food we eat: Despite advertising and marketing and the biochemical power of sugar, we recognize that healthy foods in healthy amounts serve our families' best interests. And over time, we have put pressure on food producers to change their offerings. Right now, the apps on our phones are designed to keep us at our phones. Their designers profit from our attention, not from how well the technology supports us in the lives we want to lead.

I
n Colin's family, the three children are taking paths very different from those their parents anticipated. All were sent to New England prep schools in the hope that they would pursue traditional professions, but Colin, a college junior, is on his way to a career as a musician, and his older brother teaches skiing in Vail. His parents would like to get the family together for periodic trips; only his sister, who works as a programmer for an Internet company in New York, feels she can structure
her time sufficiently to make these kinds of reunions possible. Colin tells me that when his family has conflicts, usually about the children not meeting parental expectations, “we take our disagreements to Gchat conversations.” He likes this because he says “it makes things smoother.” He appreciates that this smoother operation gives him time to collect his thoughts. But when he pauses to ask if something might be lost, a question as much directed to himself as to me, Colin responds with a business metaphor: “What would be the value proposition of disagreeing with each other face-to-face?”

He can't think of an answer. His family takes care of conflict by cooling it down online. Colin thinks they are now more “productive” as a family. But what is a family's product? Should a successful family produce children who are comfortable with “hot” emotions?

Margot, a mother of two in her late forties, uses texting and messaging for difficult family conversations. Like Colin's family, she finds it an improvement on all other options. Her practice began with a failed face-to-face conversation with her son Toby, a high school senior. Toby was upset and told his parents that he wanted to have a conversation, but one in which he could present his case to them without being interrupted. He had a message and he wanted to be “heard out.” In person. The message: He wanted his parents to accept that he was working as hard as he could in school even if he was not living up to their expectations.

The conversation took place in the family's kitchen. But Toby's father broke the rules. Instead of listening in silence, he made a comment and Toby stormed out and retreated to his bedroom. From there, he began furiously texting both his parents, inundating them with angry messages. Toby's father did not want to respond to these messages, but Margot began to reply. In response, Toby sent more texts saying that he wasn't going to read any of her texts, but Margot persevered. “I kept copying and pasting the same messages over and over until my son began to read them.”

In the past, this situation might have called for a bit of time to cool off, and then for what some refer to as “a family meeting.” A family would get together and commit to hearing each other out. Or, matters such as
these could be discussed at dinner. Even if the atmosphere was tense, the fact of regular dinners meant that families knew that tomorrow there would be another dinner and another chance to sort things out. But in this case, Margot made a conscious effort not to bring this discussion into any “in person” space. Instead, conflict was explicitly exported to the world of online interactions. This is the “family meeting 2.0.” Margot liked how it worked, so she and her family decided to keep it up.

Margot calls what her family does when they work out problems by texting each other “conversations.” As she sees it, they are exchanges designed to minimize the risk that family members will say something they might regret. Margot says her family works better as a result. In their first set of exchanges, Toby was able to tell his parents that he felt his academic efforts were unappreciated because he wasn't always successful. And Margot was happy that she got to express her point of view: She feels that Toby does not use all the help he is offered.

For Margot, the key to successful family conversations is preparation and editing. Margot says she is able to have more successful interactions with Toby because she composes her thoughts before sending them. Without the “time delay” of texting, she says she could not find the right words to reach him. And in her view, the right words matter. And the right emotional tone, caring but cool, is also something she doesn't think she could consistently achieve in person.

Margot could, of course, take the time to think through what she wants to say to Toby, and then have a face-to-face conversation with him. Margot rejects this option. She says that if she had been face-to-face with her son in that first argument, her emotions would have taken over. And she would not have had the self-discipline to keep saying the same thing over and over. “It would have felt weird.” But it did not seem weird to repeatedly copy and paste the same message in a text box. And Margot is certain that this is what the situation called for.

Now, Margot is a true believer. There is no need, in her view, to let emotional turmoil get in the way of solving important family differences. In fact, she and her husband began to use online exchanges to work out their own disagreements in the aftermath of their argument
with Toby. Toby's spotty achievement in high school had a cost. He is not going to attend a prestigious college; instead he will attend the college he was able to get into. Margot became angry with her husband because she felt he was not at peace with how the college admissions process had ended. She felt her husband was undermining their family's chance to be fully accepting of each other.

This disagreement was not about something trivial. It began about a child's college plans but ended up about the meaning of family commitment. Yet Margot and her husband chose to have their entire argument over text. Margot says that this allowed them to do away with many of the “messy and irrational” parts of a fight. As when she discusses her texting marathon with her son, Margot stresses that in this medium, you have time to compose your thoughts. As Margot sees it, in the controlled world of the digital fight, there is less danger of doing “lasting damage.”

In Margot's view, technology enables family fights to be what they always should have been: cleaner, calmer, and more considered. Therapists have been telling family members to calm down and slow down for years. The point of that advice is to help them better listen to each other, in each other's presence. Margot thinks that what she calls “fighting by text” is a method in that spirit. You don't get face-to-face contact, but family members get to hear each other out and have time to reflect on each other's point of view.

Certainly this tool opens new channels of family communication. But to say to a child, partner, or spouse, “I choose to absent myself from you in order to talk to you,” suggests many things that may do their own damage. It suggests that in real time, it is too hard for you to put yourself in their place and listen with some equanimity to what they are thinking and feeling. Being able to be enough in control of our feelings to listen to another person is a requirement for empathy. If a parent doesn't model this—if you go directly to a text or email—a child isn't going to learn it, or see it as a value.

Telling a family member that you will get back to them when you have composed yourself is a time-honored way of handling a
difficult turn in a relationship. What is different in “fighting by text” is that a moment becomes a method. It may send the message that you are so reactive that you can't even try to process your feelings in real time. Or perhaps that you don't think they can. And even if you don't mean to send this message, this may be what is understood.

And there is this: Since fighting by text puts the emphasis on your getting the “right” message
out
, it sets up the expectation that you require the “right” message
back
. This implies that you think there is a way for people to talk to each other in which each party will say the
right
thing. Relations within families are messy and untidy. If we clean them up with technology, we don't necessarily do them justice.

Colin and Margot are content in their technologically mediated conversations. Others feel that when it comes to emotional things, only face-to-face communication counts. So, for example, when Haley is home on college breaks, “house rules” require her to call or text her parents to tell them if she will be out all night. Haley says that she sometimes forgets and this produces a predictable response: alarmed text messages from her mother. Here is how Haley describes them: “There are texts saying that she is about to call the police, that she hasn't slept for the whole night, that I have to stop doing this. . . . And then I think ‘Oh, shit!'” But Haley says that she shrugs off her mother's texts—she's gotten used to them.