The Winter of Our Disconnect Page 3

  I concluded my announcement, eyes ablaze with missionary zeal (also fear), “It’s an experiment in living. We are all going to do it together, as a family. And it’s going to change our lives.” There was a frozen pause. If life was a MacBook, this was our spinning color wheel of death.

  Sussy broke the silence.

  “You mean ... like Wife Swap?” she asked.

  “YES!” I roared. Bless the baby for throwing me a life raft. “Exactly like reality TV! Exactly! Except, of course, we won’t have a TV ...” I trailed off. I could see Bill and Anni exchange glances.

  “What about homework?” Bill asked cannily.

  “You can do it at the library, or at a friend’s house, or at home using ...”

  “What? A stone tablet and a chisel?” Anni snapped.

  “If you like,” I replied evenly. (Pretending I don’t get it is kind of my genius as a parent.) “But the point is, I can’t control the universe. Alas. So it’s only our home that’s going to be screen-free.”

  I’d thought about this one a lot. In a perfect world—i.e., in which I did control the universe—The Experiment would be a total disconnect: no electronic media, at all, full stop, anywhere. It pained me to accept the reality that not even I could orchestrate such a thing. Short of moving to Djibouti, or imprisoning everybody in a backyard bomb shelter, there was no way I could pull it off. Like every other parent in the universe, I’d just have to find the serenity to accept the things I couldn’t change, the courage to change the things I could, and sufficient download speed to tell the difference.

  While they were still digesting the shred of good news I’d thrown at them, I added I’d be writing a book about our adventure. “Wait a minute, wait a minute,” Anni interrupted. “A book? Like for money?”

  “Maybe. Eventually,” I allowed.

  “Well, what do we get out of it?”

  I winced. It was ugly, but I was ready. I knew that sooner or later we’d get around to talking turkey. As the eldest, and most practiced, plea-bargainer, Anni’d had plenty of experience in brokering damages claims on behalf of her plaintiffs. I could have quoted Thoreau. I could have explained the thing about Michelangelo, or produced a recommended reading list in media, cognition, and learning. Instead, Reader, I cash-incentivized them.

  “Play along and play fair,” I muttered, “and, yes, there’ll be something in it for everybody.” I sounded like a mafia boss. But madre di dio, I have three teenagers. What else am I supposed to sound like?

  The proof of the pudding is in the eating, they say. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned in my fourteen years of being a single parent, it’s that a surprise attack—a pudding in the face, as it were—can be your best offensive strategy. I know that makes it sound as though you and your children are on opposing armies or something, but ... well, aren’t you? Boundary setting can be so hard, especially if, like me, you are secretly just a little intimidated by people who are more powerful, better looking, and wealthier than you are. Sure, they’re your kids and you love them. But they can still be pretty scary.

  That may be stating the case a little strongly. But as far as I can see, most parents of my generation—from the tail end of the Baby Boomers to the tender tip of Gen X—don’t really rule the roost. We sort of scratch around it apologetically, seeking consensus.

  We are bad at giving orders. But we are wonderful at giving options, and it’s a habit that starts right from the git-go. “Milk, sweet-heart?” we wheedle like some obsequious sommelier. “Our specials today are cow’s, soy, breast or goat’s.” We ask our children to cooperate. We don’t tell them to. And when there is an objection, we negotiate. I have one girlfriend who for many years paid her kids a weekly fee for brushing their teeth. I myself once slipped my seven-year-old a twenty for agreeing to a haircut. I think of that today and cringe. I’m sure I could have gotten it for ten.

  So it’s no wonder children today have a lively sense of entitlement. And that, metaphorically and otherwise, they take up more space. When I was growing up, back in “the black and white days,” family life—and the distribution of family space—was very different. My sister and I shared a bedroom until we were teenagers, and so did most other kids we knew. We had a spare room, which my mother called the “sewing room.” It housed a daybed that I never saw anybody use, and a Singer that dated from the Eisenhower administration. The last garment my mother had actually sewn was probably the petticoat for her poodle skirt, but that wasn’t the point. The point was, unclaimed space belonged to the grown-ups, as if by divine right of mortgagee.

  Today, most middle-class educated parents have reversed those priorities. Children are no longer the fringe dwellers of family life, but stake their claim to sit at the VIP table, even if they have to do it in a booster seat. They see resources in the home—furniture, appliances, food, adults, or any other standard utility—as their resources. I have a theory that this is particularly true in a single-parent home, where life tends to be more egalitarian, less structured and hierarchical. Okay, chaotic.

  Let’s consider the bedroom thing in more detail. Not only do our kids assume they are entitled to one, they also assume the right to maintain it according to a standard of their own choosing. My own kids were lisping, “But it’s my bedwoom!” from the time they were able to toss Talking Elmo over the side of the crib. Today, every wall and surface of my son’s private lair features sprayed-on graffiti—including, and this is no joke, a large corner cobweb—and his room is referred to affectionately as “the crack den.” I’ve given my permission for all this largely because I’m insane, but also because I’ve internalized the mantra. It is, after all, his room.

  By contrast, I didn’t grow up with the sense that “my” bedroom was “mine” in the same way at all, and not just because it was shared. In the old days—and I’m talking waaay back, before parenting was even a gerund—“your” room belonged to your parents and everybody knew it. They controlled access. They chose the furniture and decorations. (My sister and I had white Queen Anne-style dressers, Martha Washington bedspreads, and a fake oil painting of Marie Antoinette—just to cover all the political bases. No wonder getting sent to our room was an effective punishment.) Parents also told you when and how to clean your room. We vacuumed and dusted and changed the bed linen every week. Once a month—and this messes with my mind even now—we washed the woodwork. When I told my own kids about this recently, their eyes grew as wide as laser discs. “Wow,” Sussy mused. “What’s woodwork?” Patiently, I pointed out the painted molding between the floor and wall in her bedroom. “Cool,” she said politely. “I never noticed that before.” I’d lay odds she’ll never notice it again either.

  Partly, I blame myself. When they were younger I had cleaners, like many other working parents. The beauty of that was not having to freak out so much about the housework. The tragedy was that it encouraged an “Elves and the Shoemaker” mentality: that cleaning and tidying were done magically in the dark of night by kind fairies. My own ironclad habits of making my bed perfectly, complete with hospital corners and calculatedly “casual” pillow placement, are a source of genuine wonderment to my children. They used to bring in their friends sometimes for a peek, as if my bedroom were some exotic animal enclosure.

  I know plenty of other parents who don’t maintain any adult spaces—and who imply it’s a form of fascism to try. Like the neighbors of mine whose double-story heritage home for many years bore a hand-painted wooden sign that announced CAMPBELL’S HOUSE, Campbell being their four-year-old son. (Campbell’s mum and dad, you may not be surprised to learn, have since divided up Campbell’s assets and gone their separate ways.) The way I see it, there are degrees of lunacy, and I like to think our own family inhabits a kind of happy medium between Campbell’s House on one hand and Brat Camp on the other.

  Kids don’t just invade adult space, of course. They also invade adult time. And this is a commodity less easily cordoned off with bi-fold doors. Take “bedtime,” for exam
ple. When I was a child it was nothing “to have to go to bed and see / the birds still hopping on the tree,” as Robert Louis Stevenson somewhat sourly observed. Daylight savings or no daylight savings, you were tucked in at 6:30 p.m. And if you needed sunglasses and a UV blocker, so be it.

  Today, “adult time” has become something that must be chiseled painfully from the bedrock of family life—or, more accurately, dug at its shoreline in haste, before the next high tide. I was strict about bedtimes when my children were little. (Sleep is to single mothers what helium is to a hot-air balloon.) But over the years, I bowed to the pressure to lighten up, from both their peers and my own. No woman wants to be seen as a control freak, least of all those of us who make our beds with a protractor and a spirit level.

  Like so many other parents of my generation, I have grudgingly come to accept the prevailing view that “me time” is an indulgence—the temporal equivalent of a slab of mudcake or forbidden cigarette, the guilty exception to the rule that says to parents, and to mothers especially, and to single mothers most of all: “Your time is not your own.” In the age of helicopter parenting, we are not supposed to want things any other way. Hovering, chopperlike, over our children’s every move, as if they were escaped criminals or traffic accidents, is normal. In fact, we are supposed to be spinning our propellers with glee at the privilege. Being on call 24/7 is what having children is all about now—even children who are taller and more sexually active than you are (not that that’s saying much in my case).

  Opinions vary on whether the trend toward on-demand parenting is a healthy change. In a report on parenting college-age children, New York Times journalist Tamar Lewin spoke to one sophomore who uses more than three thousand cell phone minutes a month, most of it on calls to her parents, aunt, and grandparents. “I might call my dad and say, ‘What’s going on with the Kurds?’ It’s a lot easier than looking it up,” she points out. Her father is good with this. “Whether you’re wondering about a sweater or a class, it’s great to have someone to bounce questions off. And why not a parent?” he asks genially.1

  Um, maybe because the whole point of becoming an adult is to achieve self-reliance? Because maturity is largely about acquiring the confidence and the competence to make your own decisions? “Before the Industrial Revolution, there wasn’t this concept that children should grow up, move away, and become autonomous,” the father objects. That’s very true. But this man’s daughter doesn’t live in an agrarian society. She lives in a dorm at Georgetown.

  Whatever you think of its merits as a caregiving philosophy, there is no disputing that the helicopter parent is the bastard child of the Information Age. Without complex flight-control gear and a sophisticated communication network on constant alert, the level of surveillance we now regard as normal, even necessary, would be unthinkable. (More on that when we look in detail at the relationship messages we are sending with our cell phones—and I don’t mean the SMSs—in Chapter Four.)

  For now, suffice it to observe that children of all ages cross boundaries into adult territory like never before, and they do so because their parents have invited them to, whether consciously or not. I say that not in censure but in self-awareness. As a mother who once taught a graduate seminar while breast-feeding a five-month-old—and I mean literally while breast-feeding—I am a fully paid-up member of this parenting generation myself.

  But more subversive than any of their incursions into adult time or space, I would argue, is our children’s heightened sense of entitlement to information—promoted and protected by a Digital Bill of Rights under whose binding authority family life is being radically rewired.

  “It’s so unfair. I mean, what about their friends? Will they have any left at the end of it?”

  “Surely they’ll be bored.”

  “Forget about boredom. How will they do their schoolwork?”

  “Those poor children!”

  It’s not often you get to eavesdrop on a conversation that’s all about your own bad decision-making. In fact, barring my weekly phone call to my mother in North Carolina, I can’t say I’d ever experienced it. I’m still not exactly sure how it happened. One minute I was saying good-bye to the father of one of Sussy’s friends—we’d been confirming plans for an upcoming social event—and the next I was listening to a private conversation streaming live from his living room. After we’d hung up, his phone had somehow or other automatically redialed and ... well, all I know is that I could hear Philip’s voice plainly, only he wasn’t talking to me. (Sometimes technology really is our friend.) Naturally, I responded the way any other intelligent, responsible adult would do in such a situation. I covered my right ear and jammed the phone to my left as hard as I could.

  I could make out Philip explaining the outlines of our experiment to some unknown visitors, and something that sounded a lot like derisive snorting. No one actually came right out and said I was unhinged (although the phrase “a lot of pressure at work” got major air time). Nonetheless, the gist was clear: The Experiment was harsh and unworkable. The children would suffer. And I, as the crazed mastermind of it all, was borderline abusive, a cross between Super-nanny and a guard at Abu Ghraib.

  I wasn’t surprised. I’d gotten this kind of reaction a lot since I’d started to “out” us. Even my agent Susan sounded a little worried when I first approached her with the idea for this book. “I love the idea,” she wrote to me in an e-mail. “But are you sure you want to do this to your kids?” As if a child’s right to Internet access and a cell phone plan were akin to her right to food and clothing and shelter and anti-frizz serum. Information starvation, the prevailing attitude suggested, was a form of child abuse—exactly as my kids had been trying to tell me all along!

  There were others who cheered me on straightaway, including my stepdaughter, thirty-seven-year-old Naomi, who at that point was attempting to make a living renting virtual real estate on Second Life. But even among the yay-sayers, there was a widespread view that we were “going back to the seventies,” or even going back to the nineteenth century.

  What was that about?

  In fact, most of the technologies that today rule our lives, just like the children that today rule our lives, emerged in the 1990s and early noughties. That means a lot of our media are teenagers too. Some of the most mesmerizing of them all—the iPod, the Nintendo Wii, Facebook—are barely toddlers. No wonder they’re so damn attention-seeking.

  Early on in The Experiment, we are in the car on the way to school when my fourteen-year-old reminds me to contact the school secretary, urgently, about my change of phone numbers. “I told her you didn’t have a cell phone anymore and she got really mad,” Sussy tells me. “She said, ‘What if there’s an emergency?’ ”

  A stab of guilt goes through me like an overamped ringtone. “What did parents do ten years ago in an emergency?” I ask, feigning calm.

  “Ten years ago,” she replies coldly, “mothers stayed at home.”

  When I spoke to the school secretary later, she laughed. “I don’t have a cell phone either,” she admitted.

  “Wow. Well, what do you do in an emergency?” I couldn’t resist asking.

  “What everybody used to do ten years ago. If there’s a real emergency, don’t worry, we’ll find you.”

  The assumption that uninterrupted access to electronic information and entertainment is every child’s right—and every parent’s responsibility—has taken hold at a very deep level. Yet it has happened in the proverbial heartbeat.

  Our own family’s first dial-up account went online in 1996—and by Australian standards we were early adopters. Today, only 25 percent of American households do not have Internet access at home, according to 2010 figures from Nielsen NetRatings. In 1996, families were just discovering e-mail, and the more adventurous kids were test-driving the new search engines and stumbling upon free game sites.

  Today, the average American child spends almost as much time online as he or she does sleeping.

  Altho
ugh the first IBM PC hit the market in 1981—think “Bette Davis Eyes” and Charles and Diana’s wedding—most families didn’t buy their first home computers until the late eighties. They were massive clunky things, with spooky green screens and less memory than an advanced Alzheimer’s victim. The first “kids’ computer” we acquired ran on Windows 98, and, as every grown-up knows, 1998 was, like, five minutes ago. When my eight-year-old daughter’s friend customized the desktop and font colors for us, we stood around, wonder-struck. “She’s a genius!” we agreed.

  I bought our first cell phone in 2001—for my then-ten-year-old daughter, Anni, whose classmates gathered round in awe, begging for a demonstration. Today, the average high school kid spends an hour and a half text messaging each day, according to the 2010 Kaiser study. I didn’t get my own phone for a year or so, and when I sent my first text message, I considered it a technological triumph second only to opening an e-mail attachment. iTunes was launched in 2001 too—although it took our family five long years to discover it—and the BlackBerry smartphone, albeit featuring a pretty dumb monochrome display, followed in 2002. By 2008, when the iPhone made its Australian debut, I had evolved from mild technophobe to a fully fledged geek. I had one within twenty-four hours.

  Remember Game Boy? It may not have changed the world, but it sure revolutionized the family fly-drive vacation. It was first released in 1989. Nintendo 64, somewhat confusingly, came out in 1996, ten years before the release of the Wii. GameCube, Xbox, PlayStation, and their multitudinous handheld spawn—along with the other big names that have given joystick to the world—are children of the present millennium too.

  The first MMOs—“massively multiplayer online” games such as World of Warcraft or Second Life, which generally involve simulation and role-playing—started appearing around the time my stretch marks did, in the early nineties. High-speed Internet—the fast and furious kind that has made it possible to live in cyberspace—has been available to domestic users for little more than a decade, and much less than that in Australia. In September 2008, the number of broadband subscribers in Australia was 5.7 million, having grown by 90 percent over the previous six months.2 In the United States, despite an economy barely edging toward recovery, some 73 million American households, or about 60 percent of the total, held broadband subscriptions in 2010.3