Con Heir

Since the time of Cain and Abel, children have been foolish enough to believe that they can pull one over on their parents.  To wit: the many antics of Beaver and Wally, the Brady Bunch, the Huxtable Kids, and these days, the variably-gifted kids of Modern Family.  My own father’s parenting philosophy was to offer a pre-emptive strike against youthful indiscretion.  He had been such a clever and conniving youth in his own day that he assumed mischief not in evidence, declaring us guilty until proven innocent.

It was truly unnecessary.  In fact, I was such a goodie-goodie as a child that I invested little to no creativity in the usual teenage shenanigans of smoking, shoplifting, taking the car, or throwing a party when the parents weren’t home.  If anything, my insistence on following the rules made me an unwelcome moral compass at gatherings, costing me dearly in social capital.  I was the very definition of uncool.  Nonetheless, there were a few safe havens around town where I found I could talk to boys without a chaperone, or eat forbidden chocolate to my heart’s content. 

I was also very good at working within the boundaries.  For example, I discovered that our school monitored the skipping of classes by comparing the attendance lists of each class to the homeroom attendance.  If you were absent from homeroom you were officially absent for the day, making any absence from classes allowable and excused.  If I wanted to skip class (something I only did during the last semester of senior year because, let’s face it, senioritis is a debilitating disease) I simply hid in the bathroom during homeroom and then took my leave from classes that weren’t worth my time.  Unfortunately, I was not aware that there were a maximum number of absences allowed per quarter.  After being ratted out by my guidance counselor, my parents approached me, but not with concrete evidence.   Instead they told me, “we know what you did,” and then forced me to confess, hoping all the while that I was confessing to the ‘right’ crime.

My own children have been eye opening to me.  My son, in particular, was remarkably gifted in the skill of youthful subterfuge.  He could be so convincing about alleged injustices brought down on him that I would get fired up and ready to take on any authority figure at school.  Fool me once, shame on you.  Fool me twice, you are so grounded.  ‘Nuff said.

But there is a new type of adaptive behavior among the 25-and-under crowd that is so very subtle I doubt most parents have even realized it.  I call it “stealth texting”—but it could just as easily be termed “rebel with a clause.”  Our kids are the first generation to come with cell phones as standard equipment.  It didn’t take long for parents and teachers to realize that while convenient, cell phones can also be evil.  Thanks to cell phones, kids no longer speak to each other (or us); nor do they make eye contact, or talk in complete sentences.   As a result, cell phones are banned from many secondary schools, and are cause for ejection from more and more college lectures.

Despite these restrictions, our kids are not going without.  My college-age kids text me all day long during class hours.  I always admonish them, (“Oh, the professor is rewinding a video. . .”) fearing that their precious “class participation grade” will be taken down a notch or two.  It turns out that their misbegotten conduct goes undetected.  This generation has evolved a texting countenance that we older folks fail to recognize.

Consider the way I use my iphone to send a text message.  I hold the phone out in front of me, extending my arms to my middle-age focal length, and then press the clumsy touch-screen buttons with both thumbs, all the while squinting at the screen to see whether auto-correct has altered my intended meaning.  Our children, by sharp contrast, are remarkably skilled at these devices, having much-practiced dexterity that surpasses ours by an order of magnitude.  While keeping the phone in a pocket or on the seat between their legs, they complete ten messages for every one of our own.  Without any discernible shift in their posture, they can sit at a dinner table or in a lecture hall and conduct several text conversations at once.  We interpret the fact that their eyes are cast downward as a sign of a narcissistic generation rather than as evidence that they are breaking the rules.

Although this behavior is easy for an adult to overlook, the kids themselves recognize it instantly.  It didn’t take long, for example, until every person under the age of 25 was not only texting at my Thanksgiving dinner, but they were texting each other!   Text transports them to a parallel universe wherein parents and teachers are pandered to and kids have free rein.

It is hard to break this cycle.  My husband uses text to communicate regularly with his residents at the hospital—a method that I allow because it is far preferable to having the phone ring every night at dinner time.  This limits my ability to enforce anyone else’s behavior.   I am not a fan of the old parental stand-by, “Do what I say; not what I do.”  And in fairness, the much concealed method the kids use is more insult than blatant disruption.

This year, when the kids return home for the holidays they will have a shocking surprise:  a new cell-phone basket.   Each time we sit down at the table together, we will all deposit our cellphones into the same receptacle for the duration of the meal.  They will hate it, but the way I see it, we only have a finite number of dinners left with just the four of us.  Soon they will move on and start families of their own.  That’s when I will enjoy sitting back and waiting for them to see their own behaviors reflected back in the faces of their own children.