Children’s birthday parties aren’t always easy to plan, especially the guest list. Do you invite the whole class or not?
Please join us on Thursday, February 24, 2016 at 1:00 EST on Twitter to discuss the issue. Please remember to use the hashtag #braindebate. We look forward to hearing your views.
One attendee with win our Great Debate Bundle – Five print issues of Brain, Child with 5 debates.
NO
I Gave My Children Uncommon Names
By Dina Relles
I could tell she didn’t like the name the moment she first heard it. “Ai-ven,” she rolled the strange syllables around in her mouth with exaggerated effort. As if she said them slowly enough, maybe they would change.
My mother had never heard the name before, of course, because we’d made it up. I was walking home from work one evening, pregnant with our firstborn, when some combination of letters on a real estate sign overhead made me think of it—Aiven, a variation on Aiden, a name that hovered high on our list, but which was, at the time, soaring in popularity.
We thought perhaps it sounded “Hebrew enough” to pass muster with our Jewish families and, with its rhythmic “v” and “n” sounds, would be hard to hate.
I never want to be what people expect. Not Dina, the rabbi’s daughter with the biblical name and the Eastern European ancestry. I came from a community where that was everyone else’s story too. I longed to be different. I have a cartilage piercing! I’m agnostic! I wear black nail polish! My name alone doesn’t shout these things; it takes effort to undermine automatic assumptions.
As a teen, I secretly hoped, upon first meeting, that people might infer my name derives from the Greek, “Constantina,” or maybe Italian. There was even a stretch, at age eight or so, when I sought to change it to Dana. I dutifully labeled the inside covers of all my books with my new signature, wishing I could somehow rewrite my own story.
So much of where we’re going is in response to where we’ve been. No, my son would not be David or Joshua, Jonathan or Michael.
Think of it at the top of a resume.
Call it down the street from your front porch.
People advise all sorts of tried-and-true methods to ensure you choose a passable name for your child. But I preferred to picture my son lying late night on his bedroom floor, as I once did, wondering why he’s named what he is—what it means, for his past, his future, and most of all, for himself—how he can make it his own.
By choosing a distinct name, one we expected no one else to have, my husband and I sought to say to our son, “Don’t be afraid to be different. Don’t conform! Challenge everything.” From first breath to first impression, he couldn’t complacently fall back on a prepackaged standard. He would not be the fifth Ben in his class or “Jonathan R.” but one-of-a-kind, as if his name has its own story to tell.
The name for our second son, Parker, was inspired by our deep love of the outdoors, of brisk fall days spent playing in a park with our firstborn, of the park in downtown Manhattan where my husband and I had our first date and then, many months later, got engaged. Our wedding invitation bears this Simon and Garfunkel quote: Can you imagine us years from today, sharing a park bench, quietly?
Our third son, Gray, came along, and we loved both the aesthetic, as well as the meaning his name conveys: the ambiguity and tender uncertainty of our existence—the sentiment that nothing is black and white.
By this point, we welcomed the secular slant, embraced the element of the unexpected, the idiosyncrasy of the monikers we bestowed on our offspring. I no longer minded the requisite shrugs my parents would deliver along with news of their latest grandson’s name.
My sons have Hebrew names, rest assured, for use at appropriate times—Hebrew School or Jewish camp or when called to the Torah. These are often linked to a lost loved one, connecting our children to their ancestors, their rich history, to all that came before. They are there, ready to serve, but tucked away. We wanted their heritage to be but one marker of who they are, and not one worn on their sleeve.
I was 20 weeks pregnant with my second child when the sonogram revealed it would be another boy. I circulated the news to immediate family, and, while the shock of the baby’s sex was still settling, my father responded with an email I’ll never forget:
“It’s going to be a…wonderful baby, a blessing, another grandchild, the next step in your family, the discoverer of the cure to cancer, a child who will bring you no end of life and love, and…a boy!”
Each of my sons is many things. No one characteristic or trait defines any of them—not his name or sex, his love of math or his fierce fastball, or the tiny freckle just above his knee.
Now, as I agonize over what to name my fourth child, I wonder about how we imbue such significance into this one word—a single string of letters in what will become a larger story. As with so much of parenting, with the name we give a child, we aim to make our mark, from day one. But the trajectory that follows is not ours to control in the same way: it is inevitably a peculiar blend of a fixed past and an evolving personality. Where they go has yet to be seen, but the fact remains: a name is the first message we impart to our children, one they will carry with them for life.
With the names we chose, we hoped to say: Take nothing for granted. Make no assumptions. Treat everything as worth a double take, a second thought. You are unlike anyone who came before or anyone who will follow. Tread deliberately on this path that is yours alone.
Dina L. Relles is a writer with essays in The Atlantic, STIR Journal, Full Grown People, The Manifest-Station, The Washington Post, and elsewhere. She is a blog editor at Literary Mama and is currently at work on her first book, a memoir. She can be found at www.dinarelles.com or @DinaLRelles.
YES
I Gave My Children Traditional Names
By Antonia Malchik
I was sitting at the lunch table in fifth grade when I decided that if I ever had a daughter I’d name her something normal.
I grew up mainly in two different towns in Montana. In the first, all my friends had names I coveted: Katie, Stacy, Tiffany, Angie. Their names were pretty, and, importantly for an early 1980s childhood, normal. My name was not. I was named “Antonia” for Willa Cather’s novel My Ãntonia, “Louise” after my maternal grandmother, and “Evgenia” after my father’s cousin who still lived in the Soviet Union where my father had grown up. All of which got shortened to the decidedly unmusical and definitely not normal “Nia.”
By the time I finally had kids of my own I’d mellowed on the “normal” bit but realized instead what I wanted was for them to have names that connected to their heritage, names that had meaning for our family beyond my own personal preferences.
As I became an adult I learned to appreciate what I couldn’t as a child, that names can be like ancestral histories we carry with us. Now, I’ve learned to value my connection to my grandmother and my father’s family and one of my mother’s favorite books, even if I was stuck with “Nia-peeah-diarrhea” for many of my formative years. These names give me a place in far-flung communities I’m always longing to know better.
When I was in high school we moved to a very different town full of ex-hippies, where I don’t think I met a single Tiffany or Stacy. Most of my friends had names I’d never heard before and likely never will again—Zabyn, one of my favorite people, or Koan, my then-boyfriend. It later seemed to me that to give a child a name intentionally stripped of ancestry was to weigh them down with a different class of expectations. We expect you to buck the system, these names said, to be more individual, more thoughtful, more counter-culture even than you might wish.
By the time I had my first child eight years ago this trend had become convention and then passé. How many children do I know now who are named after spices or yoga positions? Most of my friends these days name their children after plants or food or Eastern philosophical concepts, thinking that doing so will give their children a blank slate of personality to fill instead of burdening them with the past.
I understand the temptation. But the thought of giving my children names without history felt empty. What was the point of naming my daughter, say, “Alice,” simply because my husband liked it? “Alice” is lovely but had no meaning for us. Why not connect her to our family histories, with all their pride and struggle and stories of people gone before? Humans are so often rootless these days, following jobs and loves and desires without always becoming grounded in a culture or community. Why not carry at least one thing from our pasts, the stories that created us?
My daughter is named for my father, Aleksandra for Aleksandr, spelled to reflect the Russian pronunciation that is intrinsic to who he is. Like my own name, it pops up throughout history and literature, connected to characters good and bad, and with a rich enough history that she can create her own meaning out of it more easily than if I’d named her after my favorite tree. My son, John, carries the English version of my husband’s Scottish name, reflecting in a single note his English heritage and my English in-laws’ love of Scotland.
Sometimes it seems like children with non-traditional names are burdened more heavily with their parents’ personalities and hopes than third-generation Harvard-bound Exeter alumni. Our kids will always feel the breath of our expectation, no matter how hard we try not to burden them. I don’t want mine to feel a demand at the outset that they push against societal norms, that they be as completely individual and unique as possible. They already are unique. Giving them a name that has history and roots and meaning connects them to a community that they may never need or be aware of, but that will always be there to brace them when they feel weak and to hold them up when they feel downtrodden.
And they can own and come into their names more easily with traditional rather than newly minted monikers. Instead of their parents creating their names—and therefore meanings—for them, they can take these centuries-old names and turn them into anything they like. There is almost no identity my son can’t form within the name John. If I’d named him Acer, to choose a name at random, he’d be trapped within its uniqueness. It’s hard to be conventional with an untraditional name, assuming one wished to, but with a traditional one you can do almost anything you want.
The truth is, I’m privileged to have names like John and Aleksandra, and middle names like Elizabeth and Henry, behind my children, privileged to have ancestry that gives them a level of freedom from birth, one many don’t enjoy, to decide who they want to be as they grow up and unlink themselves from their parents. And perhaps my expectation that they take that privilege and use it to make the world a better place is enough pressure, without an expectation that they be decisively counter-culture from the get-go.
I don’t believe in throwing off the past. Transmuting it, deepening it, shifting our understanding of it, yes. Walking away from it completely, no. We can no more shuck our ancestry than we can the DNA we were born with, and that includes the names that have come before ours.
Antonia Malchik writes about education, environment, parenting, and identity for a variety of publications. She can be reached through www.antoniamalchik.com.
Should you be friends with your teen?
Please join us on Thursday, 6/4, at 1:00 p.m. EST at a Twitter party, to discuss the different approaches parents take when a young child doesn’t sleep through the night. Did you let your baby “cry it out” or did you “wait it out’? Remember to use the hashtag #braindebate. We would love to hear your views.Remember to use the hashtag #braindebate.
We would love to hear your views.
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By Candy Schulman
YES!
“Make me a promise,” Lisa said the night before our daughters started high school. “If you ever see Hannah smoking or drinking, you must tell me. We have to tell each other.”
Hannah was Lisa’s younger daughter. Lisa had already survived raising one teenager. I was a novice: my first time jumping blindfolded into the unpredictable age between tween and empty nest.
Our daughters had once been playmates, sharing birthday parties and sleepovers. Then suddenly they grew apart, old enough to choose who they wanted to escort home after school. Lisa and I no longer chatted in the playground while our girls pushed each other on the swings. We could no longer orchestrate their play dates, but Lisa and I still had our own.
I agreed to tell Lisa if I ever saw Hannah smoking or drinking, believing it was the ethical thing to do. I just didn’t know how hard it might be, or even if I’d be able to keep my part of the bargain. I had smoked at a young age, and in retrospect I wish someone had persuaded me to stop before my addiction took hold—and as an adult suffered through withdrawal. Besides, today we know how dangerous cigarettes are, and mourn for strangers whose teenagers are killed by drunk drivers.
The issue grew more complicated when a group of ninth-grade parents arranged a meeting to discuss drug and alcohol use among adolescents. Our adolescents. Our adorable children, who just yesterday, it seemed, were hugging stuffed animals as they sailed into dreamland. It was frightening to face the topic, but I knew my daughter had been catapulted into a world where she had to navigate Physics and Calculus as well as peer pressure, booze, and pot. We’d all heard about unchaperoned high school parties, where Facebook and texting made it easy for groups of teenagers to congregate at whoever’s house was free of parents.
One parent, who had the wildest son in the school, waved a piece of paper in the air. She made a bold suggestion: “I want everyone to sign this pact. We must tell each other if we see anyone’s child smoking or using drugs. We’re obligated.”
This “pact” had been successful in her son’s school where she’d just moved east from California. Arguments exploded. We all had different values on the subject. I was thankful that my daughter was not on this boy’s radar or party list. She still spent weekend evenings baking brownies with her best friend. There is a wide spectrum of acceptability among parents when it comes to our children’s substance use. At this particular meeting, one European-born parent confessed to serving wine to her daughter’s friends when they came for dinner. And there were other parents, who still smoked pot themselves, possibly in front of their kids. Wouldn’t their alarms go off differently than mine?
Only a handful of parents signed the group pact; I wasn’t one of them. Lisa quickly took me aside and whispered, “We still have our own agreement, don’t we?”
“Yes,” I said, hoping I’d never have to oblige. Hoping she wouldn’t either. “I trust my daughter,” I added.
“Believe me, you’d want to know,” Lisa assured me. I came to agree with her—in spite of ambivalences surrounding privacy and the possibility of risking my daughter’s trust.
Our kids live in a more complicated social world than when we were teenagers. From R-rated movies to celebrity gossip where substance abuse is commonplace, our teenagers have seen more—and probably done more—than we can imagine. Without stepping over boundaries, we still have the responsibility as parents to keep them safe, and offer them help if they are in trouble.
I must confess I avoided looking at Facebook photos where Lisa’s daughter might be guilty of holding up those telltale large red plastic cups, toasting to her friends. As it turned out, Lisa was the one who had to do the unthinkable. Hannah’s friend started getting drunk and smoking pot a year after her mother died of breast cancer. Lisa picked up the phone and asked the father to meet her for coffee. She didn’t even know him well, but she told him what he’d been expecting—and ignoring—all along. He thanked Lisa for her honesty and concern.
“It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” Lisa told me.
“We’ve both been so fortunate,” I said.
“So far,” she said, nodding. “We still have our private pact, don’t we?”
“Of course,” I said. And hoped I’d never have to honor it … knowing that I would.
Candy Schulman’s essays have appeared in The New York Times, Parents, Salon, Babble.com, Chicago Tribune and in several anthologies. She is an Associate Professor of Writing at The New School in New York City.
By Sarah Werthan Buttenwieser
NO!
Full disclosure: I’m a fixer. Not the Olivia Pope variety, but I am the kind of person to whom adults spilled their lovelorn conundrums before I hit puberty. This tendency to be told things continued into adulthood. Once a friend confided an impending marital split two months before the spouse learned of the plan (yes, very awkward at school dismissal). So, I’d have thought by the time my sweet little kids garnered pimples and problems with love or illicit substances, I’d be the one to glean all the dirt. Given my moral compass, my desire for safety, and my fixer-leanings, I figured I’d be the one to call all the parents, too.
I’m not the person I thought I’d be. While the reason for this should have been obvious, somehow it wasn’t to me until I became a parent to adolescents. Here’s the thing: if my adolescent confides in me, I cannot betray his trust by calling his friend’s parents, even if I wish I could. That’s because I want to be sure the next time my adolescent is worried, he’ll come to me again. Might there be an exception? Yes. It’d have to be connected to immediate danger.
With two teens and a tween not so far behind, whether to tell seems so much thornier than I’d have imagined back when the incidents between peers were playground-centric. “He didn’t let me play on the team,” pales in comparison to underage alcohol consumption, drug abuse, initial sexual activity, or acts of self-harm.
I remember how charged—parent-to-parent—those early elementary school years were. Once, a kid intentionally spilled milk on my kid’s lunch; another time, my kid teased a classmate. There was the epic incident that involved some softened wax from cheese in a peer’s lunch having wound up in my kid’s very long hair. Whose fault that was never became clear. The apologies between kids remained equally murky. For the moms, a confusing, difficult round of “he said, he said” ensued as its own sticky mess between us. The conversation resolved well, if not easily. In retrospect, I think we were both stunned our boys might not have been entirely innocent and we were also surprised by how without simple answers the ability to support one another well—as fellow moms—became challenging, too.
That’s one of the things about the parenting of adolescents I find tough: we are, as parents, in it to protect our kids through what feels like—and is—a vulnerable, important, and volatile period. Through these teen years, kids change enormously. They are exposed to so much more than we wish at times and much less prepared for some of that than we wish, too. Often, they befriend new kids, and we don’t know the new friends’ parents well or at all. We don’t have the playground any longer as a place where we get to know our peers while our kids get to know theirs. In other words, add to these raised stakes lowered connectivity. And then, heap on pressure to protect their trust. We’re not talking is-the-tooth-fairy-real trust; this is can I trust you parent, to help me when myfriends engage in behavior that might not be okay?
Um, wow. No one mentioned any of this during childbirth class.
When my teen divulges some variation of what so-and-so’s done, inevitably, the lead up is “I’m worried because…” What I hadn’t anticipated is that those moments of disclosure aren’t simply confessional nor are they shared because my teen seeks a fixer.
Presented with a high-octane parenting moment, I do try to establish why my kid is worried, how imminent he thinks any danger is, how likely it is the kid’s parent knows orcould know what’s going on, what other adults know about this, and what I can do. I always offer, although it’s unlikely my fixer skills will come into play. I always emphasize that this isn’t my kid’s to fix—and that concern, like substance abuse or self-harm require a qualified adult’s attention (my go-to is the school’s guidance counselor). Is this irresponsible of me? Or am I responsibly parenting my child? I hope I’m being responsible enough to everyone. I do follow up with my kid to make sure an adult’s attention was enlisted. And I hope that when my kids need me, I’ll have built up trust enough to ensure I can be right where I need to be.
Sarah Werthan Buttenwieser is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in The New York Times, Brain, Child Magazine, and Salon, amongst others. Follow her on Twitter-@standshadows.
No, it’s the wrong message
By Kathy Gillen
“It won’t hurt much,” I told my two-year-old, Paige, as she waited for her immunizations. “It will be all done real fast.” Part of my statement wasn’t a lie.
Later, in the car, Paige examined her Pooh Bear bandage. Her tears were gone, and the trauma seemed to be fading. I was still shaken. But I knew just how to ease my pain: produce a little magic. “We’re going to go to the toy store,” I told Paige, “and you can pick out something because you were so brave when you got your shots.”
As the stiff plastic packaging and wire ties were removed from the new baby doll, delight filled my daughter’s face. The doll traveled by her side … for about a day. Paige never mentioned her doctor visit and soon abandoned the doll for her play kitchen. Later, as I tidied her room and placed the doll in a basket with other toys, I wondered: Did she deserve a treat? Pain is a part of life. Should she receive gifts or a lollipop for enduring her day, for growing up, for eating beans?
I continued to struggle with my reward system for a long time as Paige faced rejection from the neighbor kid, tackled a pile of cooked spinach, and lost her status as an only child as we added new siblings every other year.
When does behavior deserve a reward? After Pilates class, I used to treat myself to a Starbucks mocha. A pedicure is a treat I justified because I hauled sandals and swim noodles and beach towels to the pool all summer. And if I finished folding my laundry and put it all away, I decadently lay on my bed and got lost in a novel. But how would I teach my children that not all struggles end with a Crunch Bar or new Mario video game, when I often rewarded myself for enduring small inconveniences?
My answer came with my fourth child. Merritt had a degenerative, genetic disease. She would never develop beyond her present infantile state. Not even a side-by-side refrigerator or fresh family-room carpet would work on this hurt.
My mom friends tried to soothe me. Homemade dinners and certificates for massages were well-intentioned and appreciated, but when you win the horrible-things-that-happen-to-kids lottery, there is only so much a roasted chicken can do.
Still, the rewards kept coming. “You deserve it,” became a phrase used over and over by my well-intentioned friends. I bought into the mentality, too.
We desperately want life to be fair. We want goodness and love and great schools and healthy children for everyone. And when we realize it won’t be fair, we’re quick to offer rewards for pain. It’s easy to offer our children gifts and treats in exchange for their hurts. It seems the obvious thing to do, to try to take away their troubles.
When we act is if parenting produces hardships soothed only by rewards, then we model entitlement. Moms, of course, do deserve a break, dinner out, a kicking new outfit, and anything that helps self-esteem, but we need to set parameters for our rewards. If I had continued to rely on treats to help me cope with the daily chores of raising a special-needs child, then I would set a poor precedent for my children’s ability to handle adversity. And it isn’t just the demands of a handicapped child that can wear me down. If my kids see me fleeing the house for a mid-week shopping spree and I tell them, “I deserve some time alone,” then I’m teaching them that inconvenience is a reason to max out the credit card, or worse, that they are causing me grief which can only be fixed with a trip to the mall.
The doll I gave to Paige after her shots only taught her that the unpleasant parts of life will be rewarded. Well, sister, there will be a lot more unhappy times than a couple of shots. What will I do when she struggles with homework? Give her ice cream? When her first love breaks her heart, will I buy her a designer handbag? If her number one college pick sends her a thin letter, should I send her to Paris?
I don’t want my kids to be like dogs, anticipating a treat each time the cupboard of disappointment opens. I want to empower them to face adversity, solve problems, and understand that a positive attitude can be the quickest way to gain their equilibrium. Nobody wants hardship for a child, but amazing, life-altering joy can be found in even the dark corners of life. Teaching kids to embrace hardships without the aid of rewards can be the difference between understanding life and just muddling through it.
I recently heard of a girl who, while in the hospital with a rare kidney condition, decided to tell the people who sent her gifts to instead donate the money to an organization helping AIDS orphans in Africa. A child who is able to see beyond her own suffering and understand greater pain is rare. Children are self-focused, and when they are in pain they expect all of their parents’ attention and love. But in a society where parents try to cushion every blow their children receive, we need to teach our children that love doesn’t have to come wrapped in a brightly colored cardboard box or scooped into a cone.
Pain shouldn’t always be alleviated. Some of our children’s greatest lessons will be learned through their struggles. My compassion for others and gratitude for each new day has intensified through my own pain. Sure, I could have done without a few of those horrific months, sitting in labs, hospital rooms, and doctors’ offices while searching for answers. But my kids might have perceived Merritt as a hardship if I had rewarded myself with a new car or diamond tennis bracelet. Instead they see her as a special girl who doesn’t get ice cream after therapy or baby dolls after the doctor but lots of hugs and rounds of Itsy Bitsy Spider.
Do I deserve a break? Sure, I need time to myself, to regroup and relax. My kids need to see me having fun. But I hope they see me enjoying life, not rewarding myself for living it.
Kathy Gillen lives in Pittsburgh with her husband and four children.
Yes, parents have the power
By Renée Hill
There is a conversation I have had with my mother many times since the birth of my first child four years ago. The basic outline goes like this.
I didn’t have a lot of theories when I first started rewarding my son for his good behavior. The fact was, his birthday is in December—the same month as Christmas—and by late spring, I wanted to get the kid some new, age-appropriate toys. I thought it would be a bad precedent to set, if all he had to do was ask for them. So I started tying the acquisition of new playthings to his behavior. Voilà : My practice of rewarding his good behavior was born.
We’ve been chugging along like this for years now. He got M&Ms during potty training, plastic dinos after vaccinations. He gets new games for his Gameboy after good report cards and jaunts to the bookstore after a week’s worth of saxophone practice. When school lets out, we take a vacation.
You can call it bribery. I call it, “Hey, kiddo, I’m proud—let’s celebrate.”
I know the arguments against what I’m doing. The kid will come to expect rewards for any little thing. He’ll become an insufferable brat. His expectations of the real world will be unrealistic. He’ll grow up and be unable to handle his adult life, all because a well-meaning adult (me) taught him that life rewards good behavior, jobs well done, hard work.
But, jeez, it’s not as if he’s been sequestered in a bubble the span of his formative years.
I don’t know about you, but when I was a child, I was well aware of all the ways my small world was unjust. It wasn’t fair that I got my glasses broken in dodgeball, or that the richer kids seemed to be the more popular ones. It seemed arbitrary that we had to ask to use the bathroom at school, or that we could only get two library books at a time. It seemed cosmically wrong that, while a bunch of us girls were talking during class, I was the one who had to sit out recess.
These days, they don’t play dodgeball anymore (sorry, optometrists!) and you might get a note home from the teacher when some social situation goes awry. But, really, in the course of a childhood, hundreds of injustices are visited upon our kids. Small ones, we hope. Invisible to us, probably. But it happens to my kid, your kid, every kid. That’s the way the world is.
What I don’t understand is how we collectively got the idea that home is supposed to simulate the big, bad world. Why, again, are we supposed to try to mirror the reality that rewards aren’t necessarily handed out equally, or at all? It seems to me that the goal of any home should be the opposite: to offer a respite from the daily grind of the world’s uncertainty and injustice. I want my home to be the place where my son can expect unconditional support, where his efforts go rewarded, and where his biggest fan lives.
What I’m creating in our house, I suppose, is more like an ideal world. Here, there is compassion, in the form of making banana bread together when someone’s had a rough day. In our house, if you’ve worked to the best of your abilities and accomplished a goal, you might get a new CD. If you do something kind, someone takes notice, and there might be a trip to the ice rink in your future.
In many ways, my rewards system is more realistic than expecting the boy to find his work rewarding in itself (remember learning the times tables?) or hoping that he can find a vein of altruism to mine. Because, as imperfect as the world is, most of us adults work for the reward of money. We’re capitalists, after all. But I’m careful, in rewarding him, to give bonuses for effort, not his innate qualities like his handsomeness or athleticism. Besides, he can suss out what’s subjective mama-love (you’re so gorgeous!) and what’s genuine pride in his accomplishments.
My son will someday be an adult in this dog-eat-dog world, and with any luck, he’ll have a measure of power. He knows the great feeling of getting a reward. And he knows—because I’ve made it obvious—that I’ve gone to some effort to reward him when I get him a new gizmo or celebrate with a special outing. He’s learning that grown-ups—whether they’re parents, teachers, or bosses—have the power to reward. They should use it.
Renee Hill is a freelance writer. She’s currently at work on a collection of essays.
Brain, Child (Spring 2008)
My father and I argue about the state of the world a lot, as children and parents will do. My father is sure that texting is the death of interpersonal relationships and I’m sure that texting is just another technological leap like the radio, the television and the Internet – the kind of leap that makes old folks shake their fists and tell the kids to get off of the lawn.
Some of the research on this tends to side with my dad, witness this study out of Washington and Lee University. Texting While Stressed: Implications for Students’ Burnout, Sleep, and Well-Being, examined the experience of 83 incoming freshman and found that the more they text, the lousier they feel. They sleep less, they stress more about relationships and they burnout on their studies more quickly.
The issue we have here isn’t texting; it’s texting too much. And what the study shows is a great teaching opportunity, not a call to return to the age of the landline.
My dad read a report about the study and immediately sent it to me as proof that he’s right and I’m wrong. I read it and thought about how it gave great pointers for the youngsters to learn how to moderate their text intake by clearly listing the red flags. Is it interfering with sleep? Adding stress? Making you burn out fast? Well, there you go. Time to curtail the texting.
As a counselor, I see lots of worried parents and lots of screen-savvy kids. My client list includes both hard-core gamers and virtual social butterflies. Certainly a few of them are escaping into online worlds in order to avoid facing real life challenges and some of them are slaves to their smart phones but the vast majority of them manage things pretty well.
Lots of parents worry that virtual relationships will take the place of real life relationships but I think this stems from a misunderstanding of what virtual relationships are. Virtual relationships are real relationships; ask anyone who met their current spouse on eHarmony. Besides these crazy kids have new fangled things like web cams and USB headsets, which allow them to see that the imaginary people who live in their monitors are actually real live human beings with real live lives. Parents of a certain age used to fall asleep with the phone glued to our ears (remember that? I’d listen to the entire Dark Side of the Moon album with my boyfriend, both of us sitting in rapt silence on opposite ends of the phone line listening to our respective record players) so we should appreciate the lure of socialization from afar.
As for the smart phones and the texting, the tweeting, the Kicking, the Skype-ing, the FaceTiming and the ooVooing, I agree with my dad who looks askance at the families sitting in a restaurant, heads buried in their screens with nary a word exchanged with each other but that’s not a technology problem; that’s a people problem. I agree that using technology to avoid each other is a sign of dysfunction but it’s a chicken and egg thing. Did the texting as avoidance tool beget dysfunction or did dysfunction beget texting as avoidance tool. My money is on the latter.
There was much debate among the psychiatric community about whether or not Internet Addiction and Internet Gaming Disorder ought to be listed in the fifth version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V), which is also known as the bible of mental health professionals. At this point, neither one was included although the discussion and the research continues. I’m happy both with the current omission and with the ongoing debate because we do need to wrestle with this and we need solid research before we start giving people a diagnosis.
Meanwhile I think parents ought to be aware that managing our time with the Internet or with smart phones can be problematic and that teens—with their immature brains and emotional development—are especially vulnerable. But they’re going to head out into the great big wide world without us someday and we need to help them manage the virtual world, which they can only learn by doing.
So how do you know your teen needs to curtail her screen time? You ask yourself these two questions: Is it hurting her relationships? Is it hurting her school life? Is she stealing from your wallet to fund her Steam account? Or does he knock over his baby brother and his limping grandmother to get to his vibrating phone? Then it’s time to talk. (Me, I’ve had to set limits on texting during sessions with both teens and adults.)
Parents need to help their children learn moderation, (which can be challenging if we’re fighting our own compulsive need to add to our ever-growing Pinterest collection or to thumbs up all the events on Facebook). We need to recognize when our concern is valid and when it’s really a reaction to growing older and not understanding how that Vine thing works.
We also need to talk to our kids. One of the gamer girls who used to come to my practice was better at managing her Internet intake than her mom realized. When I facilitated a discussion between the two, the daughter had the chance to explain how she knows when she needs a break and what rules she’s set for herself to make time for schoolwork and going on World of Warcraft campaigns with her guild. So if you’re not sure if it’s a problem, ask your child. Then ask how they would know if it WAS a problem. You might find that your kids have given more thought to it than you realize.
Art by Michael Lombardo