Thumbing Through Life

My wife and I have three daughters. All three are 'wells of hyperbole,' you know those over-the-top ways parents describe their children: wonderful, beautiful, delightful, amazing, AWESOME! The difference in my case however (and I'm being completely objective here), is that these adjectives area 100% accurate. My girls are all those things and more.

Our eldest is 16 and firmly in the midst of her teenage years. She excels at nearly everything she engages in and is a model student. He mom and I couldn't be prouder. When she was 13, we decided, somehow, that it would be an excellent idea to get her a cell phone of her own. It was a momentous occasion and one that will long be remembered.

In those early days, the phone was new and the possibilities were yet unexplored. She enjoyed using it to arrange a time for one of us to pick her up from her dance class, or from a friend's house after school. It served the very purpose for which it had been acquired. My wife and I nearly dislocated our arms by patting ourselves on the back for displaying such wisdom and astute parenting skills.

She came home from school one day and announced that all her friends were doing something called 'texting' and she wanted to know if her phone could do it too. We had no idea. One call Verizon and, yep, we had texting enabled; up to 250 texts per month. More than enough, we thought. Have at it, text away up to our collective 250 message limit.

It didn't take her, or us, long to find out that 250 messages would not only NOT last a month, 250 would barely last ONE DAY! That after I discovered that every text over the allotted 250 cost me $.10. Therefore, a conversation of, "whatcha doin?" "IDK", etc. for a few minutes could add up quick. Something had to be done, and fast.

After much debate and deliberation, we finally landed on an unlimited plan, and she was in texting heaven. Through the months we discovered that this new form of communication would begin to assert an insidious influence on our daughter. Gradually, she began forgetting how to talk in real sentences and instead spoke in abbreviated grunts and short acronyms, the meaning of which I have yet to understand.

A quick Google query showed that this texting epidemic was not unique to our daughter, but was sweeping over the world in a tidal wave of texts, all generated from a flurry of thumbs and bevy of letters like, IDK, BFF, TTYL, etc. There are a million more of these shortened sentences, and I became concerned that the lauded phone could be turning our daughter's brain to mush and her thumbs into Olympic athletes.

We sat our daughter down and set some guidelines to help regulate this new perpetual connectivity. No texting after 10:00 p.m. or before 6:00 a.m. No texting at the dinner table or during family time. Absolutely no texting in Church or in class at school.

Admittedly, we've had our struggles, and she's lost her phone privileges from time to time, but for the most part, we think we may haveat least put a leash on the texting beast.

I realize that kids these days (hmmm, that sounds a lot like something my dad would say...), need to stay in touch with their friends, and being off the network can make them feel unconnected and out of the loop. I guess I just feel that there is still value in picking up the phone and having a vocal conversation with someone wherein you are required to formulate your thoughts and them verbalize them in a coherent, cogent fashion that is impossible to do via short bursts of 140 characters or less. The dynamic is different and the results lead to a different kind of relationship.

My hope is that our daughter will come to understand the limitations of basing her entire foundation of communication on what her thumbs can type out in fewer than 140 characters and work to add in and become astute in the richer dimension of verbal communication. Think of what she, or all of us for that matter, could do if she could master both forms.

That's my perspective. What's yours?