Both Oars In Excavating the Modern Teenager

Aug 21, 2009

“Mr. Owl, How many licks does it take to get to the Tootsie Roll center of a Tootsie Pop?”

 

“A good question.  Let’s find out. A One, A two-hoo, A three…crunch”

 

“A Three.”

 

This commercial came to mind spontaneously the other day while I was appreciating the recent surfacing of my son from his technological shell.  Due to extenuating circumstances beyond his control, my teenage son can no longer submerge himself at will in texting, online chatting, YouTube surfing and Xbox playing. We did not enroll him in a detoxification program; we just moved to an underdeveloped country where these things are a little harder to access.  

 

Unable to distract himself daily with gigabytes of media and instant communication, my 16 year old son has resigned himself to assist his mom with inviting 20 to 30 children each afternoon to play in our school’s recently added playground, complete with swings and a jungle gym.  The inadvertent result of this daily activity has been the emergence of the kid at the core of my otherwise tightly wrapped in cynicism, teenage son.  

 

What let me know that my son had reemerged from his self-applied first world techno coating was a simple comment. Out of all the improvements that had been made at our school in Haiti, to which we recently returned, he chose to mention the new community playground as the best. He has given this improvement more praise than even the recent addition of internet to the school.

 

In the midst of the parental joy caused by hearing this optimistic unsolicited comment, I was struck by what was before my eyes: my son!  I now know how many things one would have to remove to get to the center of the modern teenager.

 

Cue the commercial.

 

However, these days it is a lot easier to get to center of a Tootsie Pop than to the core of a teenager. There are far more than three layers of technology for the parent to penetrate. Teenagers today have more communicating, media and computing power than the CIA Agents, Network CEOs and IBM engineers of the past century.

 

Surveys report that 80 percent of U.S. teenagers have a cell phone; 20 percent have a Blackberry or a PDA. The average household has 1.5 computers, 2.1 video game consoles and nearly three TVs. Two-thirds of teenagers have MP3 players and over half have hand-held gaming devices. Their techno coat is a lot thicker than the hard candy part of a Tootsie Pop.

 

In total, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, teenagers spend more than 40 hours a week—the equivalent of a full-time job—wired or plugged-in in some fashion.   They send more than 2,500 texts per month, some send in excess of 5,000. That’s more than 150 text messages per day. Teenagers may appear distant and aloof to us, but they are connected twenty-four-seven to each other. No wonder, one out of two teenagers feel that his or her life would end without a cell phone. 

 

When teenagers are not talking, texting and chatting, they are gaming and surfing. In the past three years, visits to the virtual world have tripled.  Surveys suggest that the average teenager spends an hour a day on computer and video gaming and another 1.5 hours listening to music. They spend another two hours on YouTube.  In total, teenagers spend 31 hours a week on the net.

 

(Column continues below)

In the normal course of a day, we parents don’t have a chance to get in touch with our actual child. It’s hard to connect even superficially, let alone in profound way, with some one who is already logged on, plugged in, and wired. This has made the technological deprivation of our current circumstance a bit like Heaven.    

 

While I do encourage fellow parents to consider seeking un-wired environments to help reconnect with their actual child and help their children reconnect with the actual world, it would be an oversimplification to suggest that mere technology depravation brought my son back to the surface.  So in the way of a disclaimer, I have to admit that there is a bit more to his youthful reappearance than just being unplugged.

 

Since he was three, my son has seen children carry five gallon buckets of water on their heads for hours a day. He has watched children gather in the street half-clothed with nothing more than a rock and stick to play with. He knows that abject poverty robs children of their childhood. He knows this because just witnessing it robbed him, at least partly, of his own. He does not take the children to the playground because he has nothing else to do, he does it because he is looking for his childhood, too.