Technology Parenting

Technology Connection

I shift a few inches to the right, edging closer to my husband in the crowded diner booth. To my left, my teenage son snickers as my movement against the vinyl bench creates a sound identical to the release of bodily gas. Across the booth, my daughter’s head is bent over a phone. The “no-electronics-at-mealtime” rule does not apply when the electronics are Grandma’s.

“You have to go into your settings,” she explains with a patience I’ve rarely seen in my high school senior. Her messy bun tips forward, almost touching the salt-and-pepper head of her grandmother.

The two stare at the screen, one gaze confident and one confused. The teenager works her magic, and my mother-in-law smiles as she tucks her ancient smartphone into her handbag. Problem solved, courtesy of the most savvy electronics user in our family.

As the oldest grandchildren on both sides, my two kids have been their grandparents’ technology gurus for the better part of their childhoods. It has been a bond between the generations since the kids became tweens. Once they had email addresses, their grandparents could skip relaying messages through me and talk directly to the source.

The source is not always reliable, however, and technology is not always a relationship boon.

“Did he get my email?” my mother asks me.

I tell her that I don’t know. He obviously has not responded to my mother, and she is turning to me. I am the middleman, and I can’t win. Grammie is upset that communication is ignored, and the kid is upset because Mom and Grammie are riding him.

“Just reply to her,” I implore. “Pretend she’s a friend who you would get back to immediately.” He rolls his eyes.

While I was close to my grandmother, our communication was less frequent than it is for this generation. I called her when something important happened, but less frequently just to catch up.

Now, grandchildren and grandparents can touch base at any time, and for the smallest of reasons.

As the kids get older, they are usually better about timely replies. They want to stay in touch with their grandparents, but they don’t necessarily want to be as connected as they are to their friends.

Constant contact and instant responses are the norm for teenagers and millennials, but even this generation of adolescents doesn’t want to be beholden to their grandparents 24/7.

I explain to my mother that my kids will reply eventually. I explain to my kids that Grammie feels snubbed when they don’t respond the same day they receive a text.

I want to take everyone’s phones and toss them out the window.

I was stuck in the middle again last week, but this time I was happy to be there. My son asked a girl to homecoming, and he texted me a photo of the two of them to share the news.

“I sent it to Grammie, too,” he mentioned. “I figured it would make her happy.”

Oh, it did. She told me how touched she was by this gesture; as the go-between, I delivered this news to my son. He’s beginning to realize how much a few seconds of his time can mean to his grandmother.

The landscape will undoubtedly be different by the time I have grandchildren. Perhaps they will give me lessons in mastering the iPhone 20, or we will catch up via a virtual reality FaceTime. As the world becomes wider and family time becomes tougher to come by, technology is more than a divide between generations. It also creates opportunities for small, infrequent connections that strengthen the bond between them.

Dana Hemelt’s first published work was a logic puzzle picked up by a game magazine in the early 1990s. Since then, her essays have appeared in the anthologies “The Mother of All Meltdowns” and “The HerStories Project: Women Explore the Joy, Pain, and Power of Female Friendship.” A Baltimore native, Hemelt lives in Howard County with her husband and two teenagers, blogs at kissmylist.com and tweets @kissmylist.