The Winter of Our Disconnect Read Online Free PDF Page B

point of becoming an adult is to achieve self-reliance? Because maturity is largely about acquiring the confidence and the competence to make your own decisions? “Before the Industrial Revolution, there wasn’t this concept that children should grow up, move away, and become autonomous,” the father objects. That’s very true. But this man’s daughter doesn’t live in an agrarian society. She lives in a dorm at Georgetown.
    Whatever you think of its merits as a caregiving philosophy, there is no disputing that the helicopter parent is the bastard child of the Information Age. Without complex flight-control gear and a sophisticated communication network on constant alert, the level of surveillance we now regard as normal, even necessary, would be unthinkable. (More on that when we look in detail at the relationship messages we are sending with our cell phones—and I don’t mean the SMSs—in Chapter Four.)
    For now, suffice it to observe that children of all ages cross boundaries into adult territory like never before, and they do so because their parents have invited them to, whether consciously or not. I say that not in censure but in self-awareness. As a mother who once taught a graduate seminar while breast-feeding a five-month-old—and I mean literally while breast-feeding—I am a fully paid-up member of this parenting generation myself.
    But more subversive than any of their incursions into adult time or space, I would argue, is our children’s heightened sense of entitlement to information— promoted and protected by a Digital Bill of Rights under whose binding authority family life is being radically rewired.
     
     
    “It’s so unfair. I mean, what about their friends? Will they have any left at the end of it?”
    “Surely they’ll be bored.”
    “Forget about boredom. How will they do their schoolwork?”
    “Those poor children!”
    It’s not often you get to eavesdrop on a conversation that’s all about your own bad decision-making. In fact, barring my weekly phone call to my mother in North Carolina, I can’t say I’d ever experienced it. I’m still not exactly sure how it happened. One minute I was saying good-bye to the father of one of Sussy’s friends—we’d been confirming plans for an upcoming social event—and the next I was listening to a private conversation streaming live from his living room. After we’d hung up, his phone had somehow or other automatically redialed and ... well, all I know is that I could hear Philip’s voice plainly, only he wasn’t talking to me. (Sometimes technology really is our friend.) Naturally, I responded the way any other intelligent, responsible adult would do in such a situation. I covered my right ear and jammed the phone to my left as hard as I could.
    I could make out Philip explaining the outlines of our experiment to some unknown visitors, and something that sounded a lot like derisive snorting. No one actually came right out and said I was unhinged (although the phrase “a lot of pressure at work” got major air time). Nonetheless, the gist was clear: The Experiment was harsh and unworkable. The children would suffer. And I, as the crazed mastermind of it all, was borderline abusive, a cross between Super-nanny and a guard at Abu Ghraib.
    I wasn’t surprised. I’d gotten this kind of reaction a lot since I’d started to “out” us. Even my agent Susan sounded a little worried when I first approached her with the idea for this book. “I love the idea,” she wrote to me in an e-mail. “But are you sure you want to do this to your kids?” As if a child’s right to Internet access and a cell phone plan were akin to her right to food and clothing and shelter and anti-frizz serum. Information starvation, the prevailing attitude suggested, was a form of child abuse—exactly as my kids had been trying to tell me all along!
    There were others who cheered me on straightaway, including my stepdaughter, thirty-seven-year-old Naomi, who