New Age Parenting

I've come to the conclusion that life as we know it has come to an end. In the near future, we will be a civilization spawned of surrogates and Petrie dish specimens after artificial insemination, or else, cloning. Thus, biological parents will be no more. Rather, parenting will be done via our various electronic tools.

Television will provide examples of how we should deal with others, acceptable language, style, protocols in business professionalism and decorum, ethics. Radio will no longer exist as we will be visually driven, not audio.

But one form of traditional interaction will continue to exist, albeit in modified version and probably also with a screen. That will be via phone -- cell phone. And the cell phone will become the new, virtual parent.

Have you thought about how amenable your calls are to being picked up by others or intercepted by some monitoring agency? What do parents do when they suspect that their kids are talking to someone they shouldn't or planning to do something that's not such a great idea? Parents sometimes put time limits on calls, as well. And that is where the cell phone is starting to prove itself as the able parent in the here and now.

The ultimate new age parent will be the cell phone. When you've talked too long, the parent has a simple and very effective way of dealing with the situation. Drop the call. If you try to re-initiate the call in order to continue it, the parent has another very simple and effective solution. Drop the call after five to ten minutes. And if you're foolhardy enough to try to re-initiate the call a second time, the parent will do one of two things, both of which are a tacit message that says (very firmly), "I said 'no.'" The technique is to either drop the call after a few seconds of connection or not allow the call to go through at all.

Now dropped calls are an annoyance, true. Adding to the annoyance is when the dropped call is with someone you have some sort of relationship or are trying to achieve a meaningful goal. Say you're having an argument with the significant other. Just as you're at the crisis point in the conversation, the call gets dropped. Did the other party hang up or did the call get lost? If you're at call number three that can't get through, you won't know until the email arrives -- if it's considered as an alternative.

Then there's the friendly catch-up call that gets dropped. Reaction on the other side is probably something on the order of, "Well now I remember why I don't try to stay in touch. They keep hanging up on me."

Or consider the pre-screening interview via phone or the conversation with the exec. In the middle of some critical point, the call gets dropped. There you stand with a cell phone in your hand and egg on your face because the call got dropped again and you can't get through any more. The parent won't let you. The other party is wondering how much more rude you can be.

This new age parent, the cell phone, is so effective. When it says 'no', it means no. When it enforces, there's no equivocating. That is exactly what we need to be as parents - consistent - and we need to do - draw limits. And how else to drive home the message by putting us in an embarrassing place so that we do whatever we can to avoid the situation in the future. If only we'd learned this parenting skill early on!