Laura M. Holson
1 As president of the Walt Disney Company's children's book and magazine publishing unit, Russell Hampton knows a thing or two about teenagers. Or he thought as much until he was driving his 14-year-old daughter, Katie, and two friends to a play last year in Los Angeles.
2 "Katie and her friends were sitting in the back seat talking to each other about some movie star; I think it was Orlando Bloom," recalls Mr. Hampton. "I made some comment about him, but I got the typical teenager guttural sigh and Katie rolled her eyes at me as if to say, 'Oh Dad, you are so out of it?'".
3 After that, the back-seat chattering stopped. When Mr. Hampton looked into his rearview mirror he saw his daughter sending a text message on her cellphone. "Katie, you shouldn't be texting all the time," Mr. Hampton recalls telling her. "Your friends are there. It's rude."
4 "But, Dad, we're texting each other," she replied. "I don't want you to hear what I'm saying."
5 It's a common scene these days, one playing out in cars, kitchens and bedrooms across the country.
6 Children increasingly rely on personal technological devices like cellphones to define themselves and create social circles apart from their families, changing the way they communicate with their parents.
7 Innovation, of course, has always spurred broad societal changes. As telephones became ubiquitous in the last century, users—adults and teenagers alike—found a form of privacy and easy communication unknown to Alexander Graham Bell or his daughters.
8 The automobile ultimately shuttled in an era when teenagers could go on dates far from watchful parents. And the computer, along with the Internet, has given even very young children virtual lives distinctly separate from those of their parents and siblings.
9 The popularity of the cellphone—along with the mobility and intimacy it affords—will further exploit and accelerate these trends. "For kids it has become an identity-shaping and psyche-changing object," observes Sherry Turkle, a social psychologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who has studied the social impact of mobile communications.
10 So far, parents' ability to reach their children whenever they want affords families more pluses than minuses. Mr. Hampton, who is divorced, says it is easy to reach Katie even though they live in different time zones. And college students who are pressed for time, like Ben Blanton, a freshman at Vanderbilt University, can text their parents when it suits them, asking them to run errands or just saying hello.
11 "Texting is in between calling and sending an e-mail," he explains. Now he won't even consider writing a letter to his mother. "It's too time consuming," he says. "You have to go to the post office. Instead, I can sit and watch television and send a text, which is the same thing."
12 But as with any cultural shift involving parents and children—the birth of rock 'n' roll or the sexual revolution of the 1960s, for example—various gulfs emerge. Baby boomers who warned decades ago that their out-of-touch parents couldn't be trusted now sometimes find themselves raising children who—thanks to the Internet and the cellphone—consider Mom and Dad to he clueless, too.
13 Cellphones, instant messaging, e-mail and the like have encouraged younger users to create their own inventive, quirky and very private written language. That has given them the opportunity to essentially hide in plain sight.
14 In some cases, they may even become more alienated from those closest to them, says Anita Gurian, a clinical psychologist.
15 "Cellphones demand parental involvement of a different kind," she notes. "Kids can do a lot of things in front of their parents without them knowing."
16 To be sure, parents have always been concerned about their children's well-being—and the rise of the cellphone offers just the latest twist in that dynamic. However it all unfolds, it has helped prompt communications companies to educate parents about how better to be in touch with their children.
17 In a survey released 18 months ago, AT&T found that among 1,175 parents interviewed, nearly half learned how to text-message their children. More than 60 percent of parents agreed that it helped them communicate. When asked if their children wanted a call or a text message requesting that they be home by curfew, for instance, 58 percent of parents said their children preferred a text.
18 Text messaging has perhaps become this generation's version of pig Latin. For dumbfounded parents, AT&T now offers a tutorial that decodes acronyms meant to keep parents at bay. "Teens may use text language to keep parents in the dark about their conversations," the tutorial states. Some acronyms meant to alert children to prying eyes are POS ("parent over shoulder"), PRW ("parents are watching") and KPC ("keeping parents clueless").
19 Savannah Pence, 15, says she wants to be in touch with her parents—but also wants to keep them at arm's length. "I don't text that much in front of my parents because they read them," she says.
20 At first, Savannah's father, John Pence, who owns a restaurant in Portland, Ore., was unsure about how to relate to his daughter. "I didn't know how to communicate with her," Mr. Pence says. So he took a crash course in text messaging—from Savannah. But so far he knows how to quickly type only a few words or phrases: Where are you? Why haven't you called me? When are you coming home?
21 Savannah says she sends a text message to her father at least two or three times a day. "I can't ask him questions because he is too slow," she adds.
22 Mr. Pence is well aware of how destabilizing cellphones, iPods and hand-held video game players can be to family relations. "I see kids text under the table at the restaurant," he says. "They don't teach them etiquette anymore." Some children, he says, watch videos in restaurants.
23 "They don't know that's the time to carry on a conversation," he remarks. "I would like to walk up to some tables and say, 'Kids, put your iPods and your cellphones away and talk to your parents.'"
24 But even he has found that enforcing rules is harder than might be expected. He now permits Savannah to send text messages while watching TV, after he noticed her using a blanket over her lap to hide that she was sending messages to friends. "I could have them in the same room texting, or I wouldn't let them text and they would leave," says Mr. Pence of his children. "They are good kids, but you want to know what they are up to."