“She’s going to be a few minutes late.” “I told her we’re almost there.” “Her train is being held at the station.” “I told her we’re here.” “I’m asking her where she is.” “The train is moving again.” “She’s almost here.”
My two children and I were meeting my friend at a Brooklyn boutique to help her size T-shirts she was buying for kids close in age to mine. My daughter, a freshly minted middle schooler, was also a freshly minted cellphone owner. After seven years of walking down the street to our local elementary school, she was now a commuter, taking the subway three stops every day with a friend. Like all the other parents of 6th graders we knew, my husband and I had decided, much to our daughter’s delight, that she should have her own phone now that she was traveling to and from school without one of us accompanying her. Much to her dismay, we’d selected the most boring flip phone on the market.
That didn’t prevent her from engaging in a steady stream of texts, at this moment with my tardy friend. My friend eventually arrived and we tried on some shirts, leaving the boutique as it was closing to have some dinner a few blocks away. When we sat down, my daughter was still clutching her phone, but she realized that the small purse in which she carried it — along with her lunch money, library card, and MetroCard — was missing. I ran back to the boutique, but it was dark and shuttered. My daughter was so distraught throughout our meal (mostly over the MetroCard, which was provided by the school along with stern warnings not to lose it) that when we finished eating, a cook emerged from the kitchen with a chocolate mousse and told her gently, “I hope things get better.”
They did get better: I called the store after it opened the next day, and the bag was there, contents intact. But the incident gnawed at me. My daughter had brought her phone along because she was in the middle of a running dialogue with my friend concerning our respective locations.
It struck me, however, that the meeting would have played out in exactly the same way without the bazillion messages being lobbed back and forth. We would have arrived at the store on time and poked around until my friend showed up a few minutes later. We had gotten our daughter a cellphone so she would have it in case of an emergency, but she had fallen into an easy pattern of using it primarily for communication that wouldn’t meet anyone’s definition of urgent. (We had also gotten her the phone for our own peace of mind, of course, but I felt anything but reassured a few days earlier when I happened to catch her texting while she crossed a city street.)
With middle school looming, we had prepared our daughter in many ways, from practicing the commute to setting up a dedicated homework space to shopping for clothes. But in those hectic early days of the school year, we had done nothing to prepare her for having a cellphone which, it now occurred to me, was a momentous transition itself. Maybe I hadn’t anticipated needing to do so since my kids, having grown up awash in technology, have a much more intuitive approach to it than I do. By age 4, my son seemed as comfortable going to Google with questions (“What happens when you die?” “Is Katy Perry nice?”) as he was going to me. What could I possibly tell my daughter about her phone when for several years she’s been the one helping me figure out how to work mine?
What I might have told her is this: Having a device at hand seems to compel to fill any empty time by tapping away at it, but so many of the messages we send each other are extraneous. Just as many kids wouldn’t opt to stare out a car window if an iPad was in the seat pocket or daydream on a flight if a TV was in front of them, access to a phone can create a compulsion to do something when doing nothing might be the better choice: either to prevent distraction or simply to enjoy a moment of quiet amid the constant, inconsequential chatter.
Her boring flip phone is surely the first of many cellphones my daughter will possess over the years. I’m trying to teach her now that just because we can always be in touch doesn’t mean we must always be.