Kristina Lunde

The Lord is my strength and my song.
Psalm 118:14a

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September 28, 2015 by Kristina Lunde 1,252 Comments

Generation Z: Screen Obsessed

Head tilted down, outstretched palm holding cell phone, eyes glued to the screen – so lives Generation Z: the digital natives, the screen-obsessed.

Group of teenage boys and girls ignoring each other while using their cell phones at school
Antonio Diaz/2015 bigstockphoto

As a baby boomer parent, I see my offspring and their peers perpetually stationed in that pose. To me, the pose embodies the lifestyle of teen-aged postural clones whose eye contact and interactions are reserved for their hand-held devices. Are verbal conversations, interpersonal greeting rituals, and person to person time becoming obsolete? Did I waste my time trying to teach my children such old-fashioned concepts as manners, meal time interaction, and thank you note writing?

My phone calls go straight to voice mail. My words hang ignored in the air during teenage transit time. If I am noticed, I might get a reply to my text. Back in my day . . .

Well, I made different attempts to get privacy. I stormed off to my room. Or I stretched the phone cord beyond it’s curly maximum to sit behind a door. I went outside, confident that my mother would not follow me there. In my younger days, I had fun outside playing in the neighborhood or climbing a tree. Later, I would ride bike or unicycle – or sit in the yard with a friend. My teenage years may have been similarly self-absorbed, but not insulated behind a screen. In fact, we were limited to one hour of television per day – the only screen option in those days.

Life is different now. This mom used to limit screen time, but that ended when computers were needed for homework. When we added texting to our cell phone service, a much belated change compared to my children’s peers, I reviewed the monthly usage to check my children’s compliance with phone curfew limits. After we became a smart phone family last year, even limiting my own screen time seemed challenging, let alone monitoring my offspring’s. Surrendering to technology. Parental failure. Allowing my older teenagers to moderate themselves. Enabler of screen obsessions. Perhaps all of the above.

But my job remains the same even when so much else in the world changes: to love my children and commmunicate that to them. So I keep reaching out to my Generation Z, digital natives – the ones I love and feed.

I threaten to Snapchat or Instagram for visual contact with my precious teenagers, using absurd mispronunciations to emphasize my technological impairment:

“I’m going to Snappychatty you, so I can see you.”

“Why don’t you Instagrammy that to me?” (Late adopter of technology that I am, of course I don’t have Instagram. But I can joke about it anyway.)

Their groans are my reward. Ahhhh . . . I can still try to make them laugh.

[Originally posted July 2015]

Filed Under: Parenting Tagged With: baby boomer, parenting, screens, teenagers

September 28, 2015 by Kristina Lunde 1,109 Comments

Teenager, screens, and self-soothing

“Where have you been?

I was worried!

I called… [list of 3 people]…for a ride home.

I almost started walking.

What happened?!”

And so my daughter assailed me when I was 13 minutes late to pick her up. I texted her twice and called by phone once during those 13 minutes to let her know when I was on my way.

Earlier that afternoon, I dropped my daughter off at the clinic for a physical. Calculating that her appointment would take about an hour, I told her that I would be driving to the bank to run an errand. When she finished ahead of schedule, she texted me. My muted cell phone stayed in my purse as I spoke with the bank representative. With the representative out of the room at the one hour mark, I pulled my phone out to check the time and to text my daughter that I would be five minutes late. After two more phone updates telling my daughter that I was on my way, I later picked her up at the clinic.

There was comfortable indoor seating, there was no threat of infectious disease, my daughter was not injured or in pain, the clinic was not under siege, and she had wireless access at the clinic. As a healthy teenager, she had already eaten two meals that day.

Yet she was ready to report me for parental neglect because I was delayed in picking her up.

This was a child who learned to self-soothe. As a baby, she easily soothed herself to sleep. I did not deprive her of the chance to learn how to fall asleep on her own, provided she was fed, dry, comfortable, and not anxious. She learned independence at every step, often before I was ready to let her go. As a teenager, she is a self-assured young lady who thrives on outdoor adventure challenges. As a young adult, my daughter has mastered many intellectual and logistical pursuits. I am proud and amazed at her incredible accomplishments. Yet waiting for me for 40 minutes overall, 13 of them beyond the one hour anticipated appointment time, was too much for her.

In my day, I waited up to an hour for my mother to pick me up. If she said she was picking me up after an event, I knew she was coming. I had no way to contact her, but I trusted that she would come as soon as she could. I knew that I was important to her, but I also realized that she had other obligations. In the cold Minnesota weather, I was lucky if I could wait inside for my ride. Never did I question my mother’s schedule, what she did before picking me up, or why she came when she did. I did not complain when she came; I was just glad for the ride.

As much as I adore and prioritize my kids on my list of responsibilities, I have a life and other obligations beyond parenting. I have the right to ignore my cell phone during a business appointment. (Sometimes I turn it off even when nothing else is going on!)

I hope to teach my children how to wait patiently and pass the time without immersing themselves in a screen, but I don’t know if that is possible for this generation.

[Originally posted June 2015]

Filed Under: Parenting Tagged With: parenting, screens, self-soothing, teenagers

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