Written for those Grandparents who have the awesome responsibility of raising their grandchildren.
Do you remember the telephone that was connected to the wall by a cord? How about having to stick your finger into a little hole in the phone base and rotate 6-3-7-3-3-6-9 and waiting till the rotary dial returned back to 0 after every number. Do you remember penpals in elementary school from what we thought was the other side of the world? How amazing it was to get a letter from say Arkansas. Times have changed.
Those who are grandparents today grew up in an age when communication was at a much slower pace than it is today. Can we even name all the various methods of communication today? There are the oldies; e-mail, web pages and personal blogs. Now we have My Space, Facebook, you-tube, deli.cio.us, twitter, flickr, dig. FEED, RSS. Pounce, dig…. These are all on the internet. This does not include the all consuming use of text messaging.
We of the grandparent age are being left in the digital dust. Can we keep up with our grandchildren’s generation? It has been and will be very difficult for us. The children of today are being raised on the computer. They have computers in their classes at school and have access to many various modes of communication. Their social network is getting larger and larger. It is not uncommon to chat (have a live online conversation) with someone from another country. I personally have a friend in Kenya that I communicate with occasionally. Our grandchildren are speaking a different language. A language of symbols J, :) and shortened words ( b/c = because).
What are we to do? Grandparents and parents are “digital immigrants.” Computers, text messages, even e-mailing is all difficult and unfamiliar to us. Some in the older generations may even refuse to enter these modes of communication. This is all understandable but we need to understand our grandchildren are “natives of this digital age.” All this is technology is second hand to them. The generation gap is great and growing in some families.
We as grandparents raising our grandchildren have a more difficult challenge. We need to try and communicate with our grandchildren on a level that most grandparents do not have to. Today’s parents are finding it difficult to speak with their children. As grandparents walking in a parent’s role we are facing a greater challenge. We have to be able to hear our grandchildren’s problems and help them through their hard times. We are challenged because they are talking a digitally different language. We are at the verge of losing them. If we do not press into their circle or at least understand where they are coming from they will slip further into the digital culture without us. Have you seen the comic strip zits where the young people are in the same room and do not even speak to each other but they hold a conversation texting on their cell phones?
What can we do? How can we get a foot into the door of their daily lives? Ask them to explain their modes of communication. Try and use these methods of communication if we can. Monitor how it affects them. Look over their shoulder with curiosity not criticism. Limit them if it proves necessary. Watch the you-tube video with them. Learn the language. Urbandictionary.com can give a definition of our grandchildren’s slang. What does btw mean? (by the way). How about K? (ok) There are many such expressions used especially when text messaging.
Can we text them occasionally and tell them we are thinking of them? Can we facebook chat with them and help them through a stressful situation at a babysitting job? Can we try and be there for them and tell them we love them by entering into a little bit of their culture without criticism?
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