Down With Convenience!

Introduction

“I appreciate the seamless ease….”

That statement is the inspiration for this post.  It’s from a letter a friend wrote me recently.  The point isn’t that he sounds like a TV ad (from the days when ad spokesmen were earnest instead of arch). The point, rather, is that I found this simple statement oddly inflammatory.  I asked myself why.  And the answer is, I should find it inflammatory, and so should you.  Ideally, all my friends would join me in mounting a War on Convenience.  If I can’t have that, well, maybe I can influence a few readers.

A paradox

Of course I was being bombastic and hyperbolic a second ago.  Who doesn’t want convenience in his life?  But I think convenience is like alcohol:  it should be enjoyed responsibly.

Paradoxically, my worldview straddles two seemingly conflicting ideals:  I’m a great lover of efficiency, but I bristle at society’s infatuation with ease and expedience.  “Wait,” you may ask, “aren’t efficiency and convenience pretty much the same thing?”

Nope.  When I say “efficient” I mean that I can get something done exactly how I want it done in as little time as possible.  (Often this involves doing a lot of work up front, like creating macros for a software application.)  When people talk about seamless ease, they’re often referring to systems that are merely intuitive, such as a user interface that can be grasped quickly, without any need for help menus or a manual.  Some products are convenient because they remove tedious steps; other products are convenient because they rescue you from having to learn something.

I think it’s widely assumed that where user interfaces go, intuitive is best.  But this isn’t always true.  Consider the computer keyboard:  to be maximally intuitive, its keys ought to be placed in alphabetical order.  That would make it easier for the first-time user, wouldn’t it?  But of course this idea seems silly, since typing efficiency is more important than making the keyboard layout straightforward for the newcomer.

What’s even sillier is that the QWERTY layout was actually designed to be maximally inefficient, to keep early typewriters from jamming.  The Dvorak layout I use was difficult to learn, but my long-term gains in efficiency were well worth the trouble.

Low-lying fruit

The simplest argument against the embrace of convenience is that it often requires us to forsake quality.  I give you microwave popcorn:  it’s certainly easy to make, but a) it literally stinks, b) it’s more expensive than traditional popcorn, c) it tastes pretty bad, d) it’s full of salt and fat, e) it’s full of chemicals, and f) the excessive packaging is bad for the environment.  The popularity of microwave popcorn makes me embarrassed to be a member of the human race, considering that an air popper is also extremely easy to use, and cheaper, and lets you control how much salt and butter you add.

Whipped cream in an aerosol can is also really convenient, but it’s more expensive and less tasty than what you whip at home, and has the added problem of unpredictability:  it’s hard to tell when the can is low on cream (or non-dairy “kreme” as it often is), so you never know when you’ll foul up your sundae with the liquid dribble that comes at the end.  By whipping my own cream, I can choose an organic product; whip only as much as I need; control the amount of sugar; and save money.

But enough of these convenient examples.  I want to get into the more subtle ways that, through our love of convenience, we sell ourselves short without even realizing it.

The problem of control

Often, complicated systems are made more intuitive, and sometimes more efficient, through a simplification of the user interface and/or automation of repetitive operations.  A little Cessna surely has a simpler interface than a commercial airliner, though it often lacks that handy autopilot feature.

Automation is a fine idea in theory, but in practice, it’s only as good as its execution.  How accurate are product developers’ guesses about what should be automated and how?

Well, here’s a horror story.  My family was visiting some friends in their lovely, sunny home in London.  One afternoon, when our friends were out, I thought, hey, my mother-in-law is always asking for a nice photo of my wife and me.  And here we had this great lighting, so I suggested to my wife that we finally take the time to shoot a nice photo together.  My wife has a tendency to close her eyes in photos, so it took us at least a dozen tries.  Well, on the last day of our visit, our host said, “Hey, why not give us some photos of your visit from your SD card?”  Great idea!  So I took the card up to their Mac and stuck it in the card reader, expecting that I could cherry-pick the best photos of both families.  But to my surprise the operating system seized control, copied every photo off the card, and launched a little slide show, set to music.  This might have seemed really helpful to a novice computer user who hadn’t mastered file management software, but I was appalled.  The software must have chosen to show the pictures in reverse chronological order, because the first two dozen shots were of my wife and me.  We came off looking like the biggest narcissists you’ve ever seen.

Probably there’s a way to tell the Mac not to automatically grab all the photos from an SD card.  But some systems don’t give us a choice.  We consumers often put up with this lack of control because we enjoy the convenience of the overall product.  I see this problem most frequently in Internet-based systems, particularly when the revenue model is more complicated than “you pay me directly for goods or services.”  Things are automated with more than just the user’s experience in mind.

Here’s an example:  the Gmail Adsense engine, which automatically produces custom ads based on my e-mail text, doesn’t exist to serve me.  Were I given the choice to opt out of Adsense, I certainly would.  I don’t even use Gmail, and yet (as detailed here) my e-mails to Gmail users nevertheless produce these tailored ads I like it or not.

But you know what’s even worse than that?  It’s when we’re unaware of how convenience is costing us.  Consider LinkedIn:  it’s very convenient, and a great idea, and I’m glad that it’s free.  But as I’ve only recently discovered, LinkedIn does what it pleases with the information I give it.  Awhile back, because my profile photo was like five years old, I put up a new one.  (The idea was anti-vanity:  I didn’t want people to think I was using an old photo just to look younger to the world.)  To my embarrassment, LinkedIn contacted my 400 contacts on my behalf:  “Dana Albert has a new profile picture!”  As in, “Dana Albert, devoted curator of his own image and his self-important notion of an Albert ‘brand,’ wants you to see his latest self-portrait!”  A few people responded, perhaps snidely, “Nice picture!”  How embarrassing.  (Yes, I am easily embarrassed.  What can I say … I’m an introvert.)

But that’s not all.  I’ve come to find out that LinkedIn evidently does something special for their newer users:  they send an update anytime one of the user’s contacts has made new connections.  Since I don’t get such updates, I’d never have known about this behavior, except a couple of friends commented.  (“Wow, I’ve see a lot of LinkedIn updates on you lately … did you lose your job or something?”)  Once I looked into it, I figured out how to change these settings, but it wasn’t easy—which means that those who thrive on convenience will probably just accept the default behavior.  (Surely I don’t need to go into the various ways Facebook has surreptitiously exploited their users’ tastes, preferences, and purchasing data.)

Are your choices my business?

“Fine,” you might say, “Go whip your own cream, and type on your weird keyboard, and shun Facebook, if that’s what floats your boat—but let me do as I please.”  In other words, you might wonder why your behavior is any business of mine.  Here’s why:  other people’s behavior often affects what choices are available to me.

Here’s how that happens.  Because I worship efficiency, I enjoy figuring out how to make a complicated process go quickly—but not everybody enjoys this process, and manufacturers know it.  New products are often targeted at teens and young adults (to build brand loyalty early), so new consumers’ habits can have an immediate influence on industry.  Streamlining a process, modern consumers believe, should be figured out by the manufacturer and baked into the product.  Thus, the focus is outward on the product, rather than inward on the user.  It’s not “How can I get better at this” but “How can this be better for me?”  The “smarter” our products get, the lazier we’re permitted to be.

(Fortunately, schools are still essentially old-school.  If it weren’t for teachers making kids learn math, do you think these kids would bother, given the ease-of-use of smartphone calculator apps?  And yet, once you’ve learned arithmetic, it’s faster to do it in your head.)

The result of this consumer/producer dynamic is that perfectly valid products are often kicked to the curb.  Consider the manual car transmission, aka stick shift:  is it straightforward?  Not very.  Is there a benefit to learning how to work a clutch?  I think so.  After all, a manual transmission offers better gas mileage, and enables me to roll-start the car if my battery is dead.  My mastery of manual shifting impresses the ladies, and enables me to rent a car in Europe.  The popularity, in this country, of automatic transmissions didn’t used to affect me, until that choice became so ubiquitous that some foreign car companies stopped exporting their stick-shift models here.  When I bought my last Volvo, I couldn’t get one with the transmission I wanted.  I had to settle for an automatic. 

(By the way, that bit about impressing the ladies?  Yeah, that was a joke.  Just seeing if you’re awake.)

Another example:  digital cameras.  What a great invention, and yet the camera industry is really suffering.  You know what the number one camera is today?  The iPhone.  It’s easy to see why:  you’re carrying your phone anyway, so why carry another device?  The problem is, phone cameras are not nearly as good as regular digital cameras—even the more humble point-and-shoot ones.  A phone camera takes inferior pictures because the lens is too small and doesn’t let in enough light for non-flash photography in low-light conditions.  Phone cameras also lack a zoom (their so-called “digital zoom” is pure malarkey—cropping masquerading as telephoto).

Look at these two photos.  The first was taken with a $200 Panasonic Lumix point-and-shoot camera.  The second was with a Motorola Droid phone of the same vintage. 

The point-and-shoot photo is much better, and not because I got out a light meter, set the F-stop, adjusted the shutter speed, etc.  It was as easy to snap as with the phone (easier, actually, because there’s way less delay at the controls).  The only convenience I gave up was having everything in one device.

If the camera industry were healthier, I’d have even better products available to me, and at lower prices (due to economies of scale).  Alas, the market for standalone cameras has been strangled by the ubiquity of camera phones—the more convenient choice.

Whom does convenience benefit the most?

Sometimes the person who seems like the most direct beneficiary of convenience-oriented technologies actually isn’t.  Consider the grocery store UPC reader:  it’s very intuitive, and thus perfect for bringing new cashiers up to speed quickly.  It’s also more efficient, but this benefit does not accrue to the cashier, who is paid by the hour.  The system’s efficiency doesn’t mean the cashier gets a raise; it means he or she is easier to replace, and the store can get by with fewer checkout stations.

Now let’s move beyond human consumers and consider other consumers, like cattle.  Being kept in a small stall in a feedlot is certainly convenient for the cow, in terms of her basic need for sustenance.  Of course this diet causes all kinds of trouble for the poor animal, but her well-being was never the point.  The convenience of the feedlot mainly benefits the meat packer.  Since this arrangement translates into lowered operating costs, which can be passed along to the human consumer, it looks like a win-win.  So it is with cheap, high-margin products like soft drinks and sugary cereal.  Needless to say, in the long term this convenience isn’t benefiting the human consumers, either.  The countless Americans who buy junk food and frequent fast food chains are basically backing in to their own feedlot stalls.

Meanwhile, pharmaceutical companies grasp that there’s big money to be made in drugs that treat lifestyle ailments, and doctors prescribe these drugs because doing so is so much easier than trying to get people to exercise and eat well.  Consumers participate in this lowest-price, lowest-effort economic model without an appreciation for its real costs.  The companies at the top in this economy are the direct beneficiaries of our rampant convenience addiction; by indulging it, they introduce a variety of societal ills.  In this regard, convenience is like secondhand smoke.

Convenience and parenting

If you’re a parent who has made it this far into my essay, I doubt you’re the kind who feeds his kid soft drinks, sugary cereal, and fast food.  But addiction to convenience is also present in the most upscale of products.  I’m talking about PCs, smartphones, tablet computers, and Netflix.

It’s more convenient to park kids in front of the TV or PC than to try to get them to help with dinner or with setting the table.  It’s easier to let a kid use his iPad in a restaurant, while his food gets cold, than to teach him how to behave like a grown-up.  So kids and their parents become co-dependents in a family dynamic that ultimately favors no one.

I won’t lie and say I never give in to such temptations.  But when I do, I don’t pretend I’m being a good dad.  “Shall we sit our kids down in front of a video and let them rot their brains out, just to get them out of our hair?” I’ll ask my wife.  And I’ll say to my kids, “Would you like to put in a video and let your brain be automatically extracted?”  This raises awareness and may help us fend off bad habits.

Do modern kids have the mental space required to daydream?  I’d guess a lot of them don’t.  So when my kids complain that they’re bored, I say, “Good.  It’s good to be bored.”  Necessity being the mother of invention, boredom is a good problem for the mind to solve.  Solving this problem with a library book, a blank piece of paper, or some random household detritus doesn’t do much for the economy, but the economy is not my problem.

“But wait,” you may protest, “Computers can be very educational!”  Yes, they can, but that doesn’t mean just any computer-based activity is intrinsically useful.  Too many parents pretend their Internet-addicted kid might become the next Mark Zuckerberg—because this fiction is more convenient than fighting with the kid about limits on his or her screen time.

My wife and I are all about limits.  This is why we don’t have cable, our kids don’t have phones or tablets, and their PC time is closely monitored and rationed.

“Okay, fine,” you might say, “You’ve identified some troublesome trends, but how are the habits of other families any of your business?”  Well, where the hell are my daughters going to find husbands?  My kids won’t settle for a passive, inert, pasty, video-addled mouth-breather who doesn’t read.  Meanwhile, the boys out there won’t settle for out-of-touch, pop-culturally illiterate nerds who don’t even text.  Sure, there are some boys out there whose parents are just as socially unconventional as my wife and me, but it’s a small pool.

Call to action

If you disagree with all of this, that’s fine—and I thank you for at least reading it.

On the other hand, if you agree with me, you may wonder what I propose to do about this rampant convenience addiction.  The answer is simple (though not easy).  Next time you appreciate the convenience of something, ask yourself if that convenience came at any great cost to you:  to your privacy, to your health, to your family, or to the environment.  Then ask yourself if it’s worth it.  I’ll keep on doing the same.

And at a minimum, if you find yourself using the phrase “seamless ease,” please don’t say it like it’s a good thing.

Teens, Texts, and the Marshmallow Test

Introduction

I’ve blogged before about the nexus of parenting, dopamine, and social media, but have come to realize the problem is worse than I originally thought.  In this post I look at how social media and the popularity of cell phone text messaging are reshaping not just our behavior but aspects of our psychology.  In particular I’ll examine how the influence of electronic socializing may be significantly undermining the prospects of the next crop of adults.

Evolution of phone use

In the beginning we just had phones, one per household.  You reached your friend if a) he was home, and b) nobody else was using the phone.  So often the phone just rang and rang, or you dictated a message to your friend’s little brother, who most likely only pretended to take it down.  There was no expectation of recourse if your phone call didn’t reach its target.

Then we got call waiting  and the answering machine, which meant that if your friend’s little brother didn’t simply ignore your waiting call, or somebody didn’t accidentally delete your voice-mail, you had a pretty good chance of getting a call back sooner or later.

And then we got the cell phone.  For the first time in history our friends could expect to reach us at any time.  The phone wasn’t a household device anymore, but a personal device, so we could now hold our friends directly accountable for not answering or returning our call.  Sure, this device brought us freedom—from having to be organized, from waiting around at home for a call—but it also brought the shackles of greater accountability.

Finally, we have reached a saturation point with modern cell phones and smartphones:  our friends can now expect a response even when we don’t have time to talk.  Text messaging is tremendously handy for the person initiating the dialog, but can create a social burden for us when we receive a text.  Why?  Because somehow our ever-connected society has evolved to expect an immediate response whenever we send a text message.  The personal cell phone has become like the red phone in the White House.

Is this even true?

Okay, that’s a pretty strong generalization I’ve just made, and you’re right to question on what basis I made it. 

First, I have my own experience:  over the years I’ve received an increasing number of text messages even though I almost never respond.  I’ve had to train friends and colleagues not to rely on this mode of communication, by telling them flat out, “I never look at texts.”  They have come to accept this idiosyncrasy, much as you’d accept a friend being lactose-intolerant.

Meanwhile, we’ve all seen people, particularly teens but adults too, pausing in the middle of a face-to-face conversation to answer their cell phone or return a text.  Sometimes while texting they’ll pretend to still be listening to you while clearly losing the thread of what you’re saying.  This phenomenon has made it into a “New Yorker” cartoon, and my kids’ babysitter even committed this rudeness, seeming to forget I was her employer.

Of course such anecdotal evidence isn’t enough, so I turn to the testimony of a thought leader in this space, the YouTube artist sWooZie, who has created a video called “Textually Active” (subtitled “The art of text messaging and how people mess it up!”).  In this video, sWooZie codifies the impatience I’ve been talking about:  “You know what’s annoying?  People who take hours to text back, especially when they hit me up in the first place…  If you get busy, just say ‘In class - brb,’ or ‘@ work - brb.’”  (Thankfully, he doesn’t include “Driving – brb,” though many teens cite “not wanting to be rude” as their rationale for texting while driving, as described here and here.)

More insight from sWooZie

Poor response time isn’t the only issue sWooZie tackles; he also airs his grievance with replies that are too brief:  “The letter ‘K’ is only acceptable when somebody is stating a fact or looking for confirmation.  For example, ‘Hey, I’m in your driveway, let’s go,’ or ‘Hey, I’m on my way...’  If you text me the letter ‘K’ for any other reason, don’t be looking all confused when I show up in my Goku outfit ‘bout to bust a Kamehameha up in your grille!” 

But sWooZie’s greatest gripe is with people who don’t respond at all to a text: 

And then there’s those times when you’re sitting at home relaxing, checking your Facebook, and you see your friend update their status, like, “Ohh my gawwww!  Powerpuff Girls marathon on Cartoon Network!”  And instead of commenting on their wall you text them, because you’ve got special friend privileges, unlike their other 90 billion Facebook friends, and like two hours go by, and you ain’t heard jack, and you start thinking:  You know what?  I don’t even like stupid Powerpuff Girls!  Why’d I text them in the first place?  I seen you update your Instagram like two minutes ago.  Oh, you’re just gonna totally ignore me, like I don’t even exist.  Now I’m in a bad mood when I go to watch “Glee.”  My night is ruined.

Significantly, the ignored message that we see sWooZie send his Facebook friend is of a trivial nature:  “Lol. saw ur fb post. Bubbles FTW!!”  The content of this message isn’t important; what matters to sWooZie is what the exchange (or rather the lack of exchange) says about his social currency.  Each text he sends is a social overture, and each lack of response becomes, for him, a litmus test of his social standing.

Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against sWooZie.  Actually, “Textually Active” is a funny, clever movie, so much so that I almost wonder if sWooZie is doing something sly with it—a satire, perhaps, of the insecurity bred into us by this texting, social-media-obsessed culture.  Even if it is, the viewer response seems sincere and earnest.  To date, the video has received over 7 million hits, with over 100,000 positive comments and fewer than 2,000 negative ones.  A lot of viewers commiserate with him:  “SO TRUE MAN,” “We all been there,” “I know how you feel this happens to me and it SUCKS.”

One viewer comment on sWooZie’s video presents a compelling counterpoint:  “My texting peeve is when people over-exaggerate the emotional worth of a text and get all pissy when I don’t text even though I tell everyone that I don’t like texting especially when I am playing a videogame.”  This is a tricky matter, though, isn’t it?  Who is the ultimate arbiter of the emotional worth of a text?  And how is sWooZie supposed to know when his pal is playing a video game?  (Oh, right … Twitter.)

Texts as tokens

Ultimately, messages of 140 characters or less—unless written by a master poet—aren’t all that eloquent, and the rapid-fire, ultra-casual nature of the medium isn’t normally associated with deathless prose.  I’m no Facebook expert, but I gather it’s a pretty informal medium as well, with most of the value coming from immediacy, not eloquence.  All this social commerce, then, seems to emphasize the act of texting—the gesture of the text—above the content.  In other words, each text is more like a token, like social currency, than it is a real communication between two people.

A friend of mine had a reunion recently with a bunch of high school friends.  They all went out to dinner, and several of them were texting and tweeting and Instagramming throughout the evening.  Two of them posted the same photo of their dessert to their Facebook pages, and then one got all sore because her friend’s photo got more “likes.”  Later, the friend with the higher number of likes started to freak out because her cell phone battery was dying.  She eventually talked a bartender into charging it for her.  And for what?  Wasn’t the point of the evening the old friends who were right in front of her?  All these likes and texts strike me as the social equivalent of a morphine drip:  continual social affirmation, little bursts of dopamine, that become practically addictive.  The smartphone, though cordless, is like an umbilical cord.  Even when you’re in the presence of friends, the phone is a hedge against loneliness and obscurity.

And thus, modern socializing of the electronic sort becomes a matter of quantity over quality, with an emphasis on immediacy and ease.  People used to write letters, which were a lot of work, and which didn’t get a very quick reply, but these were deeper communications, and documents you might feel like keeping.  Now we have texts and tweets that are dashed off quickly, read in seconds, and then forgotten.  They’re the social equivalent of fast food:  no waiting, little cost, but not particularly nourishing.

So what?

By now you’re tired of this, and I realize I sound like a scold, and anyway what’s wrong with being impatient socially when our social media and texting technologies do seem to give us what we want?  Isn’t a wide network with casual shout-outs better than moldering away by ourselves somewhere, reading a fusty old novel, or knitting, or (gasp!) blogging?

The answer is, this widespread social impatience starts to look like a real problem when considered from a certain perspective.  I’m thinking of a psychological test performed over several years at a nursery preschool on the campus of Stanford University in the late 1960s, and described in detail in a “New Yorker” article from 2009.  As you shall see, this study considered a link between behavior and character that psychologists might do well to revisit with electronic socializing in mind.

Here’s how the test went:  a researcher would sit a child down in a chair and offer him a marshmallow, and a proposal:  if the child could sit in front of that marshmallow without eating it while the researcher left for a few minutes, the child could have two marshmallows upon the researcher’s return.  The goal of the experiment, initially, was to observe (via hidden camera) the mental processes that enabled some children to delay gratification, while others gave in and scarfed down the single marshmallow right away.

The real discovery of the experiment came when the man running the experiment, Walter Mischel, revisited his test results many years later, and compared them to more recent information about the subjects.  He “sent out a questionnaire to all the reachable parents, teachers, and academic advisers of the six hundred and fifty-three subjects who had participated in the marshmallow task, who were by then in high school.  He asked about every trait he could think of, from their capacity to plan and think ahead to their ability to ‘cope well with problems’ and get along with their peers.  He also requested their S.A.T. scores.”  

On the basis of the responses he discovered that those who as children failed to hold out for the second marshmallow—“low delayers,” he called them—were “more likely to have behavioral problems, both in school and at home.  They got lower S.A.T. scores.  They struggled in stressful situations, often had trouble paying attention, and found it difficult to maintain friendships.  The child who could wait fifteen minutes had an S.A.T. score that was, on average, two hundred and ten points higher than that of the kid who could wait only thirty seconds.”

Comparisons

According to a CTIA Wireless Association website, today’s average teen sends 60 text messages a day; the average teen girl sends 100 text messages a day.  Research reported here states that the average smartphone user checks his phone every six minutes, or about 150 times a day.  This compulsion, needless to say, is a learned behavior; after all, a generation ago there was no texting, and smartphones didn’t exist.  Modern technology is shaping our behavior.

Similarly, the behavior of the marshmallow test subjects was shaped by their circumstances.  For example, “when Mischel gave delay-of-gratification tasks to children from low-income families in the Bronx, he noticed that their ability to delay was below average, at least compared with that of children in Palo Alto.  ‘When you grow up poor, you might not practice delay as much,’ he says.  ‘And if you don’t practice then you’ll never figure out how to distract yourself.  You won’t develop the best delay strategies, and those strategies won’t become second nature.’”  Sure enough, he and his researchers were able to teach these strategies to children and greatly increase their marshmallow delay time.  In other words, children can be taught patience.

Synthesis

Of course teaching children patience isn’t a new concept, but why should we even bother if we then give them smartphones and social media access that seem to be systematically teaching them impatience?  How can we expect teenagers to sit down and focus on their homework, their piano practice, or even their daydreams if they’re stopping every five minutes to check their smartphone or send a text?

For a lot of parents, it’s probably too late to intervene.  Trying to take away a teenager’s smartphone and Facebook would work about as well as Prohibition did in the 1920s.  But parents with younger children and preteens can take important steps now to prevent them from one day becoming slaves to their smartphones.

A few recommendations

For one thing, we can set the right example.  All the lecturing in the world won’t help if you’re tuning out your kid every five minutes to fire off a text of your own.  (And no, engaging in such behaviors doesn’t make you seem young and hip.  Your kids still think you’re a dork, and they’re right.)  I don’t text, and I don’t automatically put face-to-face interactions on hold just because my phone tells me to.

If I’m trying to write, I will tell my kids to leave me alone so I can concentrate.  (In a bit of wonderful irony, the writer Maxine Hong Kingston—from whom I once took a writing class—has admitted to once giving her young child a whole bag of marshmallows just to keep him out of her hair so she could write.)  Do my daughters follow my example?  Well, they aren’t begging for cell phones, and they love to write too.

Another thing we parents can do is to work extra hard on teaching our kids patience now, to try to ingrain it in them.  I’ve done this all my kids’ lives simply because a) kids are whiners, b) whining can be terribly effective, and c) I’ve always sought to keep the balance of power in my favor.  Years before reading about the marshmallow test, I accidentally developed a version of it myself.  At potlucks and barbecues, my wife and I set limits on how many desserts the kids can have:  they’re allowed one small and one full-sized treat.  (I know, this is probably too much.  I’m weak.)  Well, early on one of my kids had already selected her two treats when something even better came along, brought by a potluck latecomer.  On this basis she asked if she could please, please, please have a third treat.  DENIED!  I let her cry for awhile before taking the lesser dessert off her hands so she could get the good stuff.  (As an adult, and a scrawny one at that, I have no dessert limit.)

At the same time, I set an important new rule:  going forward, the kids had better wait awhile before making their selections, because when something better comes along there’ll never again be a Dad-fostered substitution.  This rule puts a special strain on my daughters’ delay capability, because there’s no guarantee of a better dessert later, nor that the current front-runner will still be available.  But my kids tolerate this policy, because they have no other choice.  And it’s remarkable how long they’ll wait around for a better dessert to show up.

My third recommendation for avoiding the crevasse of electronic socializing is both the easiest and the hardest:  don’t let your teens have cell phones or social media accounts.  The hard part here will be convincing yourself and your spouse that this is a reasonable policy.  My earlier post on this topic makes a case for this, so I won’t repeat myself, but I’ll add that the Ph.D. child psychologist whose lecture inspired that post doesn’t let her kids have cell phones or Facebook either, and I’m sure more authorities will come out against such enslavement as time goes on.

I don’t kid myself that this policy will go down easy with my daughters.  Sure, I’ll discuss it with them, but they won’t have an easy time persuading me.  The most predictable argument—“All my friends have them!”—will get them nowhere.  After all, the CTIA says that only 77% of teens 12-17 have cell phones.  That leaves 23% who don’t, which is a very spacious minority for my kids to occupy.  After all, our household doesn’t even have cable TV.

Just the other day my older daughter asked when she’ll get a cell phone.  (“I’m just curious,” she added diplomatically.)  I replied, “How about never?”  (Obviously “never” isn’t a straight answer; of course she’ll have a cell phone as an adult.  Maybe even sooner, if society evolves beyond its current phone-induced OCD.)   I challenged my daughter to make a case for a cell phone.

“Well, it could lead to greater freedom,” she said.  “I could go to more places by myself, and you and Mom wouldn’t have to worry.”  I told her that our merely knowing where she is won’t keep her out of trouble, and added, “Besides, if your parents can reach you whenever they want, that’s not really freedom at all.  Freedom is having enough trust that we don’t need to know where you are.”  The conversation continued for a good while, and I was pleased to see my daughter making good points and not just gagging on my Kool-Aid.  And the best part?  We had each other’s complete attention.  Nobody was dinking around with a phone.