Which Planet?
Saturday, September 29th, 2007LONDON (Reuters) - The family meal may be threatened with extinction but “High-Tech” parents are now communicating much better with their teenagers and giving them more freedom, says child psychologist Richard Woolfson.
And this is a good thing?
Long gone are the days when parents were much more dictatorial and children were to be seen, not heard.
Pity.
“The consultation, negotiation and mutual respect that goes on between parents and teenagers in families today would probably shock the mums and dads of 50 years ago,” Woolfson said in a study of how family communication has evolved.
You’re not kidding they’d be shocked! The amount of parents I see that have absolutely no control over their children whatsoever is astounding. Kids just tell mum (for it is invariably mum - don’t meet many ‘dads’ these days) to “F**k off” and mum will scream “F**k off” back, then they’ll scream at each other a bit more, then they will both “f**k off”.
Sitting round the table together for a meal was once the bedrock of family life. It is now becoming a thing of the past but Woolfson stressed that was not the end of the world.
“Now we have today’s high-tech family where family communication takes place by email, internet, webcam and mobile phone as well as face-to-face of course,” he said.
That has another beneficial side-effect, Woolfson said in his survey for the T-Mobile phone company.
Parents are now able to contact their kids much more easily and children have become more confident and communicative.
“This means that parents are less worried about their children’s safety because they feel reassured,” Woolfson said.
Or, perhaps, parents couldn’t care less.
And the generation gap is not suffering.
“Even grandma and grandpa have entered the world of cyber space to keep close contact with their children and grandchildren, all of which can only be good news for everyone,” Woolfson concluded.
Tell that to Grandma and Grandpa that are too afraid to leave their homes any more due to yobs on streetcorners.
Source: Yahoo News