This isn’t a tall tale but some of you won’t believe me. At two gatherings recently, with many youth and young adults present, cell phones were not in evidence. Nobody collected them at the entrance or made a request to keep them put away.
At our family Fourth of July celebration, phones were pulled out often to take photos but then pocketed as conversations continued. People actually still know how to communicate! Who knew?
Some days later, we were invited to supper at the neighbor’s place. Most of the attendees were under thirty. Nary a phone was pulled out. Young people still know how to communicate! Who knew?
Well, those of us who raised our children to share thoughts, ask questions, and voice opinions knew. We are the ones you see in restaurants talking to one another instead of scrolling on phones. We don’t walk through stores or parking lots gazing at our phones and bumping into other people, or make a driver hit the brakes when we step mindlessly off a curb. We get in trouble with friends or relatives for not immediately answering texts, and not carrying our phones into stores or meetings. We don’t use our phones when visiting in someone else’s home. Some of us even turn them off at bedtime.
I’m of the generation when SOGWPIP was an acronym for “silly old grandma with pictures in purse.” There are still plenty of us around with pictures on phones, but I don’t have many of them, and figure that most folks don’t know the parents of the baby, or the wedding couple, so those pictures are mostly for me.
How do we get back to learning conversational skills that don’t include what is on social media or heard at the coffee shop? Little kids know instinctively how to share their thoughts and concerns but that gets trained out of us early. They ask a lot of questions and demand answers.
We adults need to upgrade our questioning skills. Ask at the supper table (of course this means forgoing the pressure to not have the family all present at the supper table and you’ll have to fight the schools and maybe even churches for that right) for each person to tell the funniest thing that happened today. Or the most important, or the happiest. You’ll learn a lot about one another, and the conversations will veer into unexpected topics.
I know a lot of ex-smokers who automatically reach for a pocket at the supper table although they haven’t smoked in years. You’ll find that reaching for your phone is just as automatic, so keep it in another room when you sit to eat. Bad habits can be broken and good ones learned. This could be an adventure! What’s not to like about that?
Meet me here next week and meanwhile, do your best. Somebody might like it.