Lives there a grannie or gramps so dull who is not at the ready to pull out their iPhone and show off photos of their Grands--videos and stills, group shots and solos. We're all a little besotted when it comes to sharing the adorableness of our grandkids.
But it's one thing to let friends hold our phone and watch our precious toddler pulling a truck through a puddle--so cute. It's another to post that video or photo on Facebook or Instagram or another social media platform.
Here's a summary of advice I read on Katie Couric's Media site about posting photos of children; it applies to us and our grandkids especially:
Even if you have strong privacy settings in place on your accounts, don't post photos of the grands unless and until you know the parents' social media rules and, should your grands be a few years older than toddler, ask them for permission as well. "It helps teach them how to respectfully use social media in the future," writes author Mary Agnant.
The rules do not apply to grandpups. Here's one of mine.
Our bags were packed, boarding passes downloaded and shuttle to the airport confirmed. The night before we were to leave to visit our son and his family for the weekend, a text arrived. Our DIL just wanted us to know she wouldn't be home when we arrived but our teenage granddaughter would be. Then the long back-and-forth text conversation got underway.
Readers, I won't bore you with the details, but our DIL, an only child, has a lot of "sandwich generation" stuff on her plate: A hospitalized aunt (never married; no children) who lost her hearing aids and smartphone; parents (one with cognitive issues) in mid-move to a house near her where there was a "construction" emergency there while it was being readied for their arrival. Nothing was going smoothly for either her aunt or her parents. She assured us we should come; she might be distracted but we were welcome.
We opted not to go, in part because we didn't want to be an additional burden but also because we were weary from a tiring trip the previous weekend. It was the right decision to make. That's what I kept telling myself when the blues over not being able to hug our son, grandchild and DIL set in.
That's when technology stepped in to take some of the edge off the disappointment.
We were supposed to watch a soccer game together on my son's big-screen TV. My older granddaughter, a freshman at a small college in the midwest, made the soccer team and the game was available via a link to the college's website. Watching together couldn't happen but we followed the game on our iPad; they watched on their TV and we texted back and forth about every pass and move our granddaughter made while she was in the game. It was almost like being together and being there (except that the players are teeny tiny on an iPad).
That evening, we had a date with the at-home granddaughter who's just starting high school. We FaceTime chatted for almost an hour--what the first week of high school was like, what classes she was taking, what books she was reading, how her ninja classes were going. The leisurely one-on-one chat, with some asides for family commentary, made us feel like we had a good visit with a teenager who, like many kids her age, spends most of their time on their iPhones and in their bedrooms.
The granola I baked to bring to them is in the freezer (old technology). Our bags are unpacked. But so is some of the funk I felt when we had to cancel. That's the upside of technology: It can put us in our children's homes, virtually and for a moment. It's not as warm as a hug but it's not as removed as a phone call.
Some of us have grandkids who are away at college. Naturally, we want to stay in touch. We may even expect that contact to be as close and regular as it was when they were youngsters living with their parents. And yet we may be disappointed that our in-college grandkids are a little more distant now. They don't answer every text, email or direct message we send them. When we don't get a reply we may be disappointed--even frustrated. And that begs the question: What are the rules of the road here?
One suggestion is to lower expectations: We may want our communications to be back and forth but our grands are making new friends, going to challenging classes, trying out for teams or clubs and, of course, studying and partying hard. Their lives are full and full of new responsibilities. A daily e-chitchat with their grandparent? Maybe it's an additional pressure they don't need right now.
That doesn't mean we have to stop our end of the conversation, but we can take the pressure off them to respond. The least-cliched bit of advice I came across in this regard was this simple suggestion (thank you Grand Magazine here and here): Tack an NNTR onto whatever it is you're sending. It stands for "no need to reply." It lets your grandchild/college student read (and delight) in your message without feeling guilty about not replying.
That leads to another tip: Let your emails or texts be something amusing, informative or newsie--a funny anecdote, a report on the whereabouts of one of their cousins, a link to research they may find useful for one of their courses.
Last piece of advice for now: You don't want to clog up their accounts or be in touch so often that, much as they love you, they groan to see it's a message from you, again--even though (and maybe especially if) it's a forward of a fwd of a series of jokes about aging that your friends are sending around.
Have you got any suggestions to add to this? Pop it in the comment box if you would.
When we have grandchildren we can be tugged into a competitive frenzy with out co-grandparents: If our grandkids see their other grandparents more often than they see us, does that mean they'll love them more? Is the bond between grandparent and grandchild dependent on gifts the other grandparents bring or favors we offer?
A Carolyn Hax reader raised a variation on that worry: Can social media posts reflect our relationship with our Grands vis a vis the other grandparents. Here are two Carolyn Hax anecdotes that circle around that question.
Complaint one: A daughter-in-law posts regularly on social media about her parents and what terrific grandparents they are. The posts are full of photos of the grandparents playing with their grandchild. The grandparents live in the same West Coast town as the young family does. The daughter-in-law never posts about her in-laws and how great it is of them to fly across the country to visit every few months and to take the whole family on vacation in the summer. She never posts photos of the East Coast grandparents on visits or vacations with the family. The East Coast grandma feels under-appreciated by the lack of balance in the social media attention and resentful of the social media love showered on the other grandparents.
It may be that the daughter-in-law is more comfortable talking about her parents on social media than she is about her husband's parents. Or she's addressing friends who know her parents. Or something else totally benign. As Carolyn Hax noted, there can be a host of non-negative reasons for being ignored on social media and the East Coast grannie should free herself from worry by coming up with a benign reason for the uneven coverage. Beyond that, Hax's bottom line is this: "It's social freaking media. Ignore, ignore, ignore."
Complaint two: The other variation on this social media theme comes from a daughter-in-law who writes to Hax to complain about her mother-in-law's social media misrepresentation of her relationship with the grandchild. She frames herself as an active, involved grandmother when she is not--she wasn't before Covid made visiting difficult and once the quarantine set in, she refused zoom or other Internet visit options. On social media, the mother-in-law paints herself as a poor-me victim of the pandemic and her loss of closeness with her granddaughter. The daughter-in-law resents the general injustice of the misrepresentation.
Hax's reaction follows along the lines of her previous ignore, ignore, ignore and advises the daughter-in-law: "Stop following her on social media. It is not oxygen; you can cut it off completely, immediately and forever, and still not die."
Both of these episodes made me think of a line from Lisa Carpenter's first book, The First Time Grandmother's Journal (my blog post on her book is here) that taps into the core of finding your footing as a grandmother. She writes of her own journey and says, "I just needed to be true to myself and define the role on my own terms, in my own way." To which I would add this update: No need to let social media do that defining for us.
When a 14-year-old Grand hopped a plane and came to visit her Gramps and PenPen during spring break, the trip was all about indulging her--giving her the chance to decide what we would do, where we would go and the kind of food we would eat. Freedom Hall. A visit without the parents in tow is a liberating experience for us as well as for her. But there was one rule that her parents insisted we enforce: No cellphones, laptops or other screens in her room at night.
When our 16-year-old Grandson flew down here last week for a quick 36-hour visit (Sunday soccer games must be accommodated), a similar admonition followed him. Cellphones had to be parked in the kitchen (or wherever we plugged our charging station) at night and during dinner.
I hate being a policeman. I want my visits with my teen Grands to feel like we are a staging for the almost-adults they are almost becoming. I want them to feel I trust them to be responsible and to follow the sensible rules their parents lay down--that I don't need to check up on them.
But the cellphone rules are there for good reason. The science (and we believe in science!) finds that screen time at bedtime is disruptive to sleep patterns. A European study of nearly 10,000 16- to 19-year-olds found that the longer the time in any given day that a teenager spends using electronic devices such as tablets and smartphones, the worse their sleep will be.
Closer to home, an article in Science Life (a publication of University of Chicago Medicine and Biological Sciences) looked at sleep patterns for children and adolescents. After delineating a variety of reasons why adolescents don't bed down as easily as their younger siblings (circadian rhythms and that sort of stuff), the article ran these family-friendly Q and A paragraphs:
Is it okay if the phone is in the room but it’s just plugged in and charging? Or is there something about the presence of it, knowing it’s there and you might get a message?
That should be fine, but if your kid knows it’s there and might be tempted to check it in case a friend texts, you might as well charge it in the living room. Even if it’s on vibrate, their brains are cued to hear that and it could wake them up. They’re going to want to get up and check it, so it’s removing the temptation by taking it out of the room.
Is there a rule of thumb for how long before bedtime you should turn off the electronics?
If you could do at least 30 minutes that’s great. An hour or more is wonderful, but that’s not terribly realistic for a lot of people, including myself. I know the rules and I break them myself sometimes. But give your brain a chance to unwind, to reduce the effects of the bright light and recover from that. Give yourself at least 30 minutes to not be staring at a bright light or doing anything particularly stimulating like playing violent video games. Watching TV from a distance isn’t necessarily as bad because it’s not as bright, unless what you’re doing is very stimulating, so watching a horror movie in bed isn’t always a great idea.
Which is more of a problem: the light from screens or the stimulation from using electronics?
Both. Light is particularly bad because it suppresses melatonin. It’s also an alerting signal to the brain of it being daytime. It can confuse the brain about what time of day it is. The brain is thinking it should be alert and awake because it’s bright and something is going on. So it’s doing both at the same time.
Turns out we didn't have to police the situation too closely. Both our Grands (one our daughter's child; the other our son's) understood the rules. They voluntarily brought their phones to the charging station when they went to bed. There was a little more fudging on the laptop front--I won't say by whom. We did have to close it down when we did a bed check before we went to bed. But there were no whines or complaints. We could rest easy: Our Grands have learned and are practicing proper digital device behavior. Are they sleeping the sleep of the good? We assume so.
Following on last week's post about posting photos on Facebook, here's another source of unknown ramifications our grown children with teenagers are parsing: the photos on their children's smart phones.
According to a Pew Research Center survey, 24 percent of teenagers are online "almost constantly." They aren't just playing video games. If they are like my teen grandkids, they are spending time posting photos on Instagram and Snapchat. It's a way to stay in touch with friends.
While they're Instagraming or Snapchatting, mistakes can be made--posting a too-sexy photo, say, or forwarding an unflattering one of a friend or classmate. Do parents have a right to edit what their children post?
Many parents--a recent survey put it at just under 50 percent--check out what their child is posting. My daughter and son-in-law do and they require a "take down" of any photos that are deemed to be "inappropriate." But some kids--my granddaughter is one of them--also store photos on their phones in a camera roll and those photos are often the source of Instagram posts. Is the camera roll fair game for parental eyes?
I was witness to a kerfuffle on this point that broke out during a family weekend visit. It was hard to tell--the flash point became red hot so quickly--just what the parents (my daughter and son-in-law) were trying to check out. All I knew as the grannie in the awkward position of observing a family row was that my Grand huffed off to the guest room in tears, phone clutched to her chest, door slammed shut. Everyone was upset and, with my limited knowledge of the issues swirling around smart phones and teens--and no experience with those issues--there wasn't much I could do to ease the situation or to give what could possibly pass as wise counsel. So I did what I do best. I waited a few minutes, asked my daughter if she minded and then knocked on the guest room door.
Here's what I learned. My Grand agrees with the Instagram rule. She is willing to take down any photo her parents don't think should be up there. And she agrees that they have a right to check her Instagram account whenever they want to. But she sees the camera roll as her private domain. For her parents to peer into it: that's an invasion of privacy.
While I have no experience with camera rolls and teen behavior thereof, it struck me that in my Grand's eyes, the camera roll was tantamount to what in my day was a personal diary. Parents wouldn't read their children's diaries. Or would they? One key difference: There is little likelihood that the scribbles in a personal diary would go viral and be read by everyone in a child's high school.
Writing in the Washington Post's On Parenting, columnist Meghan Leahy repeated this piece of tech-parenting advice a friend gave her. It was about texting but it seems to me to apply to photo scrutiny as well.
'Unless you suspect real danger or have real concerns, do not read your child's texts on a daily basis. It will erode the good trust you have with your child, promote sneakiness in your child and create a 'gotcha' atmosphere in your family.'
Then Leahy, who has three children, added a word or two of her own in reaction to that advice. Her words are ones that we, as parents of grown children whose children are online, can bear in mind--and pass along if it seems appropriate:
Do I still glance at texts, Instagram and Snapchat? Yes. But I tell my child when I do it and what I learned, and then I go into listening mode. The main message is: 'I care. I am watching. I know your heart. I love you. You will make mistakes. I will always be here for you. I am listening.'
They are so adorable. Of course we want to share the photos of our Grands on Facebook, Instagram and everywhere else our friends may follow. Only maybe we shouldn't--unless we've asked the parents first. There are, it seems, all kinds of ways photos can be misused.
Take this Ask Amy letter from a distraught mom whose mother-in-law has been sharing on Facebook photos she (the mom) has posted of her children. The problem, as the mom tells it, is the way in which the shared photos can get posted, re-posted and spread around to who-knows-what.
Here are the specifics from the mom:
A widowed aunt has been speaking to men over Facebook, and one of these men shared a photo of my daughter to his Facebook friends! This was truly alarming.
I immediately asked this person (whom I’ve never met) to take the photo down. After a day I was still so shaken that I deleted my account. My mother-in-law was heartbroken."
I don’t want [my mother-in-law ] sharing so many pictures, because others in her circle seem to think that by her sharing, they are welcome to do that as well.
There you have it. Inadvertently we may cross a social media line--making the parents of our grandchildren uneasy about the safety of their children. So we're stuck with keeping those photos to ourselves to enjoy--unless we clear the share with our Grand's parents. It can be a dangerous world out there. The tech-safety challenges weren't around when we were bringing up our children, but they are here now, and we may not understand all the ramifications.
They've left the building--our building, that is to say their childhood home and the comforts of their bedroom, our company and the family pets. They're off to college or to their own apartment. From day to day contact--and pretty constant text or email updates on whereabouts and what-they are doing--they are living a more independent life.
We have an empty nest. We're no longer in control of daily decisions--what did you eat for lunch? Curfew is midnight. Who's driving you home? But we still have access to a possible 'control' button--the icons on our cell phones that let us tap out a text message or a Facebook comment.
So, how often should we use social media to stay in touch, and do we abuse it if we use it to make us feel our empty nest is still filled?
This is a question raised in a NYTimes story. Henry Alford interviewed several recently emptied-nest parents to explore where on the continuum of keeping in touch we should land--a continuum that flows from being a hands-on, controlling parent to an advisory counsel.
Actress Alfre Woodward, whose younger son, Duncan, left for college in 2012, had this advice:
“You have got to leave your kids alone. The only time you text is if you have something really slammin’ to say. Something you know they’re really into. Like, Duncan is a big golfer, so I’ll text, ‘Oh, no, Rory didn’t!’ That’s all I’ll say. What you don’t want to write is ‘Your room is so warm!’ Or ‘Have you eaten?’ Or ‘Do you have any friends?’ ‘Are you drunk?’”
Karen Coburn, the senior consultant in residence at the office of the vice chancellor for students at Washington University in St. Louis, had this observation of college kids and warning to their parents:
"Some students say that no way do they want their parents on social media. Others say they like it because it means they don’t have to communicate with their folks as much because the parents get an idea of what the kids are up to. But one of the worst things a parent can do is to ‘friend’ one of their kid’s friends. One of my students told me, ‘Another student came up to me and said, ‘This old woman friended me on Facebook, I think it might be your mom or grandmother.’ The ‘old woman’ was probably 45.”
As for Alford, he ends with this sage piece of advice that covers not just the etiquette and wisdom of being part of a social media presence in our children's lives but our overall relationship with them once they've left the building:
"The greatest lesson for many empty nesters may be learning to be their child’s coach or inspiration rather than a child’s concierge or critic."
Okay, so it was a retailer's survey , not a rigorously researched one from from academia. Still, it tells us something we've sort of known all along: We aren't tech-dummies but many of our grown kids think we are.
The bar is not exactly high. According to Best Buy's Parent-Millennial Child Tech Survey (of 1,000 parents and 1,000 grown kids), fewer than one-third of millennials think their parents are comfortable buying the right personal tech for themselves. Two-thirds of us, however, say we are. Only one-third of our kids give us credit for understanding our gear; 60 percent of us say we know how to get the most from our technology.
Almost half (47 percent) of our kids say we turn to them for tech help at least once a week. Only 17 percent of us admitted to that--although about half of us 'fess up that we bother them for tech advice roughly once a month.
There's a gender divide here. Among parents who considered their children to be the most trustworthy source of advice, 64 percent are moms and 36 percent are dads. Dad, it seems, would rather take their advice from expert reviews (60 percent) than hear it from a millennial son or daughter. When Moms turn to their kids for help, more often they call on their sons for tech help (39 percent) rather than than their daughters (28 percent).
The numbers came closer on one point: 62 percent of parents say their adult children are happy to help and 58 percent of adult children confirmed that.
We're making our list, checking it twice: where the deed to our house is, what our bank account numbers are, who insures our health, house and car.
This is not for a phantom Santa. It's our attempt at a 40/70 list--the one our grown kids are supposed to ask for when they're 40 and we're 70, or thereabouts. Ours haven't asked yet, but we're getting ready. A sometimes overlooked part of that list: passwords and other cues for digital access to our accounts.
It used to be that when "the time" came, our grown kids could walk (tearfully, of course) through our home and find all the valuable physical objects and important papers, check our snail mail for account statements and bills, and otherwise get their hands on what they needed to pull together our estate. Today much of that is either delivered via email, stored in the cloud or kept in a folder on our computer. That means it's probably protected by passwords--for the accounts themselves as well as for our smartphones, laptops, email and social media accounts (where sentimentally precious photographs may be stored). Gaining access to those privacy-protected accounts could cost our estate time and money.
All of which means access to the digital side of our estate should be part of the 40/70 list. But not necessarily, estate planners say, part of our will. That's because wills are changed infrequently--or at least they should be--while online info needs regular updating, especially when we "forget" a password and have to change it, yet again.
