News Regarding the Center
A Parent's Guide to Teenspeak by Text Message
New York Times, Week in Review
November 26, 2006
Teenagers being teenagers, though, the more parents invade their private space, the faster they will seek new ways of talking to friends in ways moms and dads cannot fathom.
"In modern societies, teens want to have their own cultures," said James E. Katz, a professor of communications at Rutgers University. "When the dominant culture rushes into teen domains, the teens create new domains that exclude the parental grip."
Perhaps it is the gloss of time, but maybe teaching parents how to communicate in cellphone slang is the modern equivalent of parents using the toys of yesteryear to bond with their children. Dads gave boys train sets not only to foster their interest in engineering but to pass along their nostalgia for the steam engine.
Cheap, readily available and increasingly complex electronics have blurred the distinction between the generations further, some say, because now teenagers are increasingly determining the ground rules for using devices that were once solely the province of adults.
Thanks to technology like cellphones, said Gary Cross, a historian at Penn State University who studies childhood, "we see this return to this earlier world where kids are not trained to be adults, but where adults and kids mingle and where kids are precocious and adults are childish."
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