I recently finished a book by one of my favorite authors, Talking to Strangers, by Malcolm Gladwell. It’s a non-fiction book about the difficulty in human communication. The premise of the book is that not only are we bad at talking to strangers and recognizing what they’re really meaning when we talk to each other, but we’re also bad at the non-verbal communication, the body language cues that people give off.
The book examines why spies can go undetected for so long, and why financial scams cost people their life savings and why normal police traffic stops go so horribly and sometimes tragically wrong. I was feeling quite satisfied, and I admit just a little bit smarter than I was before I read this book, when I noticed my teenage son, face buried in his phone and thumb scrolling at a rapid pace across the screen, and I realized if Mr. Gladwell really wanted to pen a best seller, than his next book could be called Talking to a Teenager.
I have the same conversation with my son every night. It happens approximately 3 minutes after I walk through the door from work.
“How was school?”
“Fine”
“Any homework?”
“Some”
“What’s new?”
“Nothin”
“Any problems I need to know about?”
“No”
From this 20 second conversation, I’ve determined everything is going good in my sons life. I’m fairly confident about this because I know that if something was really wrong, my wife would already know about it and would have told me before I had even shut the door.
Or take this conversation I had with him as I prepared the shopping list last weekend.
“Do you need granola bars?”
“mmm, mmh, mmeh”
Three sounds each one an octave higher than the one before. I know this means an affirmative response and he definitely needs granola bars.
“How about fruit snacks?”
“mmh, mmmgr, mggr”
Also three sounds, but each one an octave lower than the one before, a big negative on the fruit snacks.
The real difficulty happens when he actually does try to speak. He has a tendency to say yah and nah a lot and they frequently sound the same.
Lets be honest, the real problem with communicating with teenagers these days is the competition from their phone. Nothing in their immediate vicinity is as interesting as whats on their phone. The Facebook, the Snapchat, the YouTube, Twitter and Instagram, and there’s probably a whole bunch of new apps I don’t even know about. Oh and the TIK TOK…. so much tik tokking going on.
Back when I was a child it was the TV that parents worried about. What were we watching and how much time we spent in front of it. Then the video games came along with the dire predictions that too much time playing video games was going to ruin children. Now the cell phone, a mobile device that acts as a TV and a gaming system and so much more, so very much more. Where in my childhood, my parents could turn off the TV thereby limiting our exposure to the programming and also to video games and shoo us outside, now a days the phone fits right in their pocket. Kids go outside today and look at their phones, they get together with friends and look at their phones, often not even speaking to their friends unless they need to share a video.
I often wonder if this generation of kids are going to have bad necks from always looking down at their phone, and one thumb grotesquely larger than the other from scrolling with it. In fact, in the future that thumb will probably have a name, the scrolling thumb.
But it’s not just the teenagers, it’s everyone. Kids learn from the people around them, yes their friends but also from adults. People are texting and driving, walking and watching YouTube, Tweeting when they should be talking to the people in front of them. Do you take your phone into a restaurant when having dinner with other people? Do you look at your phone more than one time during dinner?
I often think of my son as a big cat. Much like a cat, he ignores us for most of the day disappearing into his room to sleep ungodly amounts of hours, only to reappear and ignore us some more until he wants to be fed. And then finally when he’s well fed and rested, he’ll pay attention to us only if we’re amusing enough to him to drag him away from his phone. Much like you have to dangle something interesting in front of a cat to get their attention, like a piece of string, we have to dangle something more interesting than his phone in front of him.
Is talking to teenagers difficult? Yes, but no more so than it was for our parents when we were teenagers, just different. Is there any secrets in getting your teenager to open up to you about what’s happening in their life…no, but I’ve found that if you talk about things there doing, things they’re interested in that, that’s a good starting point.
And if that doesn’t work, ask to do a Tik Tok with them….oh, so much Tik Tokking.
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