Posted by Naomi de la Torre on Dec.15, 2009

©iStockphoto.com - sjlocke

My father finally crawled out from under his rock and purchased a cell phone. For years, he resisted. He was adamant and philosophically against them. “Cell phones are ridiculous! They’re absurd!” he proclaimed, the blood rising to his face. “Why do I need to carry a phone everywhere I go? There is no need for such urgent communication. If someone needs to tell me something, my home phone is good enough.”

He had a point, I thought. Except for emergencies. But my father said that he had never had an emergency he couldn’t handle in his past 60 years without a cell phone, so why should he start now?
He finally succumbed for logistical reasons. He and my stepmother own several homes in different locations. It was cheaper to have one cell phone rather than several landlines. Funny enough, now that he’s on board with cell phones, he is the easiest person to reach on the planet. He always answers his phone and even harasses me about why I don’t answer mine more often.

He still refuses to text, however. “Texting is ridiculous and absurd!” he says. “Why not just pick up the phone and have a real conversation?” It’s beyond his comprehension, he says. I say texting is just a pain in the butt. It takes too long and hurts my fingers. But I would probably like it better if I had a fancy phone with a keyboard.

I think it’s the generational divide. My dad is actually quite hip for his generation. He’s on the up‘n‘up with lots of technology that I can’t even pronounce or comprehend. But each generation has it’s own take on things and it’s the next generation’s duty to perceive the last one as outdated, antiquated, and backwards.

For example, the other day, I was trying to figure out how to play a game called Bubble Popper on my husband’s Blackberry-style cell phone. As I sat there struggling with the buttons, my five-year-old Nino came over and said, “Look, Mami. It’s easy. Let me show you how.”

And like a little professor, he walked me step-by-step through the process. Meanwhile, my two-year-old Diego noticed what we were doing. “Popus! (his pronunciation of Bubble Popper) he proclaimed. Then he snatched the stylus out of my hand and began to play.

A second later, he stopped. He looked at me pointedly and said, “Mami. Popus. Easy.” He gave me such a knowing look that I felt wholly judged by his assessment. Even if he was communicating in monosyllabic one-word sentences, his message was clear. I am an old doofus loser who can’t even manage to keep up with technology my two-year-old is comfortable using.

And I thought to myself, how did this happen? I’m certainly no technological wizard, but until that moment, I had never felt truly old and outdated. Was this the beginning of the generational divide in our family? Would my children soon make fun of me behind my back because of my prehistoric fashion sense, lack of technological prowess, and un-hip turns of phrase?

And anyway, how is it possible that both my children—one of whom just learned to tie his shoes and the other who doesn’t even use the toilet yet—know how to work my husband’s cell phone better than I do? Is it the same reason why they are capable of programming the DVD player and the cable box better than I? Nino recently figured out how to work my husband’s iPod own his own, which was also humbling, because I needed several excruciating half-hour lessons to halfway-learn. And I’m not positive, but I think that Nino might have MySpace and Facebook accounts that he is hiding from me.

The truth is, even if I was average or advanced in my technological abilities for someone of my generation, I would never be a match for the children of the next generation. Generation Z or iGeneration, as they are fittingly called, is being raised by technology. They are growing up in a world that didn’t even exist when I was a child.

Whenever Nino has a question that I can’t answer for him, before I have even finished explaining that I don’t know and that we should look it up, he’s off and running. “It’s okay!” he shouts as he dashes down the hall. “I’ll just look it up on the Internet.”

I remember spending hours pouring over dusty, smelly encyclopedias in the public library as a child, trying to figure out the life cycle of the frog or the names of all the dinosaurs that lived during the Jurassic Era. I remember hiding out in the bookracks with my classmates while chewing contraband gum and hoping we wouldn’t get caught by the  librarian with the foot-high beehive, who smelled of mothballs and had a penchant for pinching children who disobeyed her.

Will my children ever have those experiences? Or will they do all their research in virtual libraries in cyberspace? Will they make friends with kids on our block or will they befriend virtual strangers in chat rooms? Will they meet their future wives while at a grocery store or coffee shop or nightclub? Or will they use online dating/networking sites to meet potential mates?

When I ask myself these questions, I feel like my 98-year-old great-grandma who saved tin-foil shards, infinitesimally small scraps of paper, shredded nylons, and expired candy in her dresser drawers until she passed away in 1984 because she couldn’t let go of her experience of having lived through the Great Depression.

But was she wrong? Probably not. Frugalness is a great quality. We just didn’t understand her in the Eighties when we could buy any one of those useless things she had so scrupulously saved brand new for just 99 cents at Walgreen’s. But now that recycling and eco-friendly behavior is trendy again, she could be a national hero for all the random things she managed to stow away in her five-foot tall dresser.

I don’t know if I am just being nostalgic when I feel slightly sad thinking of my kids growing up in a world that is sometimes more virtual than real. I try and control the amount of media exposure they have, but short of moving to a wood cabin in the mountains with no electricity, they will be exposed to a lot more technology and media throughout their lives than I can ever control or even imagine.

Why is it that each generation feels so convinced of their ideology? Why do we look at our parents and grandparents with their outdated hairstyles and clothes, their inability to accept new technology, their old-fashioned manners and way of doing things—and feel superior? Are we really better because we know that jeans that went past your belly button went out 15 years ago? Or are we just as trapped inside the passing trends and permutations of our current culture?

I tend to think that each generation makes some actual advances, but also manages to forget some of the real wisdom of the past. I just wasn’t expecting my turn to be the old-fashioned, mothball-smelling, child-pinching, beehive-wearing lady to arrive so soon.

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Posted under Family, GDM Baby.