healingways
Unexpected Upside W
Media Gadgets Can Boost Family Connections by Lisa Marshall
itness a gadget-obsessed fam- ily at the dinner table and it is easy to conclude that tech- nology is fracturing family life: Mom’s emailing her boss; Dad’s watching a YouTube video on his tablet; sister’s texting her boyfriend; and little brother is playing Angry Birds on his smart phone. No one is talking with each other. But dysfunctional dinner habits aside, it appears cell and Internet tech- nologies haven’t turned out to be as harmful as once predicted. “When we started this research, the dominant thought was that Inter- net technology would make us lonely, socially isolated and threaten our family lives,” says Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Research Center’s Internet & Ameri- can Life Project. “We have been asking people about this now for 12 years in our surveys and the dominant answer is ‘Actually, we feel more connected with our families than we did before.’” Web-conferencing systems like Skype have enabled family members across the globe to chat for free and also see each other. Social networking
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sites like Facebook have enabled previ- ously out-of-touch siblings to share photos and revive contact. According to Pew studies since 2008, cell phones have led married couples to talk more during the day and parents to maintain more open lines of communication with their kids.
“There always seems to be anxiety in raising a teen, and now a lot of that can be alleviated,” says Larry Rosen, Ph.D., a research psychologist at Cali- fornia State University and author of Me, MySpace, and I: Parenting the Net Generation. “A scared mom or dad can text their kid, saying ‘R U OK?’ and get a one-word answer back, whereas before that kid would have had to find a pay phone, maybe wouldn’t have done it and Mom and Dad would have panicked.” Rosen’s own research suggests that social networking can actually teach teens to be more empathetic, a trait that enhances their bonds with family mem- bers. For example, a cousin will post on Facebook that her cat died, then the teen responds warmly and their bond tightens. The teen gains empathy useful
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