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Teenagers have a natural affinity for telephones. The phone, which was largely ignored or avoided in early childhood, is now treated as if it were a natural appendage of their bodies, an electronic extension of their mouths and ears. There is good reason for this newfound attraction, for there is much more to teenage telephone use than what parents often perceive as idle jabbering.
One study done about a decade ago found that girls in the fifth
and sixth grades averaged 30 minutes per week on the telephone.
Boys that age averaged 15 minutes per week. By the time they reached
ninth grade, girls were spending 180 minutes per week and boys were
spending 50 minutes per week on the phone. (My friends who have
teenage girls tell me that those figures are low!)
Teenagers use telephones differently than both younger children and adults. While an adult may use the phone to call a stranger or someone he or she has not seen for a long time, teenagers often feel awkward and uncomfortable with such conversations. Instead, they use the telephone to talk with the very people they've been with all day. Parents often find this confusing. Why would a fourteen-year-old girl, for example, come home from a school dance and immediately call her friends (who all had been to the same dance) to recount in great detail what had happened less than an hour before?
The answer is reflected in the developmental issues teenagers are facing throughout puberty. They are constantly trying to discover who they are, who they should be, and how they compare with others. The telephone is an ideal tool for tackling such questions, for it provides intimacy as well as a certain amount of anonymity. The teenager who calls up her friends immediately after a dance is asking, in effect, "Did you see this event the way I saw it? Are my perceptions accurate? Am I interpreting the world in the same way as my friends?"
Part of the increase in telephone use by teenagers parallels a general increase in the amount of time adolescents spend in all types of talking. Younger children spend much of their time outside school playing and little time sitting down and speaking to each other. By the time they reach adolescence, that pattern of activities begins to change. They feel a much greater need to talk with someone their own age who's going through the same experiences. They also have a much greater ability to talk about abstract issues. Those new and more sophisticated thinking skills make talking much more interesting and attractive.
The telephone's unique combination of intimacy and privacy allows adolescents to test their new skills and new areas of adult behavior without risking as much embarrassment as they would in person. They don't have to be as conscious of their facial expressions and their gestures as they do in person. That can make the telephone a powerful and very helpful tool for teenagers who are shy. The boy who feels too uncomfortable to talk to a particular girl in the school hallway for fear of looking foolish or otherwise embarrassing himself in public may feel less exposed and vulnerable on the telephone. That is why many teenagers use it as a way to ease themselves into dating. (E-mail and web-based chat session may serve the same purpose, but are less intimate.)
Here are several guidelines to help parents handle their adolescents' increasing use of the telephone:
- Help teenagers understand that telephone use is a privilege, not a right. It's sometimes very effective to make telephone use contingent upon certain behaviors, such as finishing chores at home.
- Set limits on lengths of calls and hours for telephone use, but make sure they're realistic. Teenagers often benefit greatly from conversations that parents sometimes see as trivial. Although it may be expedient to get your children their own telephone line--especially if you have several teenagers--there are also advantages to sharing the line with the family since they must learn to cooperate with the rest of the family.
- If you arrange for a separate telephone line for your children, set up clears rules for its use. Many parents find that their children's friends quickly learn to call the parents' phone number if the children's line is busy, leading to a resurrection of the problem that made the family pay for the extra line in the first place.
- Set up a system for paying the telephone bill, especially long-distance
charges. Will your children have to pay for all their long-distance
calls or only for those that aren't made to relatives? Will they
be able to use the telephone on "credit" from you? What
happens if they can't pay their contribution when it's due? Having
partial responsibility for a monthly telephone bill is an excellent
way to ease teenagers into the autonomy they'll need when they
leave home.
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