May 16, 2005 – Staying Relevant to Grandchildren

May 16, 2005 – Staying Relevant to Grandchildren

As I played baseball with my grandson MJ last Saturday I recalled playing baseball as a youngster in fifth and sixth grade on a little league team. We lived in Puerto Rico on Ft. Buchanan Army Base just outside of San Juan—a middle-American small town on the northern shore of this small Greater Antilles Island. The place I lived back then had much in common with Pleasanton where my grandson is growing up. However, the world MJ is joining is a world quite different from the world I knew as a child. When I was eight, a bit older than him, television was still in its infancy. Color TVs were yet to come. The 78-RPM record was being replaced by the 33-1/3rd-LP (long playing) vinyl record and for the teenager of the day, there was the 45-RPM record—the dawn of rock and roll was just breaking the horizon with Elvis Presley the pop star of the day. The term “high fidelity” had entered the English language to distinguish lesser quality audio reproduction with the state-of-the-art phonographs being marketed to the masses. The term “stereo” was yet to come. The radio and telephone were just over a half-century old. And computers had just come into the world during the Second World War.

By contrast, MJ inherits a world where there is more mass media than anyone can consume in the course of a day, a week, a month, a year, a lifetime even. From the time he was born, MJ has being inundated with stimulation. The television set in most households, MJ’s included, is on from the time everyone wakes in the morning until they all fall asleep at night—my youngest daughter and granddaughter, have a habit of falling asleep to Conan O’Brien on late night television. MJ’s house also contains four computers: a Macintosh, his mother uses, a notebook PC his dad’s office provides, and two tangerine Apple ibooks that each of our grandchildren uses for playing games. MJ’s home also contains TiVo, Comcast cable with a few dozen free channels as well as one premium package and on demand movies, a DVD player, and a VCS cassette recorder, not to mention a library of DVDs and video cassettes with movies and television shows for parents and children. MJ’s house has two telephone lines, one with a cordless phone with speakerphone in handset and base station and the other with a fax connection. High-speed broadband access is provided by the cable company, which is definitely faster than the SBC DSL connection I have. Finally, both MJ and his sister EM have a large collection of toys, traditional—dolls and stuffed animals; small trucks, cars, and trains; etc. as well as electronic—Leap Pads, and a variety of V-Tech gadgets. And there are children books, from those intended for the very young all the way to those aimed at the adolescent. Within MJ’s home is enough activity to fill every waking minute of our grandchildren’s lives.

What kind of person will all this stimulation produce? Will it produce someone with a mild to severe case of environmentally induced attention deficit disorder? If MJ’s mother is any indication, it will produce a generation of multi-taskers: carrying on a phone conversation while driving a car and reading directions from a Yahoo map printout, while drinking a Drive-Thru Starbuck Latte. In addition, MJ may be a person who is continuously connected to a circle of friends and acquaintances via instant messaging, e-mail, and always-on pagers and cell phones, thus accessible, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for his entire lifetime.

My wife and I were reminiscing about our childhood and recalling when there was no school how we left home early in the morning and went out to play for the whole day. She and her friends would roam as far as the banks of the nearby River Clyde from her home in Carmyle, a 13th Century Scottish village southeast of Glasgow that was the home of the Clyde Ironworks—where her father worked—when she was growing up. Her stimulation and mine was the world around us, insect bites, skinned knees, trees that had to be climbed, and mischievous pranks that tested the limits of what we were allowed to do.

MJ and his sister gets driven everywhere they have to go outside of home. The backyards of most suburban homes in Northern California are barely large enough to contain the energy of a three-year old like MJ. He needs a park with long expanses of open space to run unchecked for as long as his short little legs will tolerate. Such freedom requires the full-time supervision of an adult, who would be otherwise earning a salary to keep up with the escalating cost of living in this modern world of ours. The result of course is that most children today are given over to the electronic media that surrounds them: DVDs that feature their favorite characters: Dora, Sponge Bob, the Wiggles, all the Disney characters, etc.

Neither the world of his grandparents nor his world is better or worse. They are just different, each with a unique set of challenges that mold the way we each see the world around us. These unique life experiences are also what separate us one generation from the next. The division isn’t so sharp between the baby boomer generation and its off springs—our two daughters. The language of our two worlds are similar enough that we can communicate—though there are ample examples where parent and child say the same words but each understands different meanings. That chasm will only increase between grandparent and grandchild. The challenge for the big people is to somehow learn enough of our grandchildren’s language so as to stay relevant to them.