Raymond Morel 4401 days ago
"It started with our children. Trying to get them to study without the TV and radio was rarely successful. (We succeeded—temporarily—when the house had been struck by lightning and almost all the household electronics were “fried.”) Trying to concentrate with the stereo on drove us crazy, but didn’t seem to have any impact on them. None of our dire predictions about poor grades materialized. We probably rented as many games from Blockbuster as we did videos. At one point we thought we’d better find out what these games were all about. They let us try a game—something to do with Grand Prix auto racing. We both drove the car right into the wall. One dose of humiliation was enough to convince us that our visual-spatial skills would be no match for theirs, no matter how much we practiced.
The youngest used to arrive home after school and shout, “Hi, Mom, I’m home. Are you on the Internet?” Those were the days of dial-up, of course. I had to get offline so he could get on. He wouldn’t go outside with his friends until he’d checked e-mail and chatted with his online pals. It seemed odd, but to many parents, the teenage years are just that—odd."