Answer your *#$%in' PHONE!!!

I think about "connectedness" a lot. Most would agree it's a great thing. We've all been in situations in which we very nearly dropped to our knees in public to praise God for cell phones. Whether it's calling from the store for a vital piece of information off that notepad on the fridge, or calling AAA from the side of the road with a flat tire, cell phones are darn handy. And nowadays, they're even handier! GPS navigation, weather reports, internet access, e-mail on your hip... most of us would agree that it's becoming difficult to live without one (myself most definitely included).

However, I'm pretty sure we've also been on both sides of this irritating scenario... the one in which someone isn't answering their *%#& PHONE!!! You're either (a) the person calling, who just knows that this person should be answering, or (b) the person not answering, feeling perfectly justified in just not answering your phone at this particular moment because, darnit, you're in the middle of something (god forbid)! But in the age of perpetual connectedness, we're all expected to be at the world's beck and call, and so we catch crap for not answering. When we don't answer, the caller either gets irritated or worried. If said caller happens to be your mom or your wife, you can turn on your police scanner and listen for the missing persons report that will soon go out over the airwaves! Surely, if we're not answering, there must be something terribly wrong.

My husband is a helpless victim of involuntary ringtone response syndrome (I just made that up... like it?!). He can't help it... he has to answer. It doesn't matter if we're eating dinner (even at a restaurant), watching a movie, or in the middle of a conversation. He's convinced that the one time he doesn't answer, it'll be someone calling with an emergency. It's highly irritating. My response, of course, is the old "if it's an emergency they'll leave a message or keep calling", but apparently that's not good enough. He also answers unknown numbers, which I refuse to do (unless I know that I'm expecting an important call from someone that isn't in my contacts). And his obsession extends to my phone, too! When some number I don't recognize calls my phone, he wants to answer it and find out who it is, because he knows I won't. I don't know if it's unrestrainable curiosity or what, but he actually tries to wrestle my phone from me sometimes! Now, let me add that I KNOW that an unknown number could very well be an emergency, but I always check for a voicemail after I ignore a call, to find out if it was something important. Take home message: If you have an emergency and need to get ahold of me from a different number, leave a message ;]

I'm writing about all this because it irritates me. While I love my cell phone, love being able to stay in touch all the time and am a texting fiend, I also feel that I reserve the right to be out of contact for a minute if I so choose. I hate that I have to feel guilty for not answering my phone, because I'm probably making someone worry about me. I loathe the expectations that cell phones place on us and our personal lives - that we should be available at any moment to drop what we're doing and answer a call or a text or an e-mail. Many employers send their employees home with Blackberrys for that very purpose - so that they can always be accessible. I, for one, think that we owe it to ourselves and our families to back off the "connectedness" during certain times of the day. We owe our families our undivided attention from time to time! I know that many families have already instituted "no cell phone" rules for dinnertime and perhaps other times as well, but so many of us are just too addicted (not naming any names, sweetheart!) to let go.

The worst part is that children are now growing up in this culture of connectedness, and are not only suffering from the infiltration of work life into home life as we adults become more and more "connected", but are learning the same behaviors. We're giving our children cell phones at younger and younger ages, even smartphones (I once watched a middle school-aged girl look up the meaning of "4/20" from the church nursery, where she was supposed to be volunteering with the kids... Oye), which not only gives them largely unsupervised access to the internet any time of the day or night (case in point, 4/20 at church!) but also ushers them into this crazy world of connectedness far too soon. It becomes a part of their world - as natural as breathing - and it's only going to be compounded through the generations.

I don't think that this is happening simply because kids are begging for phones. I think that our consumerism is largely fear-driven these days (as are many aspects of our lives, but I won't get into the heavy politics here!), and we feel the need to extend that connectedness to our children for our own sake. What if they need a ride home from school? What if they're out somewhere with a friend and suddenly need me? What if soccer practice ends early? To me, the answers to those questions are obvious. Now, quick aside, I'm all for progress - I don't buy into the argument that if our parents did something a certain way 30 years ago and we're still alive, it should still be good enough for parenting today. Things change, progress is made, and it's largely to the benefit of our children. But in this case I'll say it anyway... "In my day," if I needed a ride home from school, I went to the secretary's office and asked to call my mom. If I was with a friend and needed my mom, I would've asked my friend's mom to call my mom (because I wouldn't have been out at a mall or someplace with a friend with no parental supervision before I was old enough to figure out a payphone, but that's yet another parenting discussion for another day!). You know what I'm saying? Our kids don't need cell phones. We just need to be connected to them 24 hours a day.

Now, I'm no mother, so I can't say that I know what it's like to send your child out in a car with another parent or to leave them someplace for a sleepover. I don't know that fear and worry yet, so I'll try not to judge. But I really believe that cell phones are doing more harm than good these days, at least as far as children are concerned (and maybe even for adults, but I'll be the first to admit that my phone ain't goin' nowhere!). I shudder to think of the things I'll be dealing with when my children are old enough to understand more about the world around them, and I wonder when I'll start being nagged about a cell phone. Of course, cell phones will probably be the least of my worries by that point, Lord knows. Ugh. This world. I tell ya.

So what do you think? Have you considered when you'll give your children cell phones? How do you feel about cell phones in your own life?