Moms Guide to Technology

A hazy day on the lake

Here’s a summer project to enhance your relationship with your teens and to enhance their online research and budgeting skills. 

 The fact is, teens’ digital life is dominated by texting & gaming. While more than half share content online, the girls are most likely to post pictures and the boys are more like ly to post videos.  

While teens love the internet, they spend far less time browsing there than adults.  Are they getting as much out of the internet as the time they are putting in?  Do they see the correlation between what they do online [their digital life] and what they can do in their analog life?  Here’s an idea for a practical exercise in how the internet can help them make plans and how you can all enjoy family time together.  Allow your kids to plan a summer family getaway.  Let THEM make the plan, with as few limitations as you are comfortable with and let their imaginations go wild. 

There’s lots of help online to plan a vacation with teens, just search “Teen Travel”.   Or Put it in their hands and let them plan a getaway from scratch.  Some things to consider:

• Pick the weekend, including days & dates, up front.  When you go makes a difference in availability, rates, etc.  This has to be one of the basic guidelines.  For example, you might say, leaving Thursday, July 29^th at 7pm and returning Sunday, August first at 7pm.  Let them know they don’t have to use the whole time [may want to save a night’s hotel stay by leaving Friday morning], but that’s the ‘vacation’ window.
• Give them a budget.  Make it realistic.  This will be the single most important driver to the getaway they choose.  Depending on the age of the ids, you may want to give them clearer guidelines on the budget which can help:
• Is it a competition or a team project.  Decide if you want each person to come up with their own idea to research, budget and present to the group.  The advantages are that you will get more choices and you may want to vote on one for this trip and hold onto the others for future getaways.  Or you may want to use this as a team-building exercise and have each kid assigned a part of the trip to research and report back to the group. In any case, make it THEIR project.  Mom should not be leading the project/assigning tasks. 
• Parents always have veto power.  State that right up front.  It’s still your job to say yeah or nay, considering family finances, safety and your goals as a family.  Use this veto power sparingly. 

 Budgeting  — This is one thing they may never have done before.  They’ll need basic guidance.  The budget will be key in determining whether they choose flying the Concord to France or driving to a nearby lake, or something in between.  Give them an outline like this:

 Walk them through some of the things they’ll need to look up online:

• Mapquest a driving vacation.  How far is it?  What’s the average price of gas?  How many miles to the gallon.  Multiply to find the cost.
• Are pictures available that they can show to the rest of the family when they make their presentation? [If everyone is making their own plan?]
• Activities you can do when you get there.
• What’s the ‘Plan B’?  If they pick an amusement park, what else is there to do in the area if it pours rain that weekend?
• Don’t forget the multiplication.  If the admission to an attraction is $40 and there are 4 people going on the trip, they’ll have to plan for $160 not $40 for the activity.
• Suggest they make notes on additional considerations.  For example, if their plan involves fishing, do you need fishing licenses and what will that cost.  Will you pack the tent or bring the tent?  If they want to rent a lake house, what’s the security deposit? 

 Finally, don’t start the project unless you are willing to follow through.  This is a teaching/learning opportunity with the bonus benefit of some great family time at the conclusion. We recently took an weekend lake trip, which was about 4 hours drive from our house.  We found an inexpensive hotel that took pets, it was clean and had a friendly staff, indoor pool open until 11pm with a free breakfast in the morning.  We stayed 2 nights and rented a pontoon boat one day [no dogs allowed] and stayed out on the lake all day, swimming and fishing, talking and playing cards.  A quick getaway that we all agreed was the best vacation we had in a while.   Enjoy your family.

When the talk around the water cooler or in the school hallways is last night’s TV show, nobody wants to be on the outside of the conversation.

LOST: program finale

That’s why and average of 13.5 million viewers tuned in for the season finale of LOST. Sure, many had followed since the beginning but nobody wanted to be clueless around the lunch table the next day. Staying in the loop is about to get easier.

Tunerfish was announced at TechCrunch Disrupted in New York. It will be a new social network building community around TV viewing. Users post what they’re watching on television.

I tried to do that during LOST on Sunday with facebook. Some of my “friends” complained that they were DVR-ing and didn’t want me to be “the spoiler. I long for the days of my youth when I would sit among my 8 siblings watching a show. TV viewing was not a passive experience in our house. And your teens may like the idea because they’re coming of age in the digital/real-time world. They interact on everything.

This new social network will be both a web site and a mobile app. The application will track trends in viewing. In the world of adolescent angst, they will know if their friends are also watching and maybe what they think. The rebels will know who, if anyone is with them on the show nobody watches. Maybe the will have an easier time mobilizing to save a show set for extinction. I will finally find out if anyone watched “Ru Paul’s Drag Race”.

I have not seen it in action. Early reports say you can recommend shows to your friends, you can share material, through links to youtube, vimeo and my personal favorite, hulu. While there is nothing to see yet, you can go to the Tunerfish site and give them your email address and they’ll let you know when it’s up and running.

“Why?” you ask. I am a TV junkie. I suppose there are enough of us to make it worth doing. More than that, Tunerfish is developed by Plaxo. Plaxo is the online version of the rolodex, so they have basic online networking experience. More importantly, Plaxo is owned by Comcast, the cable, internet phone, television people. It’s a natural fit and potentially a way to get you to spend more money with them. I’m not saying they’ll charge you to join the social network. But don’t be surprised to get there and find they try to entice you to their pay-per-view, watch their shows, and contribute to their own ratings system. Perhaps the holy grail of social networking: gathering information about you so that they can turn it into money.

Readers know I am a big fan of a digital life. And I love a social network. As always, I throw up the caution flag. This gives you another chance to talk to your kids about what information they may want to share.   Blanket prohibitions won’t work with teens, like I have to tell you that.  Try out the site. Pay attention to privacy issues.  Then talk to your kids.

And maybe it’s time to re-evaluate the television watching rules at your house. The kids are getting older and the “No TV on a school night” rule is probably obsolete. The fact is, TV is not a box in the family room anymore. TV plays on their phone, the computer. And they are older. It’s more difficult to control. Perhaps a better course is to talk about the pitfalls and give them tools to make good decisions for themselves.

Some ideas of what to include in your house rules:
• Plug in the phones in a central location each night, away from the bedrooms. Be out of touch during sleep hours.

central location for cell phone charging

• Monitor balance of physical activity with time in front of any box: tv, computer, texting,etc.
• Manners are much the same in digital life as in real life. Don’t play with your phone when others think you are involved in a conversation with them, etc.

Good Manners never go out of Style.

And if you have a few minutes, check out Tech Crunch: for all the latest about what’s happening with technology standard-bearers as well as those breaking new ground. They have all gathered in the Big Apple to launch new tech companies and announce new ideas.
As for what I am watching on TV, I’ll let you know once we hook up on Tunerfish!

I never went to Prom back in high school.  So, I remain fascinated with the whole thing.  Now that it’s here, I am jumping on the bandwagon of the Virtual Prom.

Retailers know the bucks are flowing at prom time.  Honestly the cost of things is out of hand.  Retail marketers always use every tool in their toolbox to recruit those prom dollars.  Now, getting kids where they live means going online!

Seventeen, long the magazine to flip through to find the perfect dress, has some JC Penney ‘How To” videos.  JC Penny is also hoping to capture prom shoppers with a Fan Page on Facebook.  It has 810,330 fans.  Why?    JC Penney tips on prom dresses

I didn’t see a coupon or incentive.  It’s the same stuff you would see on their web site, minus the shopping.  It’s stale and stagnant and I can’t imagine how it could draw nearly a million fans, muchless hold their attention.

An impressive & creative approach to getting the prom-goers attention is what Men’s Warehouse is doing at virtualprom.com.  All I can say is, “groovy”.  [Now if that doesn’t get me kicked out of the virtual prom, I don’t know what will!]

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I drove by the playground the other evening.  It was empty.  No kids on the swings, the monkey bars nor ‘shirts v skins’ on the basketball court.  Who took the kids off the playground?

It was after dinner, the time when parents are winding down, preparing for the next day. Kids don’t just run off to the play with friends.  Today’s mom can’t say, “be home by dark”, like our moms did.  Concern for their safety took the kids off the playground.

Let’s think of social media as the new playground where young people go to interact and develop social skills.  Let’s help them develop skills, like you did when you showed them to pump their knees to make the swing ‘go’.

Be in the space so you know what’s happening.  But like the playground, it’s bad form for mom or dad to step in on every kid interaction.  They’ll never be safe to go it alone.

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Remember when you gave the merchant money and they gave you a product or service?  Well, those days are dwindling … even faster since the new release of Paypal’s iphone app called “ Send Money”.   And even if you ‘old school’ won’t do it, you need to know enough to tell your kids about how it impacts budgeting and banking.

The beauty of apps, of the iphone, is that you have everything in the palm of your hand.  You don’t have to go home to check online.  You don’t have to pay $1.99 for directory assistance… and so on.

I already use my phone [not an iphone] to check my bank balances, it sends me balance alerts and updates and reminders to pay bills.  Smart phones are handy.

And there’s money in that convenience …

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I know I went AWOL for a few days.  My sister and her kids are visiting from Illinois.  It has also prompted frequent weekday visits from my nieces down the street.  Any mom of teens will tell you, given the choice to hug and cuddle with little nieces and nephews or write about digital life, there is no choice.  Life is for living!

But digital life online goes on and I want to talk about GAMING!

Timing:  The Game Development Conference is going on in San Francisco.   Now, I am no gamer.  We need to know about gaming because that’s what our kids are doing.

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If you work with kids and are not on Facebook, it’s a mistake.

Teens live in a digital world.  Most adults who have not stepped into that world hold back because:   It’s too hard & I’m too busy OR Professional protection.  It’s not hard, it doesn’t have to be time consuming if you just set aside an hour each day.  And it won’t ruin your career if you do it right.

Learning to work out social norms is a natural part of coming of age.  Those natural social interactions are happening in a digital way now.  It doesn’t change the need for role models to provide guidance, support and encouragement.  I heard a speaker last week who made a compelling case that kids are losing access to caring, supportive and guiding adults.  Despite what you hear on TV, the online world is NOT only molesters and freaks. But it needs more caring adults & role models.

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You won’t hear your kids say they’re keeping their current phone, but most of my friends do.  Oh, parents will talk about the iPhone; but in the end, there are more important things that buying the fishing app and increasing the dreaded cell bill.

We’re living our adult lives post-telephone deregulation.  That means we got in the habit of a phone where we pay one fee for unlimited local calling.  As we hit our professional stride, the phone/cable companies offered us unlimited long-distance calling from our home phones.   We like to know what things are going to cost us before we use them.  Cell service doesn’t work that way.  The sales people will walk you through the ‘plans’.  But cell phone charges are NOT fixed, so don’t get caught in that false sense of security.

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Thanks for visiting the Moms Guide to Technology blog.

I’m guessing you are a mom, too.  So, I don’t have to tell you that when you’re a mom, there’ s nothing more important than the kids.   Keeping up with their schedules and my work and my husband has more than eaten up 18+ hours a day.  So, I am never surprised when parents confess they can’t  find time to step across the threshold of life to the online, multimedia world.  Even if “too busy” is just a mask for fearful, I understand.  We are a new generation of parents.  Tecnology is emerging at a rate exponentially faster than my parents could have imagined.  My parents never learned to program the VCR.  They just waited until the kids moved out to watch whatever they wanted.  Our generation will not skate by avoiding the interface with technology.

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