New Age Parenting

I've come to the conclusion that life as we know it has come to an end. In the near future, we will be a civilization spawned of surrogates and Petrie dish specimens after artificial insemination, or else, cloning. Thus, biological parents will be no more. Rather, parenting will be done via our various electronic tools.

Television will provide examples of how we should deal with others, acceptable language, style, protocols in business professionalism and decorum, ethics. Radio will no longer exist as we will be visually driven, not audio.

But one form of traditional interaction will continue to exist, albeit in modified version and probably also with a screen. That will be via phone -- cell phone. And the cell phone will become the new, virtual parent.

Have you thought about how amenable your calls are to being picked up by others or intercepted by some monitoring agency? What do parents do when they suspect that their kids are talking to someone they shouldn't or planning to do something that's not such a great idea? Parents sometimes put time limits on calls, as well. And that is where the cell phone is starting to prove itself as the able parent in the here and now.

The ultimate new age parent will be the cell phone. When you've talked too long, the parent has a simple and very effective way of dealing with the situation. Drop the call. If you try to re-initiate the call in order to continue it, the parent has another very simple and effective solution. Drop the call after five to ten minutes. And if you're foolhardy enough to try to re-initiate the call a second time, the parent will do one of two things, both of which are a tacit message that says (very firmly), "I said 'no.'" The technique is to either drop the call after a few seconds of connection or not allow the call to go through at all.