My biological clock is digital
Posted By Hinda Mandell on January 11, 2010
This article was cross-posted with the Forward’s Sisterhood Blog.
As if us single ladies didn’t have enough pressure to deal with. (No, mom, I would not like to meet the emcee from the Goldenblatt’s Chanukah party.) We now have this to consider: It’s not only our biological clocks that are ferociously ticking before our female hardware is incapable of conceiving. That concern is oh-so 1990s. Try this on for size: If we don’t have a kid soon – as in now – we may be too old to technologically connect with our tot, who will be born twiddling an iPhone.
But maybe I’m being overly sensitive.
In Sunday’s New York Times, Brad Stone wrote about a growing technology gap not only between parents and their toddlers, but also the “mini-generation gaps” between youngsters on the technological front. Two-year-olds are in love with smart phones – who isn’t? – and they assume other technological devices will act just as smartly. For instance, toddlers touch computer screens (What old-fashioned and heavy machines!) with a baby finger swipe. They’re disappointed when the screen doesn’t respond to their light touch. At the same time, parents remain hypnotized playing endless rounds of brain-cell destroying solitaire on the iPhone. In short, iBabies are tech savvier than their parents. They are born into a world where everything, literally, is available at their fingertips. For them the smart phone is the norm. For us, it’s still the coolest toy in the world.
The article doesn’t connect the iBaby trend to a related development of women having children later in life. But I can’t help think about repercussions for some women. I’m a month shy of 30, unmarried, unattached and without smart phone. In techie parlance I have a dumb phone. I guess I’m just a late adapter – and waiting for Verizon to gift me with a free smart phone.
Perhaps it’s a coincidence: I’ll be late to the game with my own smart phone and conceiving my first child. Therefore, there’s a high likelihood that my hypothetical child may indeed end up coaching me on my finger-swiping screen technique. And how to use my phone as a GPS. Or something.
My lackluster iSkills may embarrass my hypothetical child, but isn’t embarrassment a key dynamic in the mother-child relationship? Heck, I still scream to high heaven when my mom asks me how to complete the “copy and paste” task. (Yet my mother conveniently knows how to maneuver around EBay, executing the ins and outs of how to nab her item, like a stealth undercover operative.)
After some rumination, I don’t feel so bad about my potential collision of the technology gap with late motherhood. Don’t we want our children to be smarter and more nimble than us on technological and many other frontiers?
I’m now off to give my father a Facebook tutorial.
Funny, I was thinking about this too. I’ve temporarily shut down my ibiological clock. It kept freezing up on me and when I called tech I was forwarded to a “Bob” in Mumbai.
Too far apart technologically? I don’t buy it. Seriously. There’s a huge technological gap between me and someone just 10 years younger — my first email address was in college; theirs was probably in elementary school, possibly middle school. The original Nintendo Entertainment System was an enormous innovation in my teens, and a handheld video game was probably a bunch of dots playing “football.”. They don’t remember a time when the cable company couldn’t figure out how to get a wire across railroad tracks. Unless women are popping out babies at 3 or 4 years old, there’s always going to be a large technological gap between generations.