Dad Doesn't Know It All
by Paul McGoldrick
It has been a common thing for people to report that they have great difficulty or cannot program their VCR, while their kids can -- seemingly with ease. Many might be partly jesting, but for many people technology is daunting in the way some things simply are not obvious. It is even worse when a number of functions on a product can only be accessed through the remote control. And the older you are, the more daunting some of this stuff must be, although it also seems that once the technology is embraced the older user is even more hooked.
I know that with my most recent car the entertainment center/radio was quite maddening (I certainly was not going to read the manual for such a simple device) until I realized that the Japanese manufacturer was thinking like a DVD designer in the way that functionality transferred between the different audio sources. Then it was really easy to do just about everything without having to think about it.
We parents naturally think that we are responsible for educating our kids. When we correct their grammar and help with that long addition -- or calculus -- we are probably the center of their educational universe (after that grade school teacher that they all love.) But when it comes to technology it seems that this is not the case -- at least not as seen by a survey conducted by HPshopping.com.
International Communications Research (ICR) conducted the survey in the United States with the participation of 635 parents having at least one child between the ages of 6 and 20. Only 20% of the parents considered themselves advanced or expert users of technology, and 69% considered themselves novices, or intermediate users. 10% of the parents do not use technology (how do you do that?)
But the real surprise came in the role of the children: 40% of the kids showed their parents how to do projects on-line, and how to install and use new software and hardware; 26% of the children showed their parents where to shop on-line; 62% of parents were shown new web sites; overall, about two-thirds of the parents said that their children introduced them to some new technology or Internet operation.
So when your children come after you to help set up that new digital camera, or scanner, or whatever, let them; it may not be intuitive to you but maybe they learned something at school that you didn't. When reading a book together with my 7-year old daughter one of the chpaters was entitled "Absolute Zero" I started to explain what it was; she butted in with "I know, you can never reach it."
I permanently withdraw from all VCR duties.
A summary of the ICR survey for HPshopping can be found at http://www.icrsurvey.com/icr/Hpshop043001.htm