<p>I LOVE texting!!! While I’m at work my kids are required to text me whenever they change locations. I can be in a meeting and don’t have to worry about ignoring some important call on my cell. I can text back ‘ok’ under the table and no one has to know :-).</p>
<p>My 14 year old had >600 sent texts and >800 received texts last month. I am a little worried about carpal tunnel syndrome with him! He’ll slow down soon… school starts in 19 days.</p>
<p>
Yes, this makes me long for the good old days when teenagers used to grunt at their parents when asked a question. At least then, you could tell their mood by the tone/timbre/volume of their inaudible response.</p>
<p>Of course, for those of you who have seen the wireless commercial where Ozzie has to use text messages to make himself clear… ROFLMAO</p>
<p>OK I use social media, email, and instant messenger too, but c’mon, there are some situations where it’s preferable to communicate via the telephone.</p>
<p>For example, when I interviewed for roommates, I strictly communicated over the phone to weed out certain people. You can instantly learn a person via the way they talk.</p>
<p>Ok so how do parents communicate with their kids when they go to college?</p>
<p>a) text
b) email
c) ichat
d) im
e) facebook
f) videochat
g) phone
h) u.s. post</p>
<p>What is working for you? I am happy to use any of the above.</p>
<p>I communicate with my mom over the phone. It’s the fastest way for me to reach her.</p>
<p>My kids text, tweet and use facebook, but D (24) also is good about voice calls. Son is not. He uses Blackberry messenger and IM with me, and messenger and texting with his friends.<br>
I tweet, use IM and facebook status updates to communicate. H, who was always on the cutting edge of technology, has fallen way behind and doesn’t have a facebook page and gave up on Twitter and IM. He is an introvert and really doesn’t care that much about communicating. I love having the world at my (literal) fingertips.</p>
<p>I use text, email, phone, and I send care packages. I don’t care how we do it, as long as we do it. Even one small “touch base” message is enough sometimes. If she prefers text, then it’s fine with me. I do feel bad, though, when I text her and I don’t get any response… Doesn’t happen too often though.</p>
<p>Ok, I don’t get the whole Tweet thing. When do you use it? For what?
DD is on Facebook but has her page set to private (she about had heart failure when I suggested she add me as a friend) so I’m not able to communicate with her via Facebook. Not many people I know use Facebook. I think I have like 4 friends on it (Does that make me a loser?)<br>
Since I’m the one paying for DD’s school next year, I’m thinking that she can communicate with me via whatever medium I choose. If she doesn’t like that, then she’ll have to start paying for her own cell phone.</p>
<p>My sons and their friends text 99.9% of the time rather than actually talking on their cell phones. The only exception? They call as they pull into our driveway to let our sons know they’re there! Whatever happened to just getting out of the car and ringing the doorbell?</p>
<p>Drives me NUTS!!!</p>
<p>I email, IM, text, tweet, blog, and Facebook. I almost never answer my phones – they go to voicemail – because I have the ringer of the house phone turned off, and my cell stays mostly on vibrate. People who know me know that they can get ahold of me almost immediately through electronic channels, so they do. While I do make phone calls when I need to, I’ve become less and less about phones as I’ve gotten older. 
</p>
<p>Our family stays in touch via IM, texting, email. Right now, I could ask my sweetie a question through IM and get a response in less time than it would take to call him. (And if he’s in a meeting or talking to a coworker, I won’t be disrupting him the way a phone call might.) </p>
<p>As far as Facebook, our family rule is that we don’t friend intergenerationally – my children don’t have me as a FB friend, and I don’t want them as one. But I do have about 300 FB friends, everyone from middle and high school classmates to cousins I haven’t seen in 20 years to coworkers to folks I see almost every week. But, I’m a tech person in general, a lifelong computer geek, and I’ve been involved in online communication for almost uh…30 years now. It’s second nature to me and people of my generation. (I’m younger than most CC parents, a Gen-X-er, not a Baby Boomer.)</p>
<p>“Ok, I don’t get the whole Tweet thing. When do you use it? For what?”</p>
<p>You send ‘announcements’ of your fascinating life out to the general public (those who “follow” you on Twitter). These posts are called “Tweets”. It take good bit of ego I think to believe that people are interested, but it’s very popular. </p>
<p>There’s a hysterical commercial out now where a daughter tells her mom to stop writing “I love you” all over her wall and the son tells the dad to stop tweeting every little thing… the dad starts typing “I am now sitting on the patio”… SO funny!</p>
<p>I use Twitter to update folks involved in special events about changes to the schedule, or to notify folks on short notice of stuff. For example, I just tweeted to my friends working in San Francisco that a big skydiving thing was going to happen at 12:15 PM. One of them is outside and is updating folks with visibility. There’s a Twitter feed that alerts me to delays in the commuter train I take, that’s updated much faster than the station signs are. A number of companies I love post Twitter-only deals. (As an example, Jet Blue is having a one day 20 percent off sale to celebrate reaching 1 million followers, making it $211 RT SFO-JFK for fall – great price for those NYC art school visits!)</p>
<p>Put that all together, and sometimes I tweet to alert folks at a Friday event I’m running that I’m going to be late and they should start without me, because the train has hit delays. I don’t have to give those people my phone number and they don’t see mine, and that’s nice for privacy. There’s a lot of really cool applications for Twitter that don’t involved just ego-stroking. Oh yeah, and my Twitter feed is private, so the general public never sees it, just the people I choose to. </p>
<p>I though it was ridiculous at first, too, but there are legitimate uses for it.</p>
<p>my son texts…a LOT. I find it helpful to keep in touch with him…,
Now, my problem is I don’t keep my blackberry with me all the time. If I’m at home working…it’s in my purse. He called today and said…didn’t you get my text?? Nooo…
I don’t want to be attached to too many things at once. I guess I should figure out how to get texts to sent to my computer email account…anyone know how to do that?</p>
<p>Sons and I text a lot. Hubby doesn’t get it and feels a little left out. Neither of the boys email much. I mostly keep in touch with son while he’s away at school through texting.<br>
Texting is much easier for me than calling as it is very quick and to the point.</p>
<p>If I need a message to get through right away, I send D a text message. Teens check text messages as soon as the phone vibrates – easy to do even when you’re with other people. </p>
<p>I’m not (personally) a huge fan – and I definitely find it weird that kids actually break up with each over via text message – ick – but I accept it as just one of those things. Like my parents accepted the notion that I got news from the web and use lots of email and watch very little TV. </p>
<p>The other thing we found out about texting is that messages go through in many places where there aren’t enough bars of service to have a voice conversation. Our high school has a significant portion built into a hillside, and there is no voice cell service down there – but texts usually come through just fine. That sounds immaterial, but we had a lockdown situation at school last year, and the stress of the situation was very much alleviated by kids locked in the underground classrooms being able to send and receive text messages, particularly since our school follows a policy of keeping everyone in the dark during any kind of incident.</p>
<p>^^ This is an important point. Making sure our executives know how to text message is part of our corporation’s emergency/disaster plan.</p>
<p>Texting is great for yes/no questions and very short messages. I know my kids will be ok with me texting every once in a while (once a week or once every two weeks?). I just wonder when or how I can find out about HOW they are doing. My understanding of im-ing or ichat-ing is that the person you want to communicate with must be on their computer. I am on early in the morning and sometimes in the afternoon. My kids are likely to be on the computer late at night. I am not sure how it will work. I am thinking I will try both methods and over time figure it out. As a last resort, I will call.</p>
<p>How often do you think is appropriate to contact your kid? I believe they need to be independent, but I don’t want to loose contact.</p>
<p>I heard a great way to have your kids call you is to send them a letter telling them to enjoy the enclosed money. Tell them to use the money on anything they want, then, purposely not enclose a money. They are likely to call immediately. </p>
<p>I think this method is meant to be a joke.</p>
<p>Chinablue: No, most IM services have a limited “buffer” for messages left when the person isn’t logged on. You could leave 2-3 messages, just not 20. When that person logs in, they get the IM’s they missed. So it works just fine even if you’re not on at the same time.</p>
<p>M’sMom: “Since I’m the one paying for DD’s school next year, I’m thinking that she can communicate with me via whatever medium I choose. If she doesn’t like that, then she’ll have to start paying for her own cell phone.”</p>
<p>You can go that route, but you might not hear from your D as much as you’d like. </p>
<p>S is a rising college junior. I’ve found he will respond to a text almost immediately, and he will answer his phone most of the time (I apparently have a knack for calling when he’s in the gym or in the shower, but even if I don’t leave a message he will usually see the “missed call” and call me back). He will eventually respond to an email IF I request a response, but sometimes I send a long detailed email and his response will be “ok.” </p>
<p>Keep in mind, college kids don’t keep the same hours we do. They have study groups and club meetings at all sorts of hours. You might try texting, “Is this a good time for me to call you? If not, when would be?” and let her tell you what works for her. If your kid called you at work and expected you to drop everything for a nice chatty conversation, you’d probably be peeved. Well, college kids have “work” too, but it’s not always the 9 - 5 hours we’re used to. You have to be a bit considerate about their schedule.</p>
<p>Or another hint our college’s Parent coordinator gave us: if you haven’t heard from your kid in a couple of weeks, mail a card that says, “Hope you’re having a great time! Use this check to treat your friends to ice cream!” But don’t actually put a check in the card. Guaranteed, you’ll get a call: “Hey mom, you forgot the check!” (cross-posted with Chinablue. Yes, this method does apparently work!)</p>
<p>In the work world, I am finding that no one really calls anymore (or if they do, it’s at a scheduled appointment … “let’s plan to talk on X day at X time about X topic”). Everyone emails and that’s how they communicate. Voicemail is a thing of the past.</p>