Is Twitter too short for you to get your point across?

Is Twitter too short for you to get your point across? For many teens, however, even Twitter’s 140 characters are still “way too much info”.

As the Mom of a teen-aged son, I should be so lucky as to have the luxury of his attention span for 140 characters. For example, when my son asks,
“What are you doing?”
I might say something like
“Oh, I’m making some caramelized onions for hamburgers and just to have on hand for later. We can use them for—”
Then I hear
“That’s enough, I get it” and he’s out of earshot already. I hear the screen door slam.
Teens want to know what’s going on but not too much and they want to be involved in family life but not too much.

When my son asks the meaning of a word in the book he’s reading, anything longer than a one word synonym is met with a glazed look.

Sometimes he asks a question and as I am opening my mouth, before I have uttered a syllable, I hear
“Never mind...”
Oh well, it’s not about the knowledge I am imparting; it’s about the fact that he’s still ostensibly seeking it in the first place.

And a seemingly simple question, like
“When’s dinner, Mom?”
actually might require a little out loud thinking on my part, such as
“Well, your sister is working the night shift and Dad’s running late so by the time we bbq I’m thinking around...”
If I get this far, I get a look that says ‘please skip to the end of the tape...’

Sometimes as parents we tend to see a question as an opening for conversation but that’s ambitious when you’re dealing with teenagers, I’ve found. We have to be careful we don’t stem the flow of questions by what they consider ‘over sharing’. And any info, if not specifically requested, can be superfluous.

Well, I’m glad that I’m learning to stop talking mid-sentence and that the questions keep coming. As long as they do, I know that the lines of communication are still open.
And when college rolls around again in a few short weeks, I will treasure all these brief moments, as fleeting as the summer days themselves.

Doone Estey
August 2009