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This week we learned that some parents are adept at communicating with their children in the age of iMessage and Gchat. With young people leading the trend of not using phones as phones, moms have had to adapt to less talk time, which has meant more rambling voicemails for some of us. For others — like those profiled in this Wall Street Journal article — it has meant teaching mom to Gchat, text, or Facebook. To be sure, it's very impressive to see an older generation adapt. And yet, parents using the Internet seem to still be, well, parents using the Internet. From the experiences of The Atlantic Wire staffers at least, we salute the efforts of moms and dads everywhere, but we have some advice for them.
Text Messages Aren't Emails. Since parents only use these tools with a small set of humans, generally, they don't understand the nuances of digital etiquette. For instance, the medium matters. Philip Bump's dad, for example, writes "essentially blog-posts-via-text," when text messages are supposed to be short, more like phone conversations than letters. Allie Jones, one of our fellows, says of her text-loving mom, "She doesn’t get that you can actually have a conversation with it. She will send a long text detailing what’s going on in the day, and then I’ll respond, and then she’ll forget to check her phone and never respond."