About two years ago, after coming home finally from being overseas, I took notice to a habit that one of my children displayed while visiting our relatives on our first union since returning. My daughter couldn’t not put her phone down. Between my plea for her to pay attention and interact with some family members that she hadn’t seen since she was younger and some of our older relatives taking notice, it was a failed attempt to get her to stop using her cellphone. I became frustrated and raised my voice a bit to get her attention and she insisted on using her phone and got visibly frustrated when her phone’s charge got low. Even as we sat at the table for dinner, she was on her phone, chatting and messaging as she responded attentively to each one of our family members whenever they struck a conversation. I sat clueless watching how my daughter, who was fifteen at the time, had the ability to multitask between supper, chat, text and family interaction and did it in synchronization.
A few months later, it happened again while my daughter and I was visiting her grandfather. This time, I was ready to snatch the phone from her, but I declined. I realized that she really needed her phone and would put up a defense if taken away from it. Relating from past experiences with technology in a sense, I couldn’t figure out exactly what she was addicted to. Was it the games, Snapchat, Instagram, texting or all of the above? Another episode occurred when she called me one day and told me she ran out of data because she was playing that Pokémon GO game and needed me to buy her some more data. I declined again, thinking to myself how in the world could she use all of her data on playing a game?